My Struggles with the Philosophy of Blogging

I've been an inconsistent blogger lately. Actually, I've rarely blogged at all in the last month or two. I frequently feel guilty about this. But honestly, my blog is fairly low on my priority list compared to other aspects of my life (namely my career and my family). And my life has become quite busy lately, not the least of which is because of a promotion I got at work and picking up a new online teaching position, among other things I won't get into now.

This has gotten me to think about my approach to blogging compared to others. One of the big differences I've seen is that many prolific bloggers love writing. They write for fun. They read for fun. They comment on other blogs for fun.

I honestly don't love writing. I never have. It's always felt like work. What I do love are ideas. And over the last few millennia, ideas have primarily been shared through writing. So I have had to learn. But if I'm not inspired and energized, it's hard to write.

My academic side is also probably a liability--I have this feeling of obligation to make sure all of my writing is top-notch, at least from the perspective of conveying thoughts clearly and with tight arguments. This adds to the burden of the writing process. So I'm going to try to write more with less-than-fully-thought-out ideas. We'll see how well that works. :) However, when I do a book review, I also feel an obligation to be quite thoughtful, which counteracts this goal.

One of the other things I've struggled with is how to much to self-promote. There is a lot of information out there about gaining followers. One blogger I follow suggested making your name very clear on all the pages because you are your brand. I've gone through boughts of trying to figure out how to increase my following. Yet that's never been my goal. While it would be fun to have a large following, I think it would also feel like a greater burden in many ways, living up to so many people's standards. And again, my goal hasn't been to self-promote. It's simply been to share ideas and to get people to think. One could argue that if I self-promoted more, I could do that to a greater degree. That's a possibility. But it doesn't feel right for me right now...