profoundly high expectations and writer’s block
after my last post (and also poem and technical article to a much lesser extent) I’ve posted blew up I’ve sorta had this writers block where I don’t know where to go from here. I know I started this blog to write casually, and to keep posting little things but between my PhD program and a general lack of motivation I’ve found it really difficult to keep writing. I want to write about my image intensified astrophotography setup, so I can then share the astrophotos I took then, but in order to share a post, I feel that I need to explain the process on how I create astrophotos, since it’s so much more involved than other astrophotographers due to the nature of my setup. My last technical piece set a high standard that a lot of people from the NV discord really liked, and I feel like I need to keep up that high standard of writing.
This compounded with my first non-depression poem in the better part of a few months doing abnormally well (11 toasts at time of writing, compared to the usual 3-5) and the aformentioned AI writing post I’ve felt that my writings need to be deeply profound, or at the very least comparable to my previous works. But I haven’t stopped writing and sharing about myself, I’ve just switched to a medium where the expectations are low, notably the instagram story. There, I have no expectations, and limited analytics to compare. If comparisons are the thief of joy, analytics are supremely miserable in and of themselves. As a very analytically-minded person I can’t help but scrutinize every number, every view, every toast, and even the guestbook signatures. It’s somehow taken the fun out of writing for me.
The beauty of a social media story post is it’s ephemeral nature, at least to the viewer. After 24 hours, it is hidden and is a memory to all those who viewed it, unlike a blogpost which stays up indefinitely, or at least until i choose to unpublish it. A life story disseminated on sticky notes, disposed of once the adhesive fails but stuck to a memory. Low-stakes writing, almost like how this blog was originally intended. Instead of that, I’ve now been burdened with the knowledge that there are so many people who read this, at least an order of magnitude more than anyone who reads my instagram story. But unlike instagram, where a bad selfie can be paired with some ephemeral thoughts that evaporate with time, the blog has a permanence to it. Bearblog is especially permanent in its simplicity, and my 4th blog still remains up, 4 years later. In an era of dead and unusable links, “404 file not found” and a decreasing permanence of stuff posted on the internet, maybe I should put more thought into a blogpost.
But writing for permanence has a gravity that a one-liner and a half-face selfie doesn’t have, and yet maybe it never mattered. Roman graffiti is carved into stone, preserved for millennia, and perhaps it may have had the same amount of thought put into it as a social media story post. Sure, it took more time to carve, but the end result is a fleeting thought given permanence. Perhaps we have lost something, in the impermanence of an accelerating world.