Thinking, Thinking...Gone

Whenever I come back to this blog, I'm always struggling to think of what to write about. I'm not very used to rationalising my internal thoughts on a given topic for public consumption, and whilst I'm fully aware probably the only people who read - or will read this blog - are people who already know it exists, I still feel I have some kind of obligation to write as if some theoretical third-party is going to stumble upon it and consume all of the ravings that came out of my brain.

I often feel very "meta" about this blog - that is, I'm more inclined to write a post about posting, or the nature of blogging, than about ordinary day-to-day subjects. I think it's my newness to the concept of regularly scheduled blogs and posting out of habit. When I post social media it's usually for a purpose - my Instagram was never comprised of on-a-whim posts, always a new project I was working on, or a specifically interesting outing, or perhaps just a personal record of one really nice event like Valentine's with my girlfriend. My twitter is much the same, and I don't try to appeal to any kind of popular activity there. My mod work is even more directed and focused - though there's a little room there for off-the-cuff posting, and the community we've cultivated around my most well-known project often favours spontaneous dialogue over methodically crafted articles. So it is that blogging and formulating my thoughts in a more refined way doesn't come naturally.

I've read other blogs before and follow Instagrammers and friends on twitter. There's a sort of paradoxical thinking in my head - when my friends "scream into the void", complaining about their pancakes this morning or some other mild misfortune, to receive no likes, no retweets, and no comments, it makes me feel a little grim. Why would I ever publicise thoughts no one is reading about, or even knows are there? The point's moot - this blog doesn't get hardly any views, with single digits still being the highest percentile according to the analytics. Yet, I feel this must be the case for many blogs - I was surprised when one of my friends recently told me they, too, maintain a blog, as they'd otherwise never spoken about it. They confirmed nobody pretty much ever read it and they'd only ever used it for jobbing and their own use.

But then, that's not "screaming into the void", is it? I'm maintaining this blog to develop a habit, develop my writing, and create a paper trail of concentrated thinking on my part for the purposes of pursuing a job and using this as material. So long as the thoughts are relatively concise and readable, and indicate a quality to my writing, it's fulfilling the purpose. When I write a blog post, it's with a reason - I'm not posting scrambled eggs on the internet because the whim took me. The intended target audience for this blog - a potential employer - will eventually read it in part as a section on my portfolio. I have that relative guarantee. Without that guarantee - providing my content into the internet stratosphere without some sort of plan for where it might go, to whom, or when - seems alien to me.

I was thinking of trying to experiment with writing not specifically intended for use with some sort of mini-series - purely for my own benefit, with it only having purpose by association on this blog. Something called "Food for Thought", or because I like to pretend my titles are clever, "Hungry Thinking". Some random misfit neuron in my brain is telling me I should make these a few lines long at most, alternate between a longer blog post and them, and try to make them provoke some kind of thinking. Then again, provoking thinking is often best done when you have something to say.