Write Like No One is Reading

I haven’t blogged much lately. My employment has taken away my ability to talk publicly on most technical topics of interest to me, and my interest in engaging in public political debates has waned as I’ve grown more disaffected with the futility and destructiveness of the national political discourse. Local politics still holds interest, although since refocusing my efforts onto my software career and our new home I have had less energy for direct involvement or thought on all but the issues that most directly affect my daily life (e.g. rats in the alley).

When I first started blogging, it was with the intention of keeping a dairy of interesting thoughts, but in a public way. Such a digital talking-out-loud helps me to crystalize incomplete ideas into cogent concepts. I want to get back to that.

But I need to deal with something first: comments. I’ve had comments on here since the beginning. Comments are traditionally seen as necessary for a good blog - a way to foster discussion between the writer and readers. At first, that seemed true, as I would often engage in heated debates with the commenters on the topic at hand. Later, my comments morphed into defense or further explanation of an opinion I held. These days, I barely took notice of the comments, except for the rare occasion where a long-lost friend would choose a random post comment as a way to re-connect.

One might say I have become set in my thinking as I have aged, but going back and reading even the best threads here has convinced me otherwise: Rather than being useful discussions, they were merely naive passion-fueled debates between uninformed parties - full of sound and fury, but signifying nothing. They added little, but took time and energy that is in short supply. Perhaps most damning, though, is that they didn’t serve my purpose here.

So I am taking back my blog. I have disabled comments, and from here on I will write for myself, like no one is reading.

And who cares, really? This is just some backwater blog on the ass-end of the Internet, and the comment threads were never really that good. It might be just a symbolic move, but symbols matter. And if you have an opinion you would like to share or feedback to give, then you know how to reach me. We can talk about it in a more personal manner.