A year of blogging

Originally published on Tumblr.

It’s hard to write something every week. I’ve done it for a year now, and I’m pretty proud of myself.

A lot of what I write is badly structured, unfinished, or uninteresting. I publish it because I have a weekly deadline. Since I’m relatively self-critical, this is how I have to work. If I don’t, I won’t publish much.

Forced blogging has been useful. It’s reminded me, over and over, how disorganized my thinking can be, and also how little I know.

Blogging has forced me to put a lot of my thoughts in order. Unexpressed thinking — at least mine — is messy. It’s impossible to avoid a vigorous cleanup when putting ideas on paper. I’ve begun many blog posts without knowing where my argument would end up. In some cases, I’ve managed to think through ideas to a satisfying conclusion. They might not have been terribly novel, but I hope they were useful to at least some of my readers. In some cases I’ve had to abandon them, either because I wasn’t able to resolve my arguments, or because I became more and more confused as I thought through them.

I recently started a post about “economic relativism” only to give it up when I realized that I didn’t know enough about cultural relativism, moral relativism, or economics to structure my argument — closer to a hunch really — coherently. I’m generally not afraid of sounding like an idiot, but if I’m going to get it wrong, at the very least I have to get it coherently wrong. In this case it quickly became clear that I’d need more than a few hours of reading to fill my intellectual lacunae.

Blogging has also taught me about things I didn’t know. In some cases I knew I didn’t know them, and filled in the blanks. In others I thought I understood something well, only to discover that I was completely wrong.

For a post I wrote about the evolution of language I had to learn about the mechanics that allow us to make such a wide variety of sounds. It was exciting research. Other times I’ve double-checked something I “knew”, only to discover that I didn’t know it at all!

A recent example is a post I planned to write on the moral bankruptcy of the idea of “paying it forward”. I understood the term to mean: giving something with the expectation of getting something in return. I saw it as a system for creating implicit obligations. But I was completely wrong. The term means means nothing of the sort. It’s embarrassing to have gotten it so wrong when I live in the world of statups where the idea of “paying it forward” is mentioned all the time.

Besides forcing me to confront my ignorance on a regular basis, blogging has also taught me how amazing real bloggers are. It’s astounding that people who don’t make their living writing are able to produce smart, well-structured, and interesting pieces, week after week.

The hard work of organizing, researching, and expressing ideas is, like a lot of things, a series of small humiliations that have managed to make me a slightly more humble person. I added slightly after noticing that I’d did manage to express pride in the very first line this post!

Plans for 2015? Keep blogging. Keep learning a little bit more about myself and the world around me every week.