Portrait of the Blogger in a Tangle of Links of His Own Making
AWM #100: Looks like I did it 💯
The blogger is sitting in his favorite coffee shop, on a decently warm autumn morning.
The coffee shop is packed with people sitting in front of laptops, and the blogger is no exception. Most of his screen is taken by the pleasant custom beige of his Substack editor tool, in which a nascent blog post appears — only a couple sentences so far, precisely those that are imprinting patterns onto your retinas right now, dear reader.
Today’s blog post is supposed to be an important one, for it is the 100th to be published here in that many weeks. The conclusion of a challenge that began in November 2020. It should be an apotheosis. A triumph.
And yet the blogger is, more than ever, unsure of what he is doing. True enough, that was always the case. At no point during those one hundred weeks was there any strong feeling of clarity, though many times there were articles that made the blogger proud, and his readers delighted.
But today it feels like the post should be something particularly special. It is the 100th post! The accomplishment of a two-years quest! The pressure is mounting, the weight of such a consequential moment is being felt. It is absolutely paralyzing the blogger, who has been spending most of the morning procrastinating by reading the news and other random things online.
The blogger now reflects on the idea of self-inflicted pressure. The whole point of Atlas of Wonders and Monsters — back when it was called Light Gray Matters (or was it “grey”? the spelling of this color, in the blogger’s non-native idiolect of English, is extremely unstable) — the whole point was to avoid pressure. This newsletter/blog was explicitly meant to be unserious. The blogger would write whatever was on his mind, and if people wanted to read it, great, otherwise, who cares. The only bit of pressure was the commitment to writing weekly for 1.92 years.
It worked, when the blogger thinks about it. Not caring helped him go though months and months of writing posts to a very small audience. Even when things started to take off, his most popular posts were often the one he cared the least about. His top post by far is one of his silliest ones; he still wonders why he even wrote it in the first place. Meanwhile, some of the ones that required the most work and research ended up having very little impact. It is kind of stupid, in a way. Why is the relationship between pressure and work quality not straightforward?
The blogger knows that for this 100th post to be as good as its unique position suggests it should be, he should avoid the pressure. But that, in itself, is a form of pressure! It is not possible to “fake” the lack of pressure. That’s why it is so hard to “let go”: it has to be done because you truly do not care, not because you want the benefits that people keep talking about.
The attainment of the 100-post mark also spells trouble. The blogger had told himself: I will Do 100 Posts, as an experiment, and then we’ll see. In the near future he would like to produce high-quality work that hundreds and thousands of people read with delight; but that is an incredible amount of pressure to inflict on oneself, and the blogger is not sure he will be able to withstand it.
The blogger is still sitting in the coffee shop, and he is thinking about links.
People sometimes say that the world runs on electricity, or love, or money, or kindness, or any number of other things. But the truth is, the world runs on links.
All telecommunication technology is links. The internet is, quite explicitly, a worldwide tangle of hyperlinks. Before the internet, the telephone, the telegraph, the postal system, all of these things were meant to link stuff. The purpose of all media is to link things that happen somewhere with people who want to know somewhere else. Relationships between people are links, and very important ones. Art is a confusing thing to describe, but a big part of why it matters is that it makes links. A universe with no links, just isolated things, would make no sense. Links give meaning to the world.
And the point of blogging is, too, to create links.
It’s quite rare that a blogger will create a genuinely new idea. More commonly, the value of blogging is to bring existing ideas together. To use lateral thinking in order to view something in a different light, therefore generating some new insight. (Come to think of it, maybe new ideas are also just that: links.)
This blogger is quite happy about how his blog turned out, in terms of links.
A few weeks ago, he realized that some of the things he wrote about, and felt totally unrelated at the time, suddenly made sense together. He has been thinking a lot, for instance, about what beauty is and why it matters; and suddenly he realized that his thought on that elegantly explained his unease with effective altruism and even several of his political positions. Links that had not been apparent until then became obvious. It was all coming together.
The blogger attempted to map the links of his own intellectual work, first in ink and paper:
And since yesterday, with software:
In both cases the result is woefully incomplete. Many key ideas are missing, because it is difficult to hold so many ideas in one’s head. And many links are yet to be added to the set. (The blogger is trying real hard to avoid any kind of pressure to make the graph perfect.)
Still, it is a good feeling to see these links in a visual display. It makes the work concrete. It gives an impression of creating something that has real value, abstract though it is.
And it is even more beautiful considering that the blogger had no assurance that such a tangle of links would eventually grow. This is the result of a spontaneous generation: though it required the blogger to do all this writing work, the coming together was neither predicted nor expected.
The blogger has weirdly mixed feeling about having reached the 100 mark. It doesn’t feel like a triumph. It doesn’t even really feel like an accomplishment. Perhaps because he hopes that it is merely a beginning.
But what will come next? The blogger is uncertain and, frankly, a bit scared. He wants the blog to continue, the audience to grow, the tangle of links to proliferate. But will the pressure increase, now that things are going pretty well? Is there a better way to work on this blog? Would trying to find that way incur a risk of sending the whole thing crashing?
(Also: will the blogger finally get a full-time job soon and have much less time for writing?)
The blogger is still in the coffee shop, though he is starting to get angsty and wants to go take a walk in the still-nice weather. He plans on writing another article on the 100-post experiment, probably next week. (Will this blog still be a weekly thing? The blogger doesn’t know. He’s free! But what to do with this freedom?) There’s interesting stuff to say about the more technical aspects of those two years: what the audience growth looked like, what posts became popular, and so on.
After that, we shall see. Surely it is pointless, even counterproductive, to decide in advance what this blog should be.
Congratulations! I am fairly close to doing a year of weekly posts and have found it a transformative experience. One thing I notice is that only about 10-15% of readers ever click links and reading your post makes me extremely reluctant to click myself out of the flow of the piece, but I find it valuable to add links for my own sense of bringing the project together. Curious about to your experience
Very relatable this! And congrats on keeping up.