Introspection

There is the question of what to write here. I'm not really sure there's much I want to say, or am qualified to talk about. I mean, it's easy to have an opinion, but actually mustering a coherent essay on a topic takes more energy than just saying something sucks.

I guess that's the rub: I don't want to just be adding to the noise out there. I want to write something original, something interesting. Something I would like to read myself.

This is certainly not it. First entry, and already I'm off to a bad start. See, now I'm about to erase this, and of course that won't be the first time I've done that. Clearly if I set my standard too high, there won't ever be anything here since everything will have been erased before reaching the stage where it's actually worth reading. Can it really be true that I need to write something mediocre in order to write at all? That is a depressing thought.

There are so many topics to write about! How about writing about facebook culture and what a strange phenomenon it is that I'm now spending a not insignificant amount of time reading about the boring life of some girl I knew in first grade, or the divorce of some colleague at a former workplace, or some other piece of information that I don't need and don't want. I could write an article about the alchemist I met at a party one time, who grew up in the same tiny town as me. Or about intellectual property and how software patents are destroying the world. I could write about how the hunt for child pornography has become the witchhunt of our age and how difficult it is to even have a rational discussion about the balance between privacy and surveillance because as soon as someone brings up child pornography, the discussion is over. I could talk about religion, and how much I dislike it (and why). Maybe I should talk about racism and the cultural clashes in swedish society? Then there's popular media, I could write pages about movies I liked or the latest episode of Battlestar Galactica. Maybe I should write about programming, or open source? That, at least, is a subject with which I am familiar. I could write about learning new languages (as in, natural languages), such as my current attempt at learning enough Cantonese to carry a conversation. There's always politics and economic theories, though I'm no expert and probably terribly wrong most of the time.

Of course, what I most yearn to do is simply write; not about things but actual new content. By that I mean, short stories. Novels. Fiction of varying sorts. Little tales that don't speak about reality and the now, like most of the content out there. So much of what you read online is simply documenting the now, that I'm not sure there's much I can add to it that hasn't already been said more eloquently by someone else.

One problem I have with writing online is that it is so easy to publish. Write, write, write, and then click! Published. The first draft ends up being the finished work. No editing, no thinking, no independent review before it's all out there, dangling free for everyone to see. Who can produce something worth reading without any revision? Yes, I know. I could hit 'Save Now' instead of 'Publish Post', but that would require some form of discipline, and I have none. Once I'm done with a session, I'm done with that article. Of course I'll probably look at it again later, but mostly to scoff at my own rambling idiocy. The few times I've actually ended up saving instead of publishing, it has been because what I've written is so terrible there's no way I'd ever actually publish it. So I just end up deleting it some time later.

This kind of shit is exactly the stuff that I want to avoid. Fuck. I guess I'll just hit 'Publish Post' since there's nothing else on there right now, and go back and delete this crap once I've written something actually worth publishing.