Why is it so hard to blog nowadays?

This is a bit of a meta post, but I just wanted to reflect a little bit on why it's so hard to blog nowadays.

When I was younger (whether that was in high school during the Livejournal days, or in college when I had my own self-hosted WordPress), I was blogging pretty much every single day... about any topic that would come to my mind. For example, I remember in college I would write blogs about the classes I attended, "day in the life" summaries, reviews of new J-pop idol music that came out. (Truly, the J-idol bloggers from back then were feral; the minute any piece of media came out -- whether that was a new album, song, PV, concert recording, photobook, etc. -- we immediately wrote a long-form review of it!) Even super mundane things got their own blog entry. I remember my friends and I would do Linux install parties in my room, and we would blog our experience.

Even something as silly and simple as buying groceries on Peapod for the first time during a nasty bout of swine flu (back before Instacart was even a thing). I wrote this blog post gushing about how cool it was to get groceries delivered, and then (because I was a naive daughter of health conscious parents and had almost never eaten canned food in my life) I put the cans of soup I had purchased into my mini fridge and took a photo for the internet to see 🤣 I'm sure plenty of people thought I was totally bonkers, but that was the vibe of the old web and the way that we blogged back in the day: very much cringe but free.

It's not that nowadays I have fewer things that I want to share. I still have copious amounts of thoughts rattling around my head that I need to share with people. However, it seems like every time I sit down to try and write about it, it doesn't come out very freely. I feel like I judge myself too harshly for how I'm phrasing things, whereas back in the day I would have just word vomited and called it a day.

I think that it's a very human desire to want to show off your shiny rocks. In this way, we truly have not evolved very much past our caveman days. Back then it was primitive objects carved from rocks and sticks; nowadays it's the latest amigurumi we crocheted or the casserole we cooked or the dance that we choreographed or the killer matcha latte we got for brunch. That's why social media is so compelling: it gives everybody a voice to share the things that they have done and the experiences that they had.

Truthfully, I think that is a good part of social media; it gives people a platform to feel seen. I don't think the idea of "I have to post it or it didn't happen" is necessarily a toxic thing; it is just a reflection of the very human desire to be acknowledged. We want to be appreciated in some way, whether that is a thank you from a friend when you give them a gift, or from a stranger on the internet saying, "Wow, that drawing that you made is amazing. I do think there can be a positive community aspect to social media and blogging. (Of course, at the same time there are lots of terrible things about social media that I would love to get rid of, but that's a blog post for another day...)

Given all of this -- people's propensity for wanting to share, and me acknowledging that I want to share -- why is it so hard to sit down and blog nowadays?

It feels like an absolute chore, and I think some of it is the gravity that I am unnecessarily imposing on myself. It feels like when you have a full-fledged blog site like this (a silly distinction, because there's nothing stopping me from turning this particular blog site into a microblog), I feel a pressure to write long-form content that has some kind of thesis that makes it a worthwhile read (vs. shorter-form content like we used to do on Twitter or even Facebook status posts back in the day).

I realize that a lot of my things that I want to share are not necessarily long form, but not necessarily short form either. I'm not sitting here writing super long philosophical articles (and if they are long, they are stream of consciousness ramblings like this). However, I'm not here for three-sentence posts either.

The reality is I'm kind of somewhere in the middle where I want to ramble for a couple paragraphs about a very specific topic and then call it a day. Like every neurodivergent nerd out there, most of the things that I want to blog about are very niche interests. For example, just a sampler of ideas I had rattling around my brain today included "Top 10 most recognizable Chinese dances", "what's in my bag", "goals for 2027", "psychological theoretical orientations", "why I will never give up bubble tea", "nostalgic places in Austin, Texas."

Back in the day, even if you did post these niche topics, people would still read it. I remember reading personal blogs of my internet affiliates/friends back in the day, and even though they would be talking about a topic I had never heard about, I would still read through the blog and comment something at the end that acknowledged what they had shared. Something like, "Oh, I've never heard of that band before, it seemed like you had an amazing experience at that concert! I'll have to check them out. Do you have a song you recommend?"

Whereas nowadays, if somebody stumbles upon your blog and see something that they are unfamiliar with, it's way too common to quickly swipe/click away and claim, "I'm not reading all that because it's not something that I'm interested in." In a way, this dopamine-addicted mindset (and the ability for social media to cater to our exact interests) has increased the echo chamber-ness of the internet. I feel like it's very hard to fight that ever-present current.

I did discover a new social media app called Thingsbook that I'm starting to use as a bit of a microblog. It was created by a big company (Korean company Naver, who owns Webtoon and Line, among other things). I'm not a big fan of big companies owning chunks of the internet, but I do think that the way this platform is set up is very nice. It reminds me of old-school Tumblr. It's microblog-ish, but you can categorize things into collections (the analog of a category in WordPress, or tags in LiveJournal), but it's quite aesthetic in the way that it's displayed, and easier to look through.

The nostalgia factor is probably getting to me a lot, but I'm going to give it a try to see if that will stick. I do think it's a nice way to cross-post from certain other social media platforms. One thing that I have found I really dislike is the idea of multiple social media platforms for highly specialized forms of media, if that makes sense. For example, we have Goodreads or Storygraph for books, Trakt for TV shows and movies, YouTube for videos, etc. It just feels very siloed compared to back in the day when we had personal blog sites where everything was just in one place. The fragmentation of the internet into 50,000 social media platforms is truly annoying.