I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment expressed in this post. A few weeks ago I was inspired by this quote from Why the Lucky Stiff:
> When you don't create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than your ability. Your tastes only narrow & exclude people. So create.
I won't bore you with the blog post I wrote in response, but the gist is that writing (and equally importantly, publishing) is a way of getting outside of your own head to think of a audience. We do it all the time as children but somehow as adults we seem to think we need permission to create something for the public. This has never been true and is doubly not true on the internet.
So write something and don't worry if nobody reads it. That is not the point. That act of writing will have sharpened a little piece of your brain.
> So write something and don't worry if nobody reads it.
It's demotivating to have created a huge body of work that you know nobody will ever read/hear/experience. It saps the desire to create any more. I've been creating things for decades and approximately 0 people (other than myself) have benefitted from any of it. Everything is always just under the line of "good enough" to publish/publicize, and publishing/publicizing are completely different skills than creating in the first place, and just feel awful to do.
> That act of writing will have sharpened a little piece of your brain.
I'm tired of sharpening my own brain. Oh yay, after several decades of challenging myself and creating lots of cool things just for myself, I have a super-sharp brain (let's be charitable for sake of argument). So what? I'm doing literally nothing useful with all my sharp intellect.
Creation has begun to feel pointless without sharing those creations, and the amount of effort and skill it takes to go from Tier 2 (not quite worth sharing) to Tier 1 (worth sharing) is enormous. We belong to a race of 8.2 billion people, most of whom are directly connected all the time. Human attention is limited, and everyone can choose to pay attention to the best 0.001% of any form of content or media -- and why wouldn't they? -- which already gives them way more content to read/watch/listen to than they could possibly experience in a lifetime.
That means you have to be absolutely world-class to create anything of value that anyone else would ever even bother to look at. You get to pick one thing that you're world-class at, if you're very lucky. And to do that, you can't do anything else. You want to share your paintings with anyone? You better fucking only paint, and do nothing else with your life, to have even a chance of anyone ever giving a shit about anything you paint. Good luck paying for your mortgage and your kids' educations.
Besides, in many endeavors AI will soon be (if not already is) churning out content that makes even world-class human efforts look like garbage. Very expensive garbage. Why would anyone bother to look at your worthless human shit when they can look at pristine AI-generated content instead?
So you can't create anything worth anyone's time, so you can't share anything, so you're stuck only ever sequestering your creations inside a dark basement forever where nobody will ever experience them. Eventually you just run out of desire to do that.
I think it is a good example of what the parent link is advocating - a short(ish) post on a single topic. We all enjoy long and informative articles but there is a place for things longer than a tweet but shorter than a essay.
Writing != Publishing. It's wise to not conflate these two acts.
Let Writing be personal; reflective. Occasionally one might feel like sharing with another self. Then, publish with kindness to self. Publishing is an open set of choices, including writing a rambling email to a friend or two. If writing publicly is stressful, email someone.
I'm sympathetic - knowing something is different from putting it into practice, and sometimes other life things happen too.
I've been writing online for a few years now and for me, it comes in bursts. I recently started a new blog and publish it every two weeks - something that helped me was to write a lot when I was in the write mood, which gave me material to edit during off-weeks.
"Quality over quantity" is a thing, especially for individuals as opposed to large publishing groups. Personally, I find that the people who post less on their blog, BlueSky account or YouTube produce the best content over their peers. I enjoy a Folding Ideas video infinitely more times more than the garbage Linus Tech Tips pumps out every day.
If your goal is to write, the worst thing you can do as an engineer is to try and write your own blog engine, or fiddle around with some custom settings.
Fight that urge. The thing to tackle is to figure out the habit of writing first. And you can only do that by writing consistently. If you have nothing insightful to write, write about something you took a couple hours to figure out in a TIL.
I stopped blogging because of this. I migrated my blog to my own stack in my mid-20s and every time I wanted to write, I would have to fix something or implement some feature. I ended up not writing.
I wish I just used Wordpress or something that let me click and drag images into it and move on.
Preach it. I had a pretty comfortable Markdown-to-Hugo-to-rsync pipeline set up. Know what’s even easier? Paying for a micro.blog account to glue all that stuff together for me, and using their perfectly fine app to publish and edit on the go.
I totally agree with the post.
Now, regarding: "Don’t over-engineer your site", I'd say sometimes it's good to add some engineering to it. To put an effort. If you had zero effort to put your website (or public notepad) online, it won't cause much regret to shut it down. So a decent effort would at least cause a second thinking before shutting it down, as you would remember the time you had dedicated to it for the infrastructure and content itself.
I struggle a lot with this, I keep a blog and every time I start a new post, I get the feeling that it should be "good" (for some definition of good), which makes the writing of most entries to drag for a week or so.
On top of that, I reject a substantial amount of the ideas that I get, because they are not good/deep enough.
To overcome internal roadblocks & generate that initial momentum.
When I take a long break from working out, it's hard to get back into it. What I'll do for the first few days is just show up & walk on the treadmill for half an hour. Easy, low-effort. Gets me comfortable in the gym environment & routine again. Then after a few days and that initial "ughhhhh, I don't waaaaanna go to the gym" brain barrier is gone, I'll adopt a real workout plan and stick to it.
With that said, sort of ironic that the author of this blog post has only posted this. Didn't seem to have helped much. :)
In order for me to take this sentiment serious I have to assume that the author is referring to a select group of people who happen to agree with his worldview and not the masses, otherwise I would have to think that his take is ignorant.
Most people have been “just writing” on the web for over a decade. Look at where it’s gotten us.
I haven't. I registered on ghost two years ago before turning 40 and have been paying them for two years now while I write nothing. It's hard to get started. I'm hoping to overcome this. This post helps.
Try writing in a private journal first in order to develop the habit of writing.
I'm a bit eccentric in this respect as I journal more than most people. I have subject matter journals that I use. When I'm working on graphics, I write in my graphics programming journal. When I'm working through abstract algebra, I write in my maths journal(s).
I do some times come across ideas for longer-form essays. But it's usually from the accumulation of small ideas, thoughts, feelings, and the like that I find them.
Eventually, blog posts.
However if it's the anxiety of performing for others that overwhelms you, try developing the habit of writing in private. You can conquer those anxieties later when you're more confident in your underlying skills.
Here’s what I wish someone had told me a lot earlier:
It’s OK to blog about silly things. Rant about something that annoyed you. Talk about how you made something. It doesn’t have to be perfect. No one cares if you make mistakes. Going from zero to something is the important part, not going from something to perfection.
And the more you do all the, the sooner you’ll find your own voice, and the easier it all gets.
I believe OP is talking about people "just writing" in short form on social media like twitter / FB / etc - getting a few words up without much "thought" behind it and hitting publish.
A social media post is a kind of writing but I took the original post to mean a longer, more publicly available work. They suggest 100 words, which would make for a long Facebook post.
> Most people have been “just writing” on the web for over a decade
This sentiment is also hard to take seriously. Who are “most people”? How would you know who is “writing on the web” and if it somehow represents a majority of humans, or even a majority of humans with home Internet access, which I highly doubt?
I would argue that a very loud, very small minority of people write on the web, which may be the cause of our dysfunction. Encouraging a more diverse crowd to think deeply and overcome presentation anxiety via public long-form writing seems like a good thing.
> Most people have been “just writing” on the web for over a decade. Look at where it’s gotten us.
Writing on blogs creates some valuable content I benefit from reading, and a lot of content that costs me nothing because I'm never aware of it.
Social media is where people would benefit from writing less. Over and over, I discover someone who produces great high-effort, high-quality content in some medium (blog posts, books, conference presentations), follow them on Bluesky, and then unfollow them because I don't want to read their reactions to random events or their conversations with other people. Even if their daily chatter is much more insightful and informative than the average person's, it's the wrong place for me to invest the energy and attention it takes to process. I feel so much better, and perform so much better personally and professionally, if I save that part of my energy budget for personal interactions with friends, family, and coworkers.
On blogs, people should write to their heart's content. They should write as much for themselves as for other people.
I think “writing” in this context is a considered, thoughtful and somewhat more rigorous activity than what happens on social media. If you exclude social media posts, I would not agree that most people have been “just writing” on the web.
Lecturing comments about what the world needs from someone who uses words like "pointless drivel" just serves to prove the poster's point. We need more writers and fewer critics.
I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment expressed in this post. A few weeks ago I was inspired by this quote from Why the Lucky Stiff:
> When you don't create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than your ability. Your tastes only narrow & exclude people. So create.
I won't bore you with the blog post I wrote in response, but the gist is that writing (and equally importantly, publishing) is a way of getting outside of your own head to think of a audience. We do it all the time as children but somehow as adults we seem to think we need permission to create something for the public. This has never been true and is doubly not true on the internet.
So write something and don't worry if nobody reads it. That is not the point. That act of writing will have sharpened a little piece of your brain.
> So write something and don't worry if nobody reads it.
It's demotivating to have created a huge body of work that you know nobody will ever read/hear/experience. It saps the desire to create any more. I've been creating things for decades and approximately 0 people (other than myself) have benefitted from any of it. Everything is always just under the line of "good enough" to publish/publicize, and publishing/publicizing are completely different skills than creating in the first place, and just feel awful to do.
> That act of writing will have sharpened a little piece of your brain.
I'm tired of sharpening my own brain. Oh yay, after several decades of challenging myself and creating lots of cool things just for myself, I have a super-sharp brain (let's be charitable for sake of argument). So what? I'm doing literally nothing useful with all my sharp intellect.
Creation has begun to feel pointless without sharing those creations, and the amount of effort and skill it takes to go from Tier 2 (not quite worth sharing) to Tier 1 (worth sharing) is enormous. We belong to a race of 8.2 billion people, most of whom are directly connected all the time. Human attention is limited, and everyone can choose to pay attention to the best 0.001% of any form of content or media -- and why wouldn't they? -- which already gives them way more content to read/watch/listen to than they could possibly experience in a lifetime.
That means you have to be absolutely world-class to create anything of value that anyone else would ever even bother to look at. You get to pick one thing that you're world-class at, if you're very lucky. And to do that, you can't do anything else. You want to share your paintings with anyone? You better fucking only paint, and do nothing else with your life, to have even a chance of anyone ever giving a shit about anything you paint. Good luck paying for your mortgage and your kids' educations.
Besides, in many endeavors AI will soon be (if not already is) churning out content that makes even world-class human efforts look like garbage. Very expensive garbage. Why would anyone bother to look at your worthless human shit when they can look at pristine AI-generated content instead?
So you can't create anything worth anyone's time, so you can't share anything, so you're stuck only ever sequestering your creations inside a dark basement forever where nobody will ever experience them. Eventually you just run out of desire to do that.
Share the post! Would love to read it
Well, if you insist: https://sheep.horse/2025/1/the_act_of_creation.html
I think it is a good example of what the parent link is advocating - a short(ish) post on a single topic. We all enjoy long and informative articles but there is a place for things longer than a tweet but shorter than a essay.
Great post and very motivating! Thanks
Writing != Publishing. It's wise to not conflate these two acts.
Let Writing be personal; reflective. Occasionally one might feel like sharing with another self. Then, publish with kindness to self. Publishing is an open set of choices, including writing a rambling email to a friend or two. If writing publicly is stressful, email someone.
Doesn't seem the author is taking their own advice. Posted a single blog post on January 8th and hasn't posted since
I'm sympathetic - knowing something is different from putting it into practice, and sometimes other life things happen too.
I've been writing online for a few years now and for me, it comes in bursts. I recently started a new blog and publish it every two weeks - something that helped me was to write a lot when I was in the write mood, which gave me material to edit during off-weeks.
"Quality over quantity" is a thing, especially for individuals as opposed to large publishing groups. Personally, I find that the people who post less on their blog, BlueSky account or YouTube produce the best content over their peers. I enjoy a Folding Ideas video infinitely more times more than the garbage Linus Tech Tips pumps out every day.
He switched to anonymous drunk posting I guess?
If your goal is to write, the worst thing you can do as an engineer is to try and write your own blog engine, or fiddle around with some custom settings.
Fight that urge. The thing to tackle is to figure out the habit of writing first. And you can only do that by writing consistently. If you have nothing insightful to write, write about something you took a couple hours to figure out in a TIL.
I stopped blogging because of this. I migrated my blog to my own stack in my mid-20s and every time I wanted to write, I would have to fix something or implement some feature. I ended up not writing.
I wish I just used Wordpress or something that let me click and drag images into it and move on.
Preach it. I had a pretty comfortable Markdown-to-Hugo-to-rsync pipeline set up. Know what’s even easier? Paying for a micro.blog account to glue all that stuff together for me, and using their perfectly fine app to publish and edit on the go.
an eternal truth, but like all eternal truths, there are many people seeing it for the first time
I would perhaps perhaps articulate it as:
you find your tribe by hoisting a flag and seeing who rallies around.
choose action over perfection - you'll be happier in the long run.
so: write on the internet.
I totally agree with the post. Now, regarding: "Don’t over-engineer your site", I'd say sometimes it's good to add some engineering to it. To put an effort. If you had zero effort to put your website (or public notepad) online, it won't cause much regret to shut it down. So a decent effort would at least cause a second thinking before shutting it down, as you would remember the time you had dedicated to it for the infrastructure and content itself.
I struggle a lot with this, I keep a blog and every time I start a new post, I get the feeling that it should be "good" (for some definition of good), which makes the writing of most entries to drag for a week or so.
On top of that, I reject a substantial amount of the ideas that I get, because they are not good/deep enough.
The internet is overflowing with low quality content and information.
I feel like, rather push the extra mile for a nice blog entry and more people will appreciate it.
Reminds me of mataroa's (personal project) philosophy: https://mataroa.blog/#philosophy
And of Jorge Luis Borges:
“What I’m really concerned about is reaching one person. And that person may be myself for all I know.”
Why?
No, really. Why write? He’s not saying anything, so what’s the point?
To overcome internal roadblocks & generate that initial momentum.
When I take a long break from working out, it's hard to get back into it. What I'll do for the first few days is just show up & walk on the treadmill for half an hour. Easy, low-effort. Gets me comfortable in the gym environment & routine again. Then after a few days and that initial "ughhhhh, I don't waaaaanna go to the gym" brain barrier is gone, I'll adopt a real workout plan and stick to it.
With that said, sort of ironic that the author of this blog post has only posted this. Didn't seem to have helped much. :)
In a selfish sense, the act of writing can be beneficial to one's inner thinking, regardless of the quality of output.
[dead]
In order for me to take this sentiment serious I have to assume that the author is referring to a select group of people who happen to agree with his worldview and not the masses, otherwise I would have to think that his take is ignorant.
Most people have been “just writing” on the web for over a decade. Look at where it’s gotten us.
I haven't. I registered on ghost two years ago before turning 40 and have been paying them for two years now while I write nothing. It's hard to get started. I'm hoping to overcome this. This post helps.
Try writing in a private journal first in order to develop the habit of writing.
I'm a bit eccentric in this respect as I journal more than most people. I have subject matter journals that I use. When I'm working on graphics, I write in my graphics programming journal. When I'm working through abstract algebra, I write in my maths journal(s).
I do some times come across ideas for longer-form essays. But it's usually from the accumulation of small ideas, thoughts, feelings, and the like that I find them.
Eventually, blog posts.
However if it's the anxiety of performing for others that overwhelms you, try developing the habit of writing in private. You can conquer those anxieties later when you're more confident in your underlying skills.
Here’s what I wish someone had told me a lot earlier:
It’s OK to blog about silly things. Rant about something that annoyed you. Talk about how you made something. It doesn’t have to be perfect. No one cares if you make mistakes. Going from zero to something is the important part, not going from something to perfection.
And the more you do all the, the sooner you’ll find your own voice, and the easier it all gets.
I believe OP is talking about people "just writing" in short form on social media like twitter / FB / etc - getting a few words up without much "thought" behind it and hitting publish.
A social media post is a kind of writing but I took the original post to mean a longer, more publicly available work. They suggest 100 words, which would make for a long Facebook post.
> Most people have been “just writing” on the web for over a decade
This sentiment is also hard to take seriously. Who are “most people”? How would you know who is “writing on the web” and if it somehow represents a majority of humans, or even a majority of humans with home Internet access, which I highly doubt?
I would argue that a very loud, very small minority of people write on the web, which may be the cause of our dysfunction. Encouraging a more diverse crowd to think deeply and overcome presentation anxiety via public long-form writing seems like a good thing.
> Most people have been “just writing” on the web for over a decade. Look at where it’s gotten us.
Writing on blogs creates some valuable content I benefit from reading, and a lot of content that costs me nothing because I'm never aware of it.
Social media is where people would benefit from writing less. Over and over, I discover someone who produces great high-effort, high-quality content in some medium (blog posts, books, conference presentations), follow them on Bluesky, and then unfollow them because I don't want to read their reactions to random events or their conversations with other people. Even if their daily chatter is much more insightful and informative than the average person's, it's the wrong place for me to invest the energy and attention it takes to process. I feel so much better, and perform so much better personally and professionally, if I save that part of my energy budget for personal interactions with friends, family, and coworkers.
On blogs, people should write to their heart's content. They should write as much for themselves as for other people.
I think “writing” in this context is a considered, thoughtful and somewhat more rigorous activity than what happens on social media. If you exclude social media posts, I would not agree that most people have been “just writing” on the web.
Writing is thinking, typing a snarky response to clickbait isn't writing, it is creating content for someone else's ad mill.
I completely agree. Only write if you have something to say. World does not need more pointless drivel, like the linked post.
Lecturing comments about what the world needs from someone who uses words like "pointless drivel" just serves to prove the poster's point. We need more writers and fewer critics.
> Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how it's done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves.
-Brendan Behan.
I write stuff, and don’t especially care who reads it: https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany