Does Anybody Blog Anymore?
I used to feel bad about the fact that I didn't sit down to write on a regular basis anymore, and I've resolved many times to write more often, as much to chronicle this part of my life as to practice stringing coherent thoughts together. It was only when I saw the caption on an Instagram photo of one of my contacts, recently—a person whose blog I used to read regularly—mentioning that she'd blogged for the first time in a long time, and then a follow-up comment that said, "It's rare that I go check out blogs anymore..." that I realized that a tipping point had been reached, and non-blogging might be A Thing now. Not even a thing we all complain about, as we used to ("I'm way behind on my blogging," yadda yadda), but just A Thing. It reminds me of that scene in When Harry Met Sally when Sally says something about her friend who complains that now that she has kids she and her husband never have sex anymore, and then she says, actually, now that I think about it, she didn't even complain about it.
I think it's that we all have Twitter and Facebook and Flickr and Instagram and are able to share our stories in smaller bits, more frequently and more easily than ever before, and so who needs a blog, really? Unless you're getting paid to write posts or trying to establish a media empire (again, with the goal of getting paid) or trying to establish yourself as an expert on a particular topic (most likely for eventual, if not immediate, gain), why invest the time in writing what amounts to an essay (at best) or a letter to your future self?
The answer for me is that I actually enjoy reading letters from a former self. I already have a pretty thorough chronicle of what we were doing at any given time over the past few years from photos (published and unpublished) and tweets and notes scribbled in calendars and on sticky notes, but I miss the old longer-form writing I used to do. I have cracked myself (and the Beaner and Al) up many a time by re-reading old avocado8 posts, and usually after doing so one of us laments that I don't really blog anymore.
I'm not sure if the resolutions I jotted down (or rather, tapped into the Notes app on my iPhone) the other day—Run. Write. Read. Raw.—will stick going forward, but I hope to give them the old college try, if only for the amusement (and possibly the mental and physical health) of my future self. In a way, knowing, or at least suspecting, that nobody blogs (or reads blogs) anymore takes the pressure off—and turns writing these entries back into the Just For Me endeavor it started out as 15 years ago.