I vaguely remember some of the first designs I did. Saying that they were terrible, doesn’t do them justice. Atrocious, colossally barbaric, desperate, and rotten. Scandalous. But they had to be done. I feel the same way about these first blog posts that I write. As awful as they might seem, they represent me, taking those first steps into the unknown world of writing. I find this quote from Rumi, most fitting here: “As you start to walk the way, the way appears”. And this takes me to the subject I’m discussing here.
There are tons of topics, ideas, and forms of entertainment out there pouring out like rain. Why some of them are so hard to find?
Content. There is quite a lot of content out there. Good content that is so hard for me to reach that the whole process itself could be a job position. We are hiring an “Internet Scavenger/Web Pilgrim/Cyberspace Inquisitor”, experience required: searched on Google past page 2, keeps no history of watching on YouTube, and has reached the end of the infinity scroll. I can imagine these people exploring the far end of the internet just like characters from a Mad Max movie scouting for car parts in a desert junkyard. It feels like that and for good reasons. The big internet, once so large now fits in one of the 3 boxes: Google, YouTube, and Social Media.
While it’s not a bad thing to have condensed information at ease with no effort on our part, it comes at a cost. Swimming through the sea of the algorithms and clickbait can be tricky and one can easily be pulled by a current. Falling into the trap of consuming empty content or even interacting with things you have no interest in seems like a normal thing to do. Blaming the doom scrolling and the internet for our procrastination has become the latest movement and what’s even more ironic, we get to procrastinate while watching videos of why we get to procrastinate. Ah yes, the content that never gets you feeling content.
I get good recommendations and get to see things that fit my narrative and my view. At least I think that sometimes. But then I imagine myself entering into a huge library and at the entrance, there is a space dedicated to me. Things that I like, selections made based on the things that I liked before which were recommended to me by the same section, and so on. Meanwhile, the entire library never gets to be explored. And so, I feel stuck. My biases are getting reinforced by the same type of content and I'm growing more and more blind and ignorant. I developed a nice personality of "I know better" and I feel like "everyone" shares my opinion because my feed is just filled with the same stuff. Well, better to be comfortable believing my bullshit than to have my entire views shifted. Hard to accept that a lot of things in my life were lies. Even harder, when you never get the full story or never hear the truth. But I want to.
I want to read the news and opinions from different views. I know things are not black and white as are usually presented. They have nuances, different shades, motifs, and complexity. For a long time, I was ready to draw conclusions and go out with a fork to defend what I believed to be right. Belief based on what was told and given to me and nothing more. Information has that power. But going from information to actual knowledge and in the end to a form of wisdom requires freedom in thinking and being exposed to reality. And so, I believe, digesting the same type of information can keep us within a tight bubble which in the end, leaves us naive.
Eating up is one thing but what about cooking? For the past years, I came close to dropping the entire social media I was doing for my business. It felt like I had to do more and more, to post two times a week, post three times a day, interact and comment on other people’s posts, and create whatever the latest trend required. Just feed the algorithm, some of the growth channels would say. I felt exhausted at some point. Doing the work for my customers and then doing social media to reach my customers was double the work and triple the effort. In the end, doing social media just trained me to become better at doing social media and nothing else. I was training the algorithm and the algorithm was training me. Having a community with people like-minded and interacting with those people used to define social media; I kind of think that the “social” part was cut. I won’t even get into the YouTube algorithms or Google search engines. I’ll just stop here before I start rumbling and ranting about this like an old grumpy man. The future is now, old man! Damn right, it is! And so I picked writing in a blog as a form of expression. Because I don't write to change the way things are, I write so they won't change who I am.
Blogging is dead, long live the blog! Keep on writing.
Boy, 2006 called to take your RSS feed home and call it a day. Just like I didn't have any money to buy my house before 2008, because I was in elementary, a similar situation imposed that I didn't have the age and the resources to write my thoughts back then. So I'm late to the party. But so is everyone else who was born later by a decade or two. And here I am, ready to press publish and end this man whole's career. This man, I guess, is me.
Who is even reading blogs nowadays? Well, I do! - I imagine saying that just like Paul Walker is admitting that he likes the tuna sandwich in the first Fast and Furious. And then fight off whoever is trying to prove otherwise. I am enjoying quality writing but I also want to read fun stuff, crazy ideas, and in general anything else besides the social media truisms. I like it raw and without a condom, the information, that is. I want to see what some other people think and I want to read what people are writing for themselves. Reading the right type of content with the right type of words can make me feel connected at an awkwardly private level with the person who wrote it.
And that is why I want to write as well. I write because I think. I write to better understand myself. I write to combat my vanity and laziness. I write because it’s fun. To become eloquent, I do research, I read lots of other articles on the theme, and I become more informed. Things that I knew to be true are proven otherwise and so I get to change my mind and little by little dispel some of the ignorance that is fogging my perspective.
This quality content you are talking about, is it in the room with us right now?
There is a discourse by Alan Watts which is called the The Dream of Life which puts us in a perspective of controlling our life as a form of a dream. Even more so, you could dream an entire lifetime every night and control all the wishes, desires, and pleasures that make up that life. After a few nights where you dreamed all that jazz and experienced all the crazy lives you wanted to have, you'll get curious. Eventually, you will stop controlling the dream and let it flow by itself to see where it goes. Getting more and more adventurous, you will let life follow its rhythm and at some point, you will dream the life you are living right now. So, having no control over the things that come to us, is a form of freedom and the natural thing to happen. The surprise factor that we find irresistible brings, after all, the joy and the wonder that makes up for the meaning we get to find by ourselves. Yes, the quality content is in the room with us, but we might not see it just because we might be blinded by what we think it should be.
It doesn’t take much to see the disjunction between power and knowledge. I’ve seen people with a great deal of followers who are set to educate them but the information they are giving away is questionable. But they are successful. It can be extremely tempting to adhere to the attention-grabbing culture and none of us can be impervious to the dynamic of the online world. Reaching lots and lots of people makes you feel validated and important. Instant gratification can corrupt even the purest of souls. Ethics and morality are tested and redefined every minute. Do I write this keyword or eye-catching soul-grabbing title and discuss this trendy subject or do I speak my mind and risk never being heard or seen? Building a better world, even online, requires a form of surviving and adapting to the environment. So we do what we have to do to make ourselves heard and do the right thing anyway.
There are quite a few people out there who know a thing or two about a thing or two. It takes a while to find the one you will enjoy but it will be worth it. I will link a few blogs that I enjoy on the regular and I hope you might find the same magic in them as I do.
I'll end this by quoting the last four lines of a poem that I very much love and enjoy written by Edgar Allan Poe and called "A Dream Within a Dream".
"O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?"
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I want to find even more. How do you search and find interesting stuff on the internet? Do you have any recommendations for good blogs and websites that you spend your time on? Why not send them to me, I love to discover new stuff on the web. Medium, The Verge, and Aeon are some of the big ones I use but I also read: Koos Looijesteijn, Austin Kleon, and a Directory where you can find some more.
Send me your recommendation or start a conversation.
I write on this blog almost weekly and you can find details about my graphic design work and get in touch on this website.
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