Obligatory “First Post!” Post

Clicking the “New Post” button made me remember all the “Hey! So, I decided to start a blog, cause like, you know, idk, I wanna share thoughts and stuff” posts everyone wrote when they started a blog. It also reminded me how a lot of people never even wrote another post after the “First Post” post. And yeah, people often started blogs. People my age will remember how everyone tried to blog at least once in their lives, and eventually abandoned it. Some after their First Post, some after publishing at least a few posts. Starting a blog was like the “Dude, we should start a band” of those times, or “Dude, we should start a podcast” of today.

Thing is, I always tried to stick with it. Well sort of. Not exactly writing blogs all the time, but just writing in general. I’m the kind of person who needs to get things out there to be able to understand them. So sometimes I will have to annoy a lot of my friends with my ideas. Hearing them back, added with their reactions, helps me understand them better. It’s a weird system but that’s how I work and I’m lucky to know people who enjoy this process. Writing can kind of mimic this process though, which is why I have often kept diaries, journals and similar stuff. Or I will google the thought I have, and find someone talking about it. Then, I imagine I am discussing it with the writer, so in the end I can understand the thought better. Anyway…

Why start writing a blog in 2023?

Even though the boom of blogging is long past, I still think there are reasons people should write blogs. But there are two very distinct reasons.

Business

The first reason is strictly business related. You find a niche that you work in well, and you write technical articles about it. So let’s say you are a software engineer, and you totally know your stuff. Well, you could write about how to do stuff in a new framework that just came out. You could experiment with some functions and write how you found out that doing something in a different way saves memory and time. You could write something about productivity and management in the field.

These are the types of posts I see pop up often when I’m either searching for something specific, like troubleshooting an issue at work or my own computer, or just surfing the web. And I don’t doubt that these are the type of posts that are now getting clicks and earn money to the writer.

Self Expression

The second reason is for self expression. You want the world to know about your love for anime so you write reviews on your blog. You use it as a diary and share interesting things that happen in your life. You use it as storage for your art. You want to build a personal brand. You want to learn a new skill and you write a blog to document your journey. Or you simply want to improve your writing skills.

Unfortunately, this reason, while I think still common and important, doesn’t get as much attention from others. Therefore, many people give up or never even start. Yes, long gone are the days where people went to some Tammy’s page to read how her kid got their tooth removed. We don’t care about that anymore. And there are websites dedicated to most things you would need anyway. You can write anime reviews on anime websites. Most people won’t read your diary, but might be interested in your tiktoks. Art should be shared on twitter, pixiv, deviantart, and your blog, but not only your blog. Personal branding means lots more time on social media. Etc., etc…

And yet, I think we forget one of the main reasons we should write. It’s because we are beings who share stories, and understand the world through stories. And writers are the ones who try to put in stone the stories that we keep in our souls and share with each other. Not to mention that writing is a great way to make concrete all that which is floating around all fuzzy in your head. You might be thinking things you don’t even understand, or feeling things that you don’t even know how they make you feel. But pick up a pen and paper, or a keyboard and a text editor, and give form to all of that!

Writing, like all art forms, is but one way to make sense of ourselves – to give form to all that which otherwise just floats around in our souls formless. I think it is unfortunate that so many of us already dismiss art as a useless endeavor, and some quit engaging in art for various reasons.

However, I have always felt an inner drive to make art, and understand my inner workings. so I choose to continue making art and continue writing, simply as a tool of self expression. There is no monetary gain in it for me, but I have everything to gain mentally and spiritually, which is much more important to me anyway.

Niches within self expression

Even with a “personal blog” about “self expression”, I guess you would still expect a person to pick a niche what they will be talking about, and how will they be talking about it. Is the person writing about their experience with some problem they are facing, let’s say a disability or mental disorder? Are they hopeful about their future, or pissed off about their current situation? Maybe they are more leaning towards philosophy, and write about the issues of the modern world through the lens of some school of thought? Or perhaps they are a troubled artist, documenting their struggles with finding their voice in the world?

It does make sense to pick a “thing” to write about and a “way” to write about it. In that sense I guess I have my own “thing” and “way”. For the last couple of years I have been really interested in Hinduism. Yeah, I meditate and shit, consume funny herbs (yes I do believe that they have healing properties), read sutras, and so on. My current view of the world is heavily inspired by Hindu tradition. Many things I analyse now through a completely subjective experience, which is the total opposite of how I used to be younger, all objective and “facts don’t care about your feelings.”

Subjectivity, Objectivity, Hinduism and Phenomenology

In the modern world it is the natural response to write about things objectively. “Coffee has 100mg of caffeine” vs “Coffee makes me jittery”. And yes, we need both. Look I’m a scientist myself, I’m an IT guy and I work in a field where we only care about numbers and whether they make logical sense. But somehow, people often forget that the fields also consist of, well… people. It’s something I see very often in my own field – no matter how smart you are, you will burn bridges quite fast if you are insufferable to work with.

There is also the fact that information, experience and knowledge are just not the same thing. I can care about how much caffeine is in coffee, know how much caffeine I consume in a day, objectively measure its effects on the human body, and still be addicted to the stuff and unable to quit it no matter how much I know about it. I can easily tell someone that the way to quit coffee is to just drink less of it every day. But how easily can I follow my own advice? Usually, quitting it yourself, you need to use completely different mind tricks.

The more I started noticing these things, the more I started doubting the entire objectivity thing. Trusting my own experiences just made more sense than raw, objective data. One thing led to another, I got very interested in phenomenology, Jung, and then Hinduism.

How are they linked though?

Phenomenology basically emphasises the importance of subjective experiences on our understanding of the world. So it goes the opposite way of trying to understand the world through objective means. And it makes sense to me. For example, you can be explaining to another person all day what it feels like when you catch your partner cheating. They will still never grasp the experience fully until they get in that situation where their partner is cheating. Science can explain how drugs alter the state of mind, but doing them will still alter your perceptions and probably affect you mentally afterwards. And ultimately, science has still been unable to truly objectively explain what consciousness is.

As I started thinking about life this way, I started thinking about Jung’s works more. While not strictly a phenomenologist, I think his ideas could quite overlap with the philosophy. Jung’s works also heavily emphasised the importance of subjective experience in shaping one’s understanding of themselves and the world. Naturally, I started devouring all his works, and analyse the world through his theories.

Living life like a yogi

If you study Jung more in depth, you find out that many of his ideas are actually inspired by Hinduism. While it would be a huge reach, you could call the yogis of old the OG phenomenologists. The difference being maybe that yogis did it more for spiritual reasons and phenomenologists for philosophical reasons. But still, some aspects of their practices do overlap.

And I think a big issue with many people is that they stop at the philosophical layer and are afraid to step into the spiritual. Of course, that makes sense, since the spiritual is seldom understood, and is often feared or mocked. But I believe that when we become brave enough to engage in the spiritual is when we are the most integrated within ourselves. And the more I’ve been reading about Hinduism, the more I became fascinated with the idea of living like a yogi.

If you think about how science explains things, they usually take a huge sample size and make conclusions and norms out of the data they collect. Some people maintain their weight at 1700 cal, others at 2400 cal, but the average is around 2000 cal. Therefore the recommended calorie consumption per day is now 2000 cal. But even if that is true objectively, I might still only maintain weight at 1800 cal, and therefore 2000 cal will be too much for me. That is something I can find out only by experimenting by myself, with myself.

And that is the approach of the yogi, really. It is the heightening of your own subjective senses to understand how everything you experience affects you. And this approach has honestly changed my life more than anything else did. I started looking at life like a fun sandbox experience. Now I am constantly excited to try out new things, because my current life goal is to build a massive library of experiences and what kind of feelings they evoke in me.

Another thing that changed was that I became more brave to face my real feelings. I was always a more critical and logic oriented person, so I pushed my own feelings aside. But I became more aware of the value of feelings, and how to work with them. I’m still quite bad at it, but I would like to believe I’m doing a good job. Plus, I realised it kind of “logically makes sense” to value the input of my feelings. Quite often I have noticed that there was something that my feelings, for example my hunch or my gut was telling me, that later turned out to be true. So I started becoming more aware of it and learning to understand it. Learning the language of feelings and the brain changed my life drastically for the better.

So, what about the content?

So yeah, to sum up all the above tangent, I’m basically writing things really subjectively and I don’t care too much about writing about factual stuff. That’s not to say I’m ignoring reality, quite the opposite. It’s just that I see many more things being a matter of personal taste rather than objective truth. And I want to express my own, real self, rather than something that’s far detached from me.

Quite often I can easily sense when people are using defense mechanisms and are lying about their true thoughts and feelings, both in speaking and writing. And I don’t want to write the same kind of things. I don’t really feel afraid of exposing myself naked like this. Since I’m quite comfortable with my feelings now. And I wish my readers appreciate that. I don’t care about writing things to appease SEO or whatever algorithms rule the blogsphere now. I want people to see the core, the truth, the rawness, the ugliness, and the beauty in it.

As for the content itself, I don’t think there will be a consistent theme. The reason I even started writing a blog was because I have already been writing think pieces and stream of consciousness “essays” about random topics that I just kinda think about often. “How can I understand my mental state by analysing my music obsessions?”, “What makes visual novels such a compelling yet underrated art form?”, “Why do you always feel the need to make jokes?”, “Why do I feel such a lack of authenticity in people nowadays?” – I clicked on four random articles in my archive and these were the ones I clicked.

And I want the world to see what kind of stuff I think about, what I think about it and how I feel about it. Somehow, I hope to make people feel less alone with their own problems by doing this.

Besides that, I also want to document my experience of life. There are as many worlds as people that have ever existed through the history of our universe. Yet how many of those worlds are we even aware of? And of the ones that we are, how much about them do we know? This is my attempt at taking up a very tiny space on this data center, that would host various thoughts and feelings of a single person in this vast planet.

I just don’t want to be completely forgotten. I want to have some kind of impact on the world. Even if people don’t consciously think of me, changing the course of humanity at least in some small simple subconscious way will be proof that I existed and impacted the world. Through some weird physics theory shit, the energy of what makes me “me” will continue to exist and shape the course of humanity.

Therefore, I hope you enjoy reading about completely random topics that just seem to float in my head, and what I feel about them. And I hope that you are inspired by reading them.