20 Years Of Blogging

I was accused of being a CIA agent. Told my experiences were not real. Criticised for writing too often about work and not often enough about work. Denounced for being too emotional and vulnerable and chastised for not revealing more about my feelings and personal experiences.

Blogging over the last 20 years has been quite a ride.

Blogging By The Numbers

Looking at just the numbers might suggest a story of decline. In the first three years, I posted about once a day. Then from 2008 to 2014, the flow slowed to two to three posts a week. From 2015 to 2021, it was about once a week. More recently, it’s been two to three times a month.

But those numbers reflect an evolving story. Over 20 years, the way I write has changed.

I started in the years before social media. This blog was my digital window to the world. The blog existed alongside a growing social media presence. It was the place for longer posts. Deeper exploration of ideas. More detail. Then I started to drop the idea of the blogpost as a specific form and understood myself more as an essayist writing longer and more crafted pieces. And lately, I’ve been trying to publish more of my words in other places. The blog has stopped being the default home for every essay I write.

This evolution is consistent with one of the few goals I had when I started this. While I had no strategy about the topics I focused on, I had one clear goal: to transform the way I wrote. I was unhappy with my academic voice. I wanted to jettison the postmodern posturing, the overly philosophical and jargon-laden way I explained things. And I wanted to drop the theological language as well. Churches have a dialect. A way of speaking that is simultaneously arcane and simplistic.

Blogging was a way to find my voice. This never stopped being true.

Evolving Interests In Blogging

In these 20 years, I’ve written about the topics that interest me. It’s that simple.

In the early years, I was trying to make sense of my life. Shifting from academia to creative work. Studying online. Living in India. Then I was trying to make sense of being a stay-at-home dad, learning photography, diving into all the arts, music, and film festivals in Hong Kong. Then I started a creative business. Tried to make it work. Had to switch gears when I moved to Singapore and got more serious about writing. Along the way I developed interests in personal productivity, the nature of creativity, and how to foster mental well-being.

Each of these seasons reflect the different places I lived. Different stages in my working life. Different roles in parenting. Different people I met and the cultures I experienced. And a changing sense of who I was artistically.

I never chose a niche. I wasn’t a music or tech or travel blogger. I was blogging about my life. All the way through. Blogging as biography.

Blogging Through The Years

For this blog’s tenth anniversary, I listed 10 significant posts. A couple of those made it to this list. Most didn’t. Time has changed my feelings about which words and observations matter most.

I guess that happens with time. We reconsider our lives, our stories, and understand them afresh in the light of who we’ve become. Sometimes our victories seem less heroic. Our defeats less tragic. And the ordinary moments more full of omens for the future.

So here are 20 blogposts. One from each year. A sampling of the story so far.

2004 Another Sleepless Diwali – This little slice of life in India is only 138 words. So many early posts are like this. Brief little observations and notes on daily life. I wish I had made recordings of those noisy nights.

2005 Do We Really Want Authentic Food? – Another short post. This time written to feature a link. The essay mentioned doesn’t really exist online anymore. You won’t find it by Googling. But, it’s still one of the best things I’ve ever read about food and “ethnic” dining experiences.

2006 The New Gilded Age – It’s slightly odd to read my breezy tone while writing about this economic disaster in the making. Of course in the subsequent 18 years this problem has only got worse.

2007 Mise en Place: The Ready State for Cooking and also Creativity – The first mention of a theme that emerges again and again in my thinking about creativity: How preparation begets creative freedom of expression. Using Mise en Place as a metaphor to talk about this has become quite popular in recent years but it was a quite novel idea back then.

2008 What Do People Really Think Of Stay At Home Dads – Or Why Women Are Using The Playground To Kill Feminism – If I were ever to write a memoir about parenting and being a stay at home dad I would start with rewriting this essay. A few days after posting the link to this piece on Twitter I was contacted by an editor from the South China Morning post and I ended up writing for occasionally them for the next three years.

2009 What The Stoics Can Teach Us About Saying No – Here I am writing about stoicism long before it became trendy to do so. And the importance of saying no would become a recurring theme in my blogposts.

2010 Work and Love – Another recurring theme; using work and love as a heuristic for understanding how to live well. At this time I’m still trying to drop the academic and theological language from my writing. But, the voice is starting to come through.

2011 7 Kinds Of People You Need In Your Creative Universe – By this stage I’ve become deeply fascinated by the topic of creativity. Here I’m also diving into the crucial question of how we choose the people in our lives. This was for several years the most read post on the blog and one that was shared by some very well known creatives on social media.

2012 Solitude, Introversion And The Power Of Working Spaces – Some blogposts are acts of public thinking. They’re like Venn diagrams drawn with sentences. Here work and home, architecture and design, music and language all blend as I reflect on finishing yet another home studio in yet another home.

2013 Tokyo One Month In – Rereading this reminded me how much of a joyful adventure moving to Tokyo was in the early days. I can see my current writing voice starting to emerge here.

2014 Act Your Age – I’m a bit guilty of aping the listicle form here. But the topic of aging well is a recurring theme on the blog. And looking back on these words ten years later I’m surprised at how well the ideas still stand up.

2015 Ansel Adams On Choosing A Camera – For a few years I wrote extensively about photography. This is a typical example of how I approached the topic.

2016 I’m OK – It’s a sign of what life was like that an “OK day” felt like something worth writing about. Anxiety had messed up pretty badly and I was only just starting a long, slow, healing process. Mental health, and the way it impacts our creativity, became an important theme in my writing over the next few years.

2017 Lunchtime – This is possibly my favourite essay of all. A simple every day moment opens a window into the author’s own somewhat troubled soul.

2018 Why You Probably Shouldn’t Get Up At 5am – The world of self-improvement was overrun with unhelpful and extremist advice. It seemed to happen slowly at first. Then it felt overwhelming. Here I’m pushing back against an idea that should never have been offered as advice for everyone.

2019 Impermanence – Living in Japan changed me. And leaving Tokyo broke my heart. I haven’t really recovered.

2020 The Noguchi Filing System – I’ve written a lot of posts about personal productivity over the years. This is one of the simplest. But, as someone who has always struggled to stay organised it felt important to share one of the very few productivity hacks that ever really worked for me.

2021 This Week I Quit LinkedIn – Some might call it brave, others foolhardy, but using LinkedIn always made me feel unhappy. This wasn’t the first time I’d quit LinkedIn. But this time it stuck. Also this was one of the last posts in the This Week I Quit series, which was one of several personal experiments I wrote about on the blog.

2022 How To Think About New Technology
– As a child I got my first computer around the same time I got my first guitar. But in recent years we’ve had a barrage of false promises. Crypto, NFTs, Web3, and of course, AI. How do we approach new tech when it so often seems to not deliver on its promises anymore?

2023 Losing My Religion – I was losing my religion when this blog started. But, it took 19 years to understand the process and articulate it succinctly. This post feels like a signpost to the future of this blog.

2024 A Personal Statement About Generative AI – The potential economic cost of AI, and the existential threat to the creative industries is so great, I felt compelled to write a manifesto about the situation.