More Than Writing
Record I'm Listening To: In The Court of the Crimson King - King Crimson
Beer I'm Enjoying: Very Enjoyable Beer - Mountain Goat Brewing
My home office is a quiet space in which I've been given free reign. The rest of the house is largely under the management of my wife. But in the office, I make the rules. How I set my workstation up and what goes up on the walls is up to me. It's a small creative space in which I am the sole creator. And within this space, I am free to create to my heart's content. I've started to think of my blog in this way. It's a tiny slice of the internet in which I get to lay things out exactly as I want them and in doing so, I'm experiencing a number of indirect benefits from other things I'm learning in the process.
1. Independence and Security
I've come of age online using the off the shelf tools that come pre-made in the box. Google for email, iCloud or OneDrive for storage and WordPress for my website, just to name a few. Everyone else I know was using these services, so it never occurred to me to question why. It's been many, many years since I've considered myself 'tech savvy' and so I'd just taken it for granted that we all entrust our private information to these large, wealthy companies and let them take care of our valuable information. Then I came across the concept of Tech Indepedendence. I've followed these instructions verbatim and have been amazed at how something as simple as getting my own domain name and setting up my own remote server would be so liberating and allow me to have full control over things like:
- Storage
- Calendars
- Personal contacts
- A personal website
- File sharing
I no longer have to entrust any of these things to a large corporation. After all, who's to say these companies might even still be around in twenty years time? In a lot of cases I am still using them because I'm a long way from understanding all of this stuff. But I intend to fully liberate myself from these services and the process of learning how to do it, is immensely satisfying.
2. The Mastery Asymptote
I'm someone who enjoys learning for learning's sake. Granted, there are times when it's nice to have a direct payoff for the time spent invested in learning new skills. But mostly, the time spent immersed in the new skills and being able to see tangible improvement is its own reward. In order to interact with my remote server, which runs the OpenBSD operating system, I've had to learn how to use the command line. This has been a steep learning curve. I've since installed Ubuntu Linux on my main computer as Ubuntu is a bit more user-friendly than OpenBSD, but a lot of the commands are transferable. Learning about how powerful the command line is has led me down a marvelous rabbit role in which I can get lost for hours learning all these new things. I'm still very much a beginner, and I don't think I'll ever get to a point where I understand it completely. But that's a major part of the fun.
3. Staying in Touch
This is the main reason I wanted to create a website. Having now lived on three continents (I'll be adding a fourth next year), I have friends and family all over the globe. Social media is great for connecting, but it's saturated with too much other junk. I can catch up with what my friends and family are doing in mere minutes, and then lose nearly an hour 'doom scrolling.' As I've got older and taken long (up to a year) breaks from social media, I've realised when I've returned to these services how superficial the exchanges are - trading photos for likes. It doesn't feel real to me anymore. I wanted to create something of more substance to give people a sense of what my family and I are up to. While not all my blog posts will be news, I do have my now page for quick updates at a glance. When I do write about newsy things, I feel assured that it's much more effective and meaningful for the people interested than social media has ever been.
4. Indie Web
Over the weekend I did a quick internet search to gauge the opinion of the web on whether blogging is still relevant in 2024. The overwhelming answer was "yes. It is still possible to make money with blogging in this day and age." It was disappointing to discover that the primary driver for many to launch a blog is to monetise it and contribute to the excessive bloating of the commercialised, advertising-infested internet. Thankfully I've recently discovered the 'indie web' or 'small web.' I probably first heard these terms a month ago and I've interpreted them to refer to a small group of people, each with their own tiny slices on the internet, fiddling away at a blog purely for the enjoyment of it and maintaining the integrity of good quality content with no ulterior motive.
5. Fun
Then there's the writing. The nuts and bolts of this blog. I've been a runner for many years because I enjoy running. I used to get really upset when people would scoff at the thought that I run quite long distances. I don't make people feel bad for bingeing rubbish television on Netflix for hours and hours. If that's what they find enjoyable, who am I to say anything untoward about it? There's an element of wanting to remain fit that serves as motivation to get out the door, and I'm not immune to the addictiveness of training for a race and trying to get faster. But the overwhelming majority of kilometres I log, are purely for the fun of it. I fundamentally just love the sport. It's a treat at the end of the day that I really look forward to. So I keep doing it. Growing up playing tennis was the same. I enjoy writing. That's all there is to it. It's a fun hobby for me. It doesn't have to be a means to an end. It is an end in itself.
Within my tiny slice of the internet, much as with my home office, I get to explore all of these things as I see fit. I have full creative freedom to do it in my own way.