Why Is This Here?
In which I attempt to justify the existence of this blog.
May 17, 2019
Someday I hope to be as successful as "Cheerful young successful blogger feeling happy and laughing while reading funny messages from his new followers"
A year or so ago, something or someone that I can’t remember informed me that I should have a blog. Not that I, Jordan, should have a blog, but that everyone who wants to be a programmer or a student or just a person in the modern world should have a blog. I didn’t take it too seriously at first, but it piqued me interest and the next day I did some quick internet searches to read various opinions about whether or not I should have a blog. To my surprise, everyone I found said that I should. And I was almost convinced, until I remembered selection bias.
See, the issue was, every article I found that talked about all the reasons why I would be foolish not to start blogging a soon as possible…they all were posted by someone else, on their own blog. All the people who had decided it was good idea to start a blog were flooding the internet with posts about why everyone else should do it. And all the people who decided it wasn’t a good idea to start a blog, or who started a blog and later realized that was a bad move and took down their blog…well, of course those people weren’t going to be making any blog posts about why it’s a bad idea to have a blog and thank goodness they don’t have one. So I reverted to my original response of not taking any of this too seriously and lived another happy year of my life without starting a blog.
So…why is this here? Well, there are a couple reasons I ended up deciding this was worth trying out.
The first was that I started having my own reasons to want to do it. Instead of reading a list of “Top 10 Reasons You Should Start Blogging Right Now Why Are You Still Reading This You Should Be Setting Up Your Wordpress Account” and listening to what someone else had to say, I was seeing those reasons naturally arise in my life. Mainly: I missed writing; I had opinions that I wanted to externalize; and I wanted to try something new. I felt much more comfortable starting a blog because I felt it was the right move for me, rather than doing it because hoardes of internet people were telling me that I was stupid not to.
The second reason I decided to start a blog was that I realized I could do so without forcing anyone to actually read it. When I put things on Twitter or Facebook, I feel like I’m assuming that everyone I know on those platforms actually wants to read what I have to say. And there’s a decent chance that they don’t, maybe for a good reason. But if I throw some bad joke or uninformed political rant out into social media, someone else is probably going to see it in their feed, whether they want to or not. For this reason, I’m pretty uncomfortable tweeting or posting these days. But thanks to this website of mine, I can throw out as many rambly articles or uninformed polemics as I want, and the only way anyone is going to see them is if they actively navigate to this blog, at which point it’s their own damn fault.
And so this blog exists, because I want to practice writing and put my opinions out there without forcing anyone to actually pay attention to them. At the time of writing this, it’s still very new, and I may well end up deciding this whole thing was a terrible idea. But if that does happen, I'm not going to take it down. I'm going to keep it up. And I'm going to write one last post telling everyone who will listen all the reasons they should never start a blog.