Recently I read a post from Wool & Home, a fellow blogger who has been blogging for more than twenty-one years, which (damn) is even longer than I've been doing it (but not much longer, as I started in 2006). In her post, she admitted to struggling with the 'why' question, as in 'what's the point of blogging?' and invited her readers to provide our own answers to the question of 'what keeps us going.'
I thought about the question as I ran through the park. For starters, if I didn't have a blog, where else would I share this important 'cats rule dogs drool' graffiti? I mean, yes, there's still Tumblr and BlueSky (but not Twitter or FB or Instagram unless you want to support objectively horrible people), but blogs in my mind are still the best means of subjectively capturing the world around us in a manner that's best suited for the internet (via beautiful words and pictures) and that is increasingly radical to the extent that readers can 'access this content' without ads and metadata and tracking and so much else that has made the internet a 'gigantic hellscape' over the past fifteen years.
The more important question to me, therefore, is not 'why blog?' but 'why not blog?' Why don't more people do it? From 2006 to 2009, blogging was a way to meet new people (many of whom were gay, which was exciting to me) without corporate oversight and their oppressive, censorious 'guardrails.' But corporations saw what was happening and they were not happy about people congregating and voicing opinions without 'giving them a cut of the action' and so they corralled us into micro-blogging sites like Twitter and Tumblr and FB/IG, which were easier to use than blogging platforms. And like cows, we went. And then a lot of people turned to 'newsletters,' which to me will always lack the appeal of a blog because a newsletter is basically an email, and emails are tedious, something we do out of necessity, not for pleasure.
I wrote a eulogy for the internet in 2013 and here I am, ten years later, still posting. Wtf.
I know it's not coming back, any more than I'm getting younger.
And like everyone else, I have a 'lot of shit to do,' just in terms of getting through daily life and its necessary work and small pleasures.
But I still like to blog, and I have no plans to quit. It's a place where I can write a few words and share some pictures that for whatever reason mean or meant something to me. It's not about making money or even trying to, which is itself an act of #resistance in our sadly money-obsessed culture. And while I sometimes question the meaningfulness of my work, I never question the meaningfulness of others who are doing the same thing, which would dictate that (if you took my neurotic insecurity out of the equation) the work is meaningful to someone, even if (stay with me here) that someone is me, or a past version of me.
As the sun set over the heather gardens, I took a picture, thinking about how it was one of many I had taken, some of which I would post on my blog, and the feeling, because I knew that in a few years I would be a different person than who I am now, was not too different than writing to an old friend.
This is great, you put into words some of the thoughts lurking in the back of my mind that I was unable to fully grasp. I too love how blogging is free, content that is not monetized. It goes against hustle culture, capitalism, everything tamping down creativity. Some Substacks are actually quite good and in the end just blogs by another name, but most do have some sort of paywall on a lot of posts. (Also I just put the substack URLs into Feedly, so I can read them without actually subscribing or getting another email.) You've inspired me to continue to resist by creating something for free, with no expectation of reward.
Posted by: Sarah | 03/09/2025 at 11:39 AM