I have a bunch of half-written blog posts, waiting for that little push over to the edge of the “Publish” button. My over-ambitious brain wants everything to be perfect. All the details must be just right; the images edited professionally. With every passing day, my heart loses interest in picking up those threads.
Every day, I tell myself, “Today is the day!” When life gets in the way, I sigh, “Better luck tomorrow.”
Today, I just thought I’d say how much I love the Medium Daily Newsletter. In an age where all email is selling something, I have finally found something worth reading.
I’ve been here long enough to recall that famous WordPress-featured home page, where I’d randomly discover amazing life stories. I met new people online through their blogs, some of them in person too!
Today, everyone is just peddling the same formula to gain eyeballs, and ultimately make a quick buck. What used to be a community, is now a platform. We had playful prompts to make us write silly things without a worry in the world. What was a creative outlet, a hobby, is now a profession to be milked with every last SEO-ed word.
Looking at everything around me, I wonder, is writing still worth it? Who even reads stuff anymore. And then, I see this breath of fresh air in my inbox, that I want to read. Something more than “10 ways to do something right.” A real human being sharing an idea worth sharing with a friend. It’s one of the few things that makes me want to read and write again. To stop overthinking. Even if it’s that one thought that sounds like a status note on a social media site.
Is this diary entry worth reading? Probably not. Will people search for it? My AI assistant sidebar says no. But did I need it for myself? Absolutely.
Musings of an eccentric mind 
2 replies on “Dear Diary / 19 Dec 24”
Yeah, I can empathise with just about all of this.
The perfectionism that stops me from completing blog posts, the reduced sense of community and increased sense of commodification of social media (I’ve been thinking of starting a Substack blog to see if that’s any better) and the uncertainty as to whether anything I write is worth the time and effort to write or read.
I’m not so much into the ‘human contact’ side of social media – I prefer one-on-one platforms like emails or Zoom for that – as the idea exchange aspects of it. But these days I’m not coming across a lot of ideas that seem fresh or original, either on the internet or in my own mind. Perhaps I’ve grown old and jaded. Perhaps I’ve contracted the cultural attention deficit people keep saying our devices are infecting us with. Most often it feels like I’ve lost faith in the capacity of myself or anyone else to communicate beyond platitudes and groupthink.
I dunno Kasturika, is writing dead or is it just us?
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Something tells me that like you and me, others also feel suffocated and overwhelmed. People just regurgitating what’s already written to create their own brand presence.
Jumping to another platform just seems like so much more work. I tried creating a publication on Medium, and it feels like so much work to maintain both. I’m too married to WordPress with all the legacy stuff. I’ve thought about Substack too, but it’s just too much to handle so many platforms.
Perhaps we’ll enter this phase where the entire community gets up in arms and rejects all this… this… junk and falseness on the internet. AI will only make matters worse, and people will crave authenticity. Maybe I’m a hopeless optimist. The fact that we’re having this conversation here, gives me some hope. At least there are some friendly pockets around — we just need to find them. It’ll be hard, given this SEO nonsense. But we gotta try — at least for ourselves and our sanity. I saw this post recently, and it rekindled my faith in writing. This post talks about the writes and write-nots: https://blog.medium.com/a-world-divided-into-writes-and-write-nots-is-more-dangerous-than-it-sounds-218cbb18ed89
I’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, and I am beginning to feel Medium is a better platform now. There seems to be some semblance of community there. It’s much easier to write, distraction free, without thinking about themes and what not. I’m trying to figure out how to slowly move over. But not sure how long that platform will last, given how quickly so many products come and go these days. I had published a few e-books on a platform called Juggernaut that promised an easy access to self-publishing, and that’s disappeared, taking my work with it. So here I am again, trying to kickstart my long-lost hobby.
I think the key is to write for ourselves — somewhere, we’ve all got caught up in trying to impress others. But we gotta do it for us.
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