https://lars-christian.com/re-do-people-irl-know-you-have-a-blog/
Yes, some do. It doesn’t influence my writing because I tend not to think about the audience when I write. I do the same when playing music, which I did for years before starting a blog.
The benefits of writing for years about life are incalculable. I didn’t know when I started!
At [day job], my writing skills have been very useful if not extremely useful. My ability to parse things the right way and bring clarity, comes from blogging. My grammatically OK English is from years of cleaning it on my blog. My analytical skills, used left and right when writing about any topic ever, have been refined and sharpened with blogging. My knowledge of things has increased dramatically by writing about those things (looks up on Wikipedia: oh shit! I didn’t know). My blogging started businesses and deep ideas, like designing a 3D printed house, which is in progress and really exciting to work on. I wrote stuff that I read years later like “I had totally forgotten about that post and damn, that perspective is on point” or “ooooh, that’s why I think this way now lmao”
I’ve always thought of this as a kind of freedom. A license to be myself. To explore my interests unapologetically and without having to explain myself. If nobody cares what I’m doing here, it means I’m free to do whatever I want. To say what I’m thinking about whatever I’m thinking about.
Exactly. This freedom of developing oneself is not always easy (countless grimy/whiny posts will spawn in your mind), but when you get there, publish something interesting and feel enlightened, it’s just so dope. Great, great feeling.
I think it takes a long time to feel good about a blog. It really is like a plant: there’s not much going on at first. But then it blooms, it grows, it looks lovely. Your mind grows, gets excited and it’s hard to put that feeling down to go back to platitudes, social dogma and all that good, stale stuff.
I think blogging can create beautiful minds that are much more calm and resilient than what the algorithms in social media do. I think we need that? Yeah.