Publishing work
The act of publishing seemingly important artifacts of your existence on the internet or through another medium.
Common arguments in favor of this:
- Inspire others
- Become “a leader in your field”
- Monetise; earn money
- Extended learning through writing
- Improve writing ability
- Share insight
My conundrums
Personally I have two problems with this act.
1. I don’t want to be a waste of space
Browsing the internet and the for all intents and purposes limitless amount of blogs, virtual notepads, digital gardens and external brains, makes me not want to add to it since I feel like most of this content is a bit useless and superficial. I don’t want to be a part of it.
Furthermore, even the extremely good content on the internet is abundant; there is no end to the mind-bending essays. Excellent insights are to be found most everywhere.
I’m not saying that this excellent internet material has no use, nor that one shouldn’t read any of it. What I’m saying is that there is so much that the real difficulty is to filter and select. To not be overwhelmed and stunned.
I’m saying that even the good content causes a great deal of “noise”.
Because of the sheer amount of writing online I in effect feel like I’m just polluting the space by adding yet more content. Creating noise.
Unless what I share is very, very good, I don’t feel I should share it.
(It is also notable that much of the internet noise is ideological. This seems to me to be so in the communities I browse at least.)
2. I want to do what I do in secret
A big part of me simply does not want to share anything. This is effectively the hermit part of me. It’s a weird drive that I’m not entirely sure where comes from.
It’s the feeling of wanting to always have a trick up the sleeve.
To have some mysterious and unknown part of me that people don’t know of unless they know me extremely well.
I don’t want to push my abilities or my interests very hard.
Solutions
Getting over this is something I do not know how to do, and quite frankly nor do I know whether I want to.
1 is easily solved; I just have to create useful, non-bullshit content that is actually interesting and not just reproductions.
And! that doesn’t ask people to subscribe, nor to read everything I write, nor to binge me and finally not to adhere to “my religion” in any way.
2 on the other hand is harder to grapple with simply because all it really comes down to is identidy and to an extent personal choice.
Maybe I can choose to share parts of me and some of the things I do. Realising that I won’t be able to communicate all of them even if I tried.
The importance
One could say that sharing your results and insights is a duty you have towards others. Because it can help and improve other people’s chances at reaching their goals and living life well.
Keeping things for yourself turns you into some sort of knowledge cul-de-sac.
A sort of dead-end. Where insights are gained but never properly implemented or shared with the external world.
(Maybe except for the indirect impact the change in your own behaviour and perspective causes through the way you treat others?)
A side-thought is that the internet also skeewed this duty because of the above mentioned abundance. Iit’s hard to cut through and sharing has had a change of definition. Before you could pass knowledge to your friends and kids, now the whole damn world is your audience.
Also…
But I kind of think not, because there’s a bigger issue: I expect and hope that eventually I will no longer be a public person — no blog, no Twitter, no public online presence at all.
Personal social media platform
As mentioned here: Bring back personal blogging in the Verge in December 2022 personal blogging can also be seen as having a personal social media platform.
Before reading this I had though of these things separately, but not connecting them and seeing publishing on a personal site as a potential replacement for social media pubilshing and interaction in this direct way.