Meditations on Blogging

I had planned to do some sort of year-end post near the end of last year. Instead, I totally slacked off and played video games. In this way I feel as though I've paid tribute to about half the time I spent this year as a "blogger," the half where instead of blogging I slacked off and played video games. There were some seriously rough patches there for a few months, where no amount of academia-related justificatory blather could mask the fact that I was just playing video games day and night to the exclusion of everything else.

Man, those were the days, huh? Well okay, you'd have no way of knowing because I didn't blog about it, but trust me - they were indeed "those days."

Every now and again I'll take some time to go back and read a bunch of my old blog posts. By and large I'm pretty happy with them. I've never been one to belabor a piece of writing by editing and re-editing it, nor have I felt obligated on this blog to offer up well-structured pieces with cogent arguments, evidence, and all those other things that make life not so fun.

However, looking back on all of the posts made to this blog, I must admit that my blogging is but a pale shadow of the material that was being offered up by the creator of this blog. There was a definitive sea change when I took up the reins, evinced not merely by the change in style and subject matter, but also by our vastly different overarching philosophies of blogging. Mine was something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. As I snarked into the great abyss with no expectation of interaction or response, my philosophy was that everybody online was just snarking into a great abyss, and perhaps foolishly hoping for interaction and response.

I think there's a lesson to be learned from all of this: intellectual maturity is a thankless state of being. The time and trouble required to observe the world and analyze it in depth, to structure those observations and analyses into cogent arguments, to begin engaging in whatever shreds of civilized discourse remain in this crazy world of ours, is so staggering that it can easily grind a person into dust.

I am of course painfully aware that as I continue to pile on years upon years of increasingly specialized education, I also continue to withdraw from intellectual engagements. I've never been a fan of structure, but nowadays I can barely muster the will to argue anything with anyone, so haunting has the spectre of futility become.

While occasionally I regret being unable to provide the blogosphere with the same caliber of service as my predecessor, I think the sea change in this blog speaks to this entropic breakdown in my predecessor's and my own will to engage the world in a particular way. Instead, we're left with a more organic, but also more nihilistic, approach to inter-impersonal communication: a collection of stories and narratives from millions of different angles, soaked up by passersby who glean from them whatever distraction, emotion, or wisdom they may. Each comes and goes with a tapestry of impressions and ideas both unique and unapproachable, the only transient balm for their alienation the progressive expansion of the self, byte by aimless, nameless byte.