/blog

I had a moment of panic last night when most days in the past year reported no posts. I initially thought that stuff had gotten deleted or the database corrupted. That wouldn't have been too much of an issue thanks to nightly backups but the panic was still real.

On This Day was reporting posts for each of the days so I realised the issue was that I had forgotten to rewrite some of the database queries after reworking scheduled posts. A few edits later and normality (and my sanity) was restored.

Julian asks "Is it just writing?" saying:

"I think the old days of blogging have gone the way of so many things. Namely, the reward vs. the effort has meant a lot of people have fallen off the wagon."

Blogging, true blogging, is now as it has always been: an individual sharing thoughts, ideas, words without an agenda.

The effort is its own reward

Oliver Burkeman in Four Thousand Weeks mentions "what the philosopher Kieran Setiya calls an 'atelic activity', meaning that its value isn't derived from its telos, or ultimate aim."

An atelic activity is one that has not yet been completed: "You can stop doing these things, and you eventually will, but you cannot complete them".

This can be applied to blogging: you can stop blogging but you're never really 'finished' in the true sense of the word until the ultimate end. A blog is a life story, that of its author so, I suppose, a blog is only really finished when that story is done. And what reward can be reaped then?