The Joy of Doing

I've ignorantly and without any planning stumbled into some things that have had a material impact in shaping my life.

One of those things was writing. It was something I had always enjoyed, and then I stumbled onto WordPress/blogging and became a prolific writer for a few years. I would write and publish whatever I wanted.

I regret that in one of the many changes to my blog over the years, I got lazy in one of those changes, and I lost years' worth of writing. Fortunately (with some work), The Internet Archive has retained some nostalgic gems I wrote 17 years ago.

Doing some post-rationalisation with all of the benefit of hindsight, I can't tell you why I published that. Except that, I felt the urge to do so, and I'd imagine I derived some joy from doing it.

In the last 17 years, I have had fits and spurts of writing more and less. More interestingly, I've published less and less as every year passes.

Part of this is because writing - and publishing - became content marketing. I had experienced the power of having an audience, and I was patently aware that there were a lot of tips, tricks and best practices for making your writing work for you.

But writing became work for me.

It became another thing I needed to be good at to pursue my broader goal of progressing in life and business. I had utterly lost the ignorance of just being able to write and publish for the sake of it.

Almost a year ago to the day, I was contemplating something similar, and I concluded that post by saying:

"...in this season of my life, I will write what I like."

But I never did.

Instead, for a few weeks, I embarked on toying with a new workflow that would take some ideas I had, and then, with the help of voice note transcription and genius LLMs, I'd efficiently turn them into punchy blog posts that I could publish here. I had a plan, too: this content was designed to build attention and eyeballs that I could divert to my new (paid) written project (R.I.P.). A little extra, fun wine money has never hurt anyone.

I never published any of those because I didn't feel like me. Part of the fun of writing is to figure out how I best communicate this idea or thought in my head. It does not have to be optimised for another purpose if the only real goal is to get that thought out of my head.

So, I recently decided to go almost dark on this blog in favour of writing just what I like.

There's no more newsletter here. Unless someone else shares it, this blog post won't make it onto X (where I've not been active for months and have locked my account). Nobody might read this. Unless, of course, they intentionally type adii.me into their web browser to come here.*

And that feels just about right at the moment.

(*I am curious and excited about Ghost's work with ActivityPub and will likely participate in and push my content into the fediverse as soon as I can.)