Why do you blog?

published Apr 11, 2007, last modified Jun 26, 2013

I thought I knew why I blogged. As it turns out, I changed along the way.

Right now, I'm hitting my daily dose of literary drugs (read: my RSS feed reader) right now. I'm plowing through more than 1500 unread items, looking for inspiration.

Click on Violent Acres. Read two paragraphs.  There it is: why I lack the inspiration to blog. As always, it's by reading someone else's words that I realize something about myself --specifically, what the acidic V said a few hours ago in her latest post:

I think everyone has those moments in their life when something all of the sudden shifts. [...] What I find most intriguing about these moments is that when traced back to their birth, they usually come about in the most mundane of circumstances. [...] The downside to all of this is that these stories are rarely told. A lot of us know that what may seem magical and beautiful to us is, in reality, just another ordinary, humdrum day. So we keep mum because,well, who wants to hear that shit?

I want to hear that shit. [...] look around the world and tell me what you think is happening. Form your own hypothesis. Do your own research. Quit depending on a society to tell you what is real! When did we all lose faith in our individual ability to learn anyway? And when did learning become synonymous with memorization? You can’t teach a conscience. It comes strictly from personal experiences; those mundane moments I wrote about earlier.

Let's ignore her main argument for a minute.  Let's focus on the sentence I want to hear that shit.

For months now, I've been blogging to serve an audience. Linux enthusiasts. WordPressers. Blogging heads. Google AdSense.

No wonder I haven't really blogged something of substance lately.

When I started this blog in 1999, I had a different idea in mind. The real reason which drove me to blogging was to expose my Grand Unified Theory of life -- how the world works, and how the world should work.  What is right, and what is wrong, and what the perfect system to tell right and wrong is.  Why I hold certain principles (life, liberty, choice, law) dear, while absolutely abhoring others (discrimination, meddling into others' lives, arbitrarism).

Practically none of my latest posts have actually dealt with that. Dealt with my thoughts and my ideas. I intended to write about hot topics, things my contemporary people would criticize me for, but later generations would recognize to be as true as I know them to be. That was my core mission, and somehow along the way, I lost it.

Thus, so far, I've failed, and I'm actually experiencing V envy. She managed to do what I set out to do: build an audience of radical haters and lovers, all of whom religiously read her articles and either categorically agree or mercilessly tear her point of view apart.

In the meantime, I've managed to build a "warm cup of coffee" stale blog, with lots of content, but few real pearls.  For Heaven's sake, my most Popular front page post talks about Alprazolam spammers!

Sure, I'm making more than $200 monthly in ads, religiously spent on weekends' nights out. But what do I care about it, now that my core mission is no more?

Or is it? It's never ever late to start writing again.

I guess I should start "pouring my brains out" again.  Trouble is, I don't know where to start.  I'm, of course, accepting questions on that matter.