Whenever anyone asks me how I write so much, my default answer used to be because I read so much. The words from other people producing content I enjoyed, be it on the web or in a book, never failed to give my pause of thought and inspiration to write them out. Not all of them were published, but I got to the stage where I was constantly putting things on my blog — currently, not so much.
I’m struggling to see the point in publishing many posts outside of those that form quickly. I’m still scribbling all the time. Opening Ulysses or Apple notes to write some ideas down, but there is very little motivation to turn it into something publishable. As much as I love blogging, and love that more people are doing it than I have even known, I’m struggling.
I’ve read some great things already this year, but it feels as if the rate of content produced has ramped up, but the quality is slipping. It seems like I need a shift in my reading to offset those that just produce content quickly and cheaply, potentially with AI, for clicks.
The great thing is, I don’t do this for anything apart from myself. There is no demand on me putting my asinine thoughts on my blog, to earn my paycheque. So I have the freedom to step back whenever I want to, and presently my online life is getting very little attention.
Evan Sheehan in their post
:I wonder what the alternative looks like. A tool that helps you remember the sites you like to visit so that you can browse them at your leisure, but that doesn’t create a commitment to read—or at least look at—absolutely everything that is published on all of those sites.
At first, this seemed like a crazy idea, but the more I thought about it, the more it made perfect sense. I read 99% of the blogs I follow in my favourite app Matter. Which is great in that it boils websites down to the basic content and makes it easier to read. However, it removes all personality and expression from personal websites.
The idea above is not as crazy as it sounds. Before Facebook invented ‘the feed’ I remember keeping a bookmark list of my friends' pages that I would check in on every so often and it’s wonderful when the internet goes full circle. Making the same list of my favourite blogs to check and enjoy the revelry of their website brings life back into the web.
I just hope it doesn’t fuel my tendency to fiddle with my blog’s CSS every five minutes!
Leo Babauta saying Become Quiet So You Can Listen:
…it’s a very human tendency to want to be busy, productive, filling every space with something useful or entertaining.
I’m one of those suckers. Those people who accuse the modern world of always being to blame for everything wrong until proven otherwise. This is one of those posts that makes me think about a small throwaway point and change my view.
Is it a natural human trait to want to be busy with something?
I suffer with a constant restless body to the point that, at times, I have to force myself to stop and do nothing. Just for a bit. My mind tricks me into believing that if I am not doing something, anything, I am wasting my time. I thought this was because of the modern world, some rub of from hustle culture, but now I am starting to think it is just me.
Long before social media, YouTube productivity gurus and hustle porn, the world was still busy. My mother was endlessly doing something. Working, meeting people, taking part in events. Just never still and present. Perhaps this is where my habit comes from, or maybe it’s just the modern normal?
Alan Jacobs with an interesting note on plagiarism:
…see something in a digital book or article that they want to use, copy the relevant text, and then paste it into Word with the intention of editing it later to in some sense make it their own.
Alan’s note covers controversy in academic publishing and the plagiarism that could be caused by sloppy writing and the pressures of education. However, I spent the whole time thinking about blogging and linking posts. I don’t write many of what you would typically call a link post, but I do quote numerous people on my blog and often run through the thought process that Alan talks about.
I save loads of quotes for possible use later. They litter my notebook, my Apple notes and even the occasional sticky note on my desk. Little snippets of ideas or information I might need later to complete some work or give me a starting point for my ideas in a blog post. I always stay true to the original person, but I must admit there’s not a lot of work needed to change the wording and attempt to pass the work off as your own.
Which leads me to wonder where the point is that the copied words become your own? Is changing the phrasing slightly enough?
…if you quote too much, it might become obvious that there’s not a lot of you in your article. So you need to rework the quotations to make the extent of your debts less obvious.
We have all seen blog posts that are more quotes than content. Which is fine, to a point, and where the aim is to share the work of someone else to another audience. When there isn’t a lot added to the conversation outside of that, you do have to ask yourself, what’s the point — and Alan suggests this is where much plagiarism begins. The words are changed, or in some cases not changed enough, due to lack of extra content and not wanting to make it obvious.
The reasons that have sparked this thought process are not sharable; however, it relates to quite a few things in our lives, and society at large, that I thought it worth sharing. It relates to the often used delaying tactic to action is the amount of knowledge we have. That we need to know more before we get started — leading, of course, to inaction.
There are always times when this is the case, but more often than not it is simply a logical fallacy. A barrier to action that our mind puts in our way. Take, for example, losing weight. There is no knowledge gap here, we all know that to lose weight in very simple terms we need to eat less and move more. Yet more than 30% of the UK population are inactive, and 63.8% of the population are either overweight or clinically obese. Without discussing the nuance of the figures and descriptions here, they clearly illustrate knowledge is not the issue.
Every person that ‘suffers’ with procrastination knows that they should be working on something. They have enough knowledge of the tasks to complete, it may be right in front of their face — but much like those that want to lose weight, they have an action problem. I know how to become a better writer, I have to write more and hone the skills that I have. I don’t need to learn more about writing, I just need to sit in the chair and do it. Yet, for whatever reason, I have an action issue.
I talk to so many people who say something similar to “I really want to be x”. Exchange x for a whole range of things. A better writer, a photographer, a better runner. Whatever ever is, there’s no knowledge gap to doing it, but no action either.