There was a spurt last month when I wrote almost everyday, then I fell of the bandwagon, because, well – life. A while ago I came across Paul Ford’s tilde.club post and it made me severely nostalgic. I remember the tilde sites, I remember writing for the sake of writing. No metrics, no agenda, no personal brand-building, just pure community-spirited sharing of yourself and your thoughts.
A couple of days ago @buster tweeted:
My http://t.co/bV4qTaOZsc habit: start on @goldman’s http://t.co/BbycOC7kjV and then read all the links in his blogroll.
— Buster (@buster) October 18, 2014
I started to poke around those posts. I cannot exactly find the words to describe how I felt when I started to read them, except that it makes me really wish we can all go back to those days when we simply. Just. Wrote.
There were no stats, no google analytics, no twitter following. We just put a piece of ourselves out there and let the magical serendipity of the internet bring the connections in. There wasn’t even RSS, so if we really wanted to “follow” somebody, we literally had to bookmark them and make the conscious effort to return. It makes it difficult to forget and see this person as a virtual stranger when it becomes part of our daily routines to anticipate the next post.
I have always desired the quality of authentic connections over quantity, though in this world where everything is a number, it gets increasingly noisy even for myself to remember what really matters. I wrote a Medium post yesterday about consciously wanting to break myself in order to rebuild again, and I am now wondering how far am I actually willing to go.
I want to consciously redefine my own communities – it was a natural consequence that my existing communities were built around what we did for a living, but now I want to build them around who we are as people. I want us to connect over our stories, philosophies and purposes, not over the overlaps we have in our professional lives.
Along the way I’ll continue to strive for putting myself out there as much as possible, even if it means being unafraid to write as my longwinded inane hypocritical paradoxical self – simply for the sake of just writing and just being me.