Caught in the loop of passive consumption
I recently decided that I should start producing more and consuming less. This thought usually pops its head during long sessions of doom-scrolling or binge-watching, in those brief moments of clarity between the end of one piece of content and the near-immediate start of another. In these moments, a nagging voice creeps into my mind saying: “Why continue passively consuming? Would another episode / video / podcast / post make any difference to anything?”. The new piece of content loads up and quickly drowns it, and the cycle continues.
When a longer pause allows me to think about this clearly, what I usually tell myself is “I’m tired, I’ve earned this break”, or “It’s not that bad, I’m learning from educational content” (my poison of choice), or just “I’m currently avoiding doing the dishes, why go straight to trying to create something? It’s just a different, more self-appeasing way to procrastinate”.
This might just be me - a childless, well-earning man in his late 20s - and my carefree self speaking, and you don’t find yourself in these situations whatsoever. You, like all of us, acknowledge that you consume content - be it the news, social media, tv, books or anything else. In your case, you might have found ways to limit the “negative” aspects of it (avoidance, FOMO, anxiety, envy, or hate to name a few) and use it responsibly to maintain friendships, keep up with what’s going on in the world, learn something new or just relax and enjoy your valuable moments of free time.
But if you got this far, you can probably relate in some way to what I said. Like me, you might find doing housework or sitting in traffic boring so you put on an episode of one of your favorite podcasts or shows (not watching the screen while driving obviously). Like me, you might take your phone with you to the bathroom, the bed, you go to sleep with a screen and wake up to a screen. You might find yourself scrolling for so long looking for something worthwhile to watch while eating dinner, that it starts to get cold. You might even find yourself at the end of a long mindless scrolling or binging session asking “How long have I been doing this? Do I even remember what I just consumed?”
Breaking the cycle: choosing to create
In the current day and age, consuming has never been this easy - many high-quality, never-ending streams of content are immediately available in the palm of your hands, just waiting for you to start a session. You don’t even have to search for it - the right content finds you, and gets more personalized the more you consume.
And if you ever think about creating something of your own, doubts immediately come to mind - how can you compete with all that content, or be heard at all? In any field or topic, there must be someone more experienced than me out there who already did that better, so why would someone even care about what I’m writing?
With the advancements in AI happening every day it’s getting even more dire - why write myself (in a non-native language) when an all-knowing machine like ChatGPT can formulate these thoughts more eloquently than I could ever dream? Will someone ever read what I write or will this just be scraped and summarized by AI agents until nothing’s left of the original words?
Now, I finally decided that I don’t care. I don’t care if this will never be read by anyone other than my few close friends, or just by future me. I don’t care that this could have been written with better structure and tone, or just summarized and distilled into a few punchy paragraphs by any modern LLM. I don’t care, because I’m going to write about my experiences, failures, successes and lessons learned in my own way, and that can never be auto-generated.
I used to think that in order to publish something of my own, I must be able to provide some new and exciting piece of knowledge to the vast sea of information that just keeps on growing. Now that it seems that this sea of information has grown infinite, I finally understand: it doesn’t matter what I create, it matters that it’s me creating it. Consistently sharing my honest experience with things that interest me has enough added value on its own, at least for now. Worst case, these creations will be a nice time capsule for my future cyborg self to open when it tries to remember what it was like to be human.
I don’t care, but I do hope. I hope that the days of blogging are not soon over, and that this makes it through the infinite noise to other like-minded people out there. I hope that my message resonates with others, because feeling alone sucks. I hope to find the courage to keep putting myself and what I think out there for all to read and judge, even though I’m still learning how to do it well.
So after writing down these scattered thoughts, all that is left to say is - thank you for consuming my first piece of content on this blog! I plan to write about things that interest me: my profession (software engineering, we’ll see how that goes), personal projects like self-hosting and owning my data, music, travel & other cultures, my personal take on things or any other subject that I may want to formalize my thoughts about.
If you want to start creating something and don’t know what - you can start by producing some words of encouragement and sending them my way :)