The Number Is Meaningless

Apparently, Seth Godin has reached 10,000 blogposts. He’s been at it for 25 years. He says that’s over 3 million words. And he posts once or twice a day. While the longevity of this practice is admirable, I think those numbers are largely meaningless.

I’ve been blogging for over 20 years. I have nearly 2,300 blogposts. At first, I posted nearly every day. But for years now, it’s been more like three to four times a month. Because many of my blogposts are long, I estimate that’s over 2 million words. And while that journey means a lot to me personally, I also think the numbers are meaningless.

Beware of Filler

I say that because many of those posts are not very good. They have no more to say than the kind of thing we might post in a tweet or Instagram caption. A lot of them were just a comment on an interesting link or video. Or an update that long ago lost its importance. They aren’t really part of a story. Or a container for an interesting idea. Or something that signposts a significant experience.

They’re just filler. They’re there because they’re there. They’re words I once wrote. Unlike entries in a journal or emails, they are public. But no one is reading them again. Not even me.

As much as I love writing and sharing blogposts, I’ve come to hate running this site. There are so many problems. And fixing them is like sticking my hand in a jar full of wasps. I can’t bring myself to address the problems without recoiling from the expense, frustration, and potential pain.

How To Start Again

If I were starting a blog from scratch, I would establish a consistent formatting style and a limited set of tags and categories. I wouldn’t use third-party apps to serve up core content. I’d have consistently formatted header images for every post.

And I wouldn’t put myself under the obligation to keep every post up forever.

I never started blogging with a clear definition of what this practice is or how it should be done. Blogging was an experiment in self-expression. It emerged organically. Only later was it codified. It got weighed down by people’s ideas about how to do it well. Whether well meant being authentic. Gaining an audience. Or some kind of commercial success.

Now I’m tired of being weighed down.

How To Find Meaning

What feels meaningful isn’t the number of posts or the years I’ve posted them. Crossing the 20-year threshold really brought that home.

What matters is the legacy. The cumulative meaning of the work. The words that continue to resonate.

I’m not sure why we came to believe that blogging needs to be an uncurated enterprise. Editing and omission are essential parts of creative work in most other pursuits.

When I look at old blogposts I wonder, Should I fix typos? Should I rewrite unclear sentences? Should I note where I changed my mind? Or where something I tried didn’t work out? Or did, but in a surprisingly different way from what I expected?

And for many old blogposts I simply wonder what the point is of keeping them. Some old posts are little more than a link to something that no longer exists online. A gloss on some long-forgotten moment.

Blogging As Performance

A blog is different to a book, for example. I think of it as performing a song live versus making a recording. In the studio, you try to get a lot closer to perfection. Or to the best you can do in every small detail. There’s a lot of polishing to create the biggest impact for something that will (hopefully) be heard many times.

But there’s also a big difference between a live performance and a jam or rehearsal. The live performance is also polished. Choices are made to make hearing and seeing the performance memorable. Artistry and stagecraft matter.

If blogging is akin to live music, there are still critical choices to be made. After all, as we blog we decide which experiences and ideas to share. All along I chose to be selective about what I shared about family, for example. I wrote about some health issues but not all of them. I didn’t mention every creative project. I mostly didn’t write about clients or collaborators.

Which brings me back to those 2,277 blogposts.

Most of the gnarly problems are with posts from the first 10 years. If I only kept 30 or so per year from that decade, I would cut well over a thousand posts. I could even keep most of the recent posts and still keep things lighter.

I’ve procrastinated for so long over this decision. The problem wasn’t technical or tactical. It was always clear that a smaller set of articles would be easier to deal with. Less work to set up. Easier for readers of the site to navigate.

Escaping Our Own Rules

We make rules for ourselves. Maybe they make sense at a certain point in our lives. But then circumstances change. We grow. We evolve. We age. Maybe the rules are no longer helpful. Maybe they become prisons for us.

Sometimes we have to escape.

If blogging were a game to play for fame and fortune, I failed a long time ago.

I don’t write in order to have a blog. I write in order to make sense of the world. I’m not here to abide by any of the rules we might make up for blogging or any of the prizes bloggers might have been promised over the years.

Some of my words live here. Some are published elsewhere. Some stay hidden on hard drives and between the covers of the many notebooks that live on my shelves.

So which words do I keep online?

The Shed

Recently, I pulled down the old shed that lived in a corner of my garden here in Adelaide. I never loved the structure. From the moment I first saw it, I knew it had to go. It was old, dusty, and cold. I dreamt of something nice. A place to work and play.

The years passed, and the shed was used mostly by my mother to store garden tools and pots. She would come by from time to time when I was away and tend to the garden. The shed reminded me of her.

But something that lay unused, collecting grime and spiders, is a poor homage to someone’s love.

I cleaned up her favourite rake and found a prominent spot for it in the garage. I bought a photo album and filled it with the nursery cards she kept for everything she planted in the garden.

A new little cabin is going up where the shed was. A clean place to write and have new dreams. I will put that little album next to a photo of my mother in the garden on a shelf there when it’s all done.

That’s how you build a legacy and keep a dream alive. It’s not by keeping everything in its dusty place. It’s by renewing and curating and bringing to the front the things that really matter. The things that drip with meaning and significance. That which moves you matters.

Epilogue

This is the first of three articles written as I convert this site and blog from dynamic content delivery with WordPress to static site generated with Hugo.

1. The Number is Meaningless
2. The Design Matters
3. Embrace The Tech You Can Master