You Probably Do Want To Know What You Had for Lunch That Other Day
There’s no getting around the fact that some posts you make are banal. You obviously thought your lunch was posting about at the time was worthy of sharing: after all, you took the effort to share it. Then a week goes buy and you wonder why you posted that. “Nobody cares about this,” you say to yourself. “This isn’t giving value to anyone.”
But I’d argue, as Doc did in Back to the Future, that you’re just not thinking forth-dimensionally enough. Sure it may seem pretty banal to you now, but what about 5 years in the future? How about 10? You could be persuing your old posts when you come across the one about your lunch, and be reminded of the food, the atmosphere, the weather, the joys of youth. It could be quite the bittersweet feeling.
Or you could feel nothing. And that’s fine too. The point is that you don’t know how banal a particular post is the moment you make it.
Worse still, you don’t know how banal anything will be 5 years from now, (as in right now, the moment you’re reading this sentence). The banality of anything is dynamic: it changes as a funcion of time. It could be completely irrelevant next week, then the best thing that’s happened to you a week later.
This is why I don’t understand the whole “post essays on my blogs and the smaller things on Twitter/Bluesky/Mastodon/whatever” dichotomy some writers have out there. Is what you write on those other sites less worthy than what you write on the site you own? Best be absolutely sure about that when you post it then, as you may come to regret making a point about posting banal tweets 17 years ago, only for that moratorium about banal tweets to be lost when you decided to move away from that micro-blogging site.
But whatever, you do you. I know for myself that I rather keep those supposedly banal thoughts on this site. And yeah, that’ll mean a lot of pretty pointless, uninteresting things get published here: welcome to life.
But with the pressure of time, they could turn into nice, shiny diamonds of days past. Or boring, dirty lumps of coal. Who knows? Only time will answer that.
valerie 🙂 I like this philosophy. I knew from the start that my blog would be a way to capture things that I might want to look back on or share in the future. However, I have a relatively short job contract that has a definite end date. Also, I’m in another country which is not where I was born or raised. For other people who are in an job/environment they are used to and don’t plan to leave soon, yeah, it could be harder to work out why it could be meaningful to log something seemingly minor
Leon Mika @val Yeah, that’s understandable. There are events throughout my day that I don’t log here too: train being a few minutes late, for example, is probably not of interest in the future. I guess, like most things, it’s a balance.