TLDR: I refashion a lot of words from main projects into blog content. It’s purposefully stream-of-conscious.
Rough Around the Edges
Imagine this: You stumble across someone’s online presence and then feel immediately diminished. They’re clearly more accomplished, more knowledgeable on wider range of topics, plus their content is simply better than yours, more polished — which makes you feel like your approach to the web is somehow inelegant, brutish or otherwise unrefined. Because you think differently than this person, you feel like an imposter; they’re the real deal.
Hopefully we both realize this is not how one should feel about these things, and so we don’t get jealous or spiteful or sad. Instead we get exhilarated because of the human existence itself. The beauty that we get to live in an age where you can simply find these people online, and then they can become fixtures in your mind for the person you want to be. You want to see what they’re up to because the journey they’re on seems so relatable that you feel on the same journey.
Hopefully you also don’t need to do much imagining, because seems like a pretty universal experience by this point. But what I find most interesting about it is the extent to which it can be shaped by our own life experiences interacting with technology — and the degree to which how we choose to manifest online becomes a function of the ideas we’re trying to signal. The project of the personal blog is to most adequately communicate the ideas you’d like to communicate — and those are not limited to the writing itself. They also come to life in the design and the architecture, not unlike how cities are constructed and technologies are invented.
Getting More Meaning from it All
This makes sense, if you believe that the human spirit contains multitudes—that’s to say our spiritual lives can be experienced across many dimensions, expressed in different forms, exposed through multifarious means—but it is less easy if you believe that you, as a manifestation of conscious spirituality, should be writing from a perspective of oneself, aiming to integrate into one strong, unified, and comfortable voice.
I rarely find people that are able to encapsulate these ideas online, because so many smart people online seem to be caught up in a game of silencing the voices in themselves that don’t agree with what they think their audience should hear. The idea that they even have a set audience is an illusion, of course. But perhaps this is because so many of us view their our true audience as themselves. On the other hand, it may have to do more to do with our general unwillingness to accept the multitudes within ourselves, because humans are complex and many of us don’t yet have the tools to make sense of all these ancient unknown mechanisms.
With this blog, I’m trying to help make sense of this world, at least for myself — but hopefully for others as well. On the blog, I envision myself as writing as I would to a friend on the back porch. Sometimes we’re a couple deep, sometimes we’re smoking something, but I’m always talking to you as I would talk to someone who I don’t need to explain myself to, because I assume you know that I am communicating my ideas freely as I arrive at them.
That’s to say that the content on my personal blog is purposefully unpolished and all over the place. I throw stuff up on the blog that I’m thinking out loud about, because I feel confident in my belief that such multitudes are important to extend out into the universe. Rather than try to make my blog a place where I craft up my ideas into carefully structured articles or prose—read my old stuff, pretty tortured—instead I try to make it into a place where I can feel comfortable writing about all kinds of different topics that interest me, many of which I am fully aware that I don’t fully understand.
In this sense, the blog is an exercise at learning in public, thinking out loud, and embracing life’s multitudes.
Writing From Multitudes to Oneself
A recurring topic on the blog is this probably going to be this idea of oneself, which is really just a writing construct that I’ve found helpful for distilling my own ideas into words. To me, oneself is a method of thinking and developing an internal dialogue that can help one be more productive, because it directs reverence toward the unknowable unknown of the human mind. Embracing this natural condition, we come to a realization that despite all the complexities of our inner lives and the ostensible patterns visible in the world (those that cannot be easily encapsulated within the English language), we still must strive to explore these things in ways that feel right.
In watching this feeling arise from your conscious mind, we are able to harness the multitudes within ourselves to arrive at a very flexible voice — one that is as adaptable and resilient as the collective human spirit. For me, conveying this fuller version of myself necessarily involves long form content, usually no less than 1000 words. I’m trying to work on being less long winded, but I also don’t think that it should matter much on my own personal blog. I don’t like having to adhere to a particular form, and so on my own blog I’m simply going to write what I feel like writing, which inevitably also works in symbiotic fashion with my experimentsl litersry praxis.
The core challenge for me is that because I spent the last eight years of my life (college and into adulthood) basically addicted to knowledge, I failed to cultivate the sort of wisdom needed to connect with others in a deep and meaningful way. Instead of going out and meeting people, I simply read a lot of books, listened to a lot of podcasts, and now the people I can most relate to aren’t even people I’ve ever met. It’s not that I wasn’t socialized or that I didn’t enjoy social activities, it just that I’ve tended to find the people I was surrounded with far less interesting than the things I could read about in books or experience through the Internet. Plus I’ve tended to be happier, more at-peace with myself and at one with the universe living this more solitary existence.
By now I accept this as my general demeanor. I’m someone who simply tends to enjoy the company of books more than the company of people. The peace of being at home and focused on reading or writing rather than being out on the town. It’s not a binary choice for one’s life, just a disposition I seem to have grown into. It doesn’t mean I enjoy being locked down during this COVID mess, but it does mesn I feel like we can all make it more productive for ourselves if we take this time to rekindle some lost appreciation (ideally some digitsl reverence) for the things we’ve come to learn about ourselves in these times.