What's this for?

It's for me. I'd like to spend less time on Twitter and YouTube, get back some attention span, that sort of thing.

I wrote a lot when I was younger, and now I don't. My college major required a lot of writing, and I also contributed the occasional music or movie review to an on-campus paper. After college, I did a nine month stint writing for a blog that covered music festivals for very little money. For that period of four or five years, I was writing and getting feedback from professors and editors all the time. While I make no grand claims about the quality of my writing, I did, at the very least, enjoy practicing and refining it. Now I don't do that.

When I was working for the blog, I had a nagging suspicion that no read the articles we were writing, and if the site generated any revenue, I saw no indication of it. We placed no ads and were never paid for what seemed like free promotion for the festivals we covered, so it was not a shock when the site was shut down. I suspect the company, if you can call it that, was a make-work program for the creative director, whose father—a foreign diplomat, according to my editor—funded the whole operation. I can't say it was all a loss, though. My editor saw a few fundamental flaws in my writing, which no one else had cared enough to correct, and I was writing every single day.

Throughout those nine months, I was constantly applying to other writing jobs. A targeted query of my email archive from that period turned up applications to mostly music sites and publishing companies, though the desperation became more evident as the rejection count grew.¹ I didn't get a single interview. When faced with such desperation, one begins to delude themself about the compromises they're about to make. They're not giving up, they're simply casting a wider net. They tell themself it'll only be temporary anyway, that they'll keep looking for their "real" job in their free time. And then they get comfortable. I often wonder where I would have ended up had I not gotten comfortable, but the time to do anything about it—having tried a few times—seems to have passed, and I'll work in my current field—tech—for the foreseeable future, for better or worse.

I'm more than capable of a lengthy anti-tech rant, but at this point in my life, I've come to understand that, while tech workers are capable of a very special douchebaggery and deluded self-importance, all industries share the same motivations, i.e. generating revenue for someone, be it their shareholders or the generous heads of a non-profit who make a measly $300k a year.²

Despite a somewhat vague, promising title ("Customer Care Advisor"), my first job was answering support emails. This was not so much "writing" as programmatically stringing together a series of canned responses. Despite marginally covering my living expenses, my salary was a lot higher than what I was making at the blog. It didn't hurt that I was praised often for my frequently exemplary stats, although the only times I felt like I ever helped customers was when I gave their money back.³ Eventually, I was promoted to a more technical job. I then learned to code a bit and got an even more technical job. These jobs never required me to write, rather to concisely fill out documentation templates, and not the cool rocket science kind.

This is all to say that outside of a few failed journals and Twitter, I haven't committed time to writing in almost eight years, and the effects are not lost on me. At the risk of sounding harsh, I have become unmistakably dumber since I gave up writing. Completing this short essay is the hardest my mind has worked in months, and being dumber in my thirties than I was at twenty-three has made me very uncomfortable. Again, I have no presumptions about ever being a "good" writer, only that I was once better than I am now.

That answers why I'd like to write more, but not why I set up this blog in particular. I went about coding this site, because, like a lot of things I might write about, I wanted to see how hard it would be. It turned out to not be that hard. I'd also be lying if I said I didn't have a personal interest in gaining some skills pertaining to my career by creating this site, but I'll save that for another post. So... voila.

Why post publicly? I'd rather not psychoanalyze that impulse too deeply, so let's just say that while recognizing the primary objective of this site (forcing me to write more), I wouldn't mind engaging with friends about common interests, which is becoming more and more difficult as I get older.⁴