Writing, Again

“To be silent is not to lose your tongue. On the contrary, it is only through silence that one can discover something new to talk about.”

— Alan Watts

After nearly four years of silence, I’ve decided to start writing again.

I’ve finally crossed that line where I miss it. A few years back, it had started to feel like a burden. Something I had to do instead of something I did for enjoyment.

Since then, most of my writing online has been technical in nature. Mostly writing tutorials or sharing thoughts and wisdom on running a small business over on my company website.

The move to stop writing here wasn’t arbitrary, though. After writing fairly consistently here for nearly eight years, I realized that:

1. I’d run out of things to talk about. I caught myself repeating things which, in some cases can be helpful, but it felt like I was just writing for the sake of posting something (not writing for enjoyment or sharing wisdom).
2. I was getting too egotistical. I’ve never been shy about sharing what I know, but in those eight years of writing, I noticed that my tone had shifted towards “hey look at me” with no real purpose or goal.
3. I needed to focus on my business. I underestimated just how much mental bandwidth it would take to build a JavaScript framework, CSS framework, and deployment service in one go. It sounds obvious now, but at the time, I figured it would be similar to my regular work. Big nope. Worrying about writing here meant distraction from those projects which I decided had a negative ROI.

Aside from those reasons, I also just didn’t feel like talking. When I was little, I spent a lot of time alone in a hospital bed receiving care for childhood Leukemia. Being “quiet” became a core part of my personality and when I don’t feel the need to say anything, I don’t (this got so bad as a kid that they thought I had a speech impediment, but really, I just didn’t care to speak—Thomas Sowell’s “Late Talking Children” further illuminated the why to me several years back).

All of that said, the other thing that’s been bothering me is the direction that technology and society are headed. I’ve hinted at my concerns before, but the thing I didn’t pay much attention to back in the aughts was machine learning and how AI was going to change (and now, is changing) how people create.

Writing is a dying art

Since I stopped writing here, a massive shift occurred in the form of “AI” (I put it in quotes because I view the current state of “AI” as more of a parlor trick than a legitimate form of intelligence).

Admittedly, AI (or, LLMs—“large language models”) are one of the coolest inventions the internet has seen. I now use them nearly every day to help with my work. But, despite their utility in some areas, I’ve realized that they’re going to have a massive negative impact on writing and thinking.

So, being a fan of da words, it feels appropriate to contribute something organic. Made with them ol’ clicks and clacks on the keyboard as opposed to being spit out by a black box machine controlled by some...questionable humans.

The nice part about taking the luddite “rage against the machine” approach? I can expand my horizons.

Expanding to different topics

For a few years, I wrote mostly from a personal, philosophical standpoint. Being an entrepreneur (read: being relatively poor early on in my business), I found this was a good way to sort out my head without going down the therapy rabbit hole. The end result has been immensely positive, but now, I feel less compelled to write from that perspective exclusively. When it makes sense, I’ll still write about those things, but for the most part, to focus on it again would just be me rehashing the same things over and over.

Instead, now, this blog will cover a wide range of topics related to my own interests. I rarely if ever talked about programming, even though that’s how I’ve made a living for nearly 14 years. I’ve also rarely talked about running a small, solopreneur business which, having survived for nearly two decades, I think could be helpful for some people reading.

The punchline is that there won’t really be a “theme” moving forward. I’ll just be writing to write on whatever I feel is important to write about at the time.

So, here we are

I’m excited to be back writing here. I have no idea how that will take shape—or in what volume—but I’ve got a lot of ideas for things I want to write about in the queue.

The last few years have been fairly evolutionary in terms of how I view the world and conduct myself (I’ve dialed off of my “yeah, but seriously, it is a conspiracy” bent). I’ve accepted that I’ll always be some variant of an eccentric, but I’ve more-or-less gotten over my Hunter Thompson “let’s scare the normies for fun” phase. Think the Ryan version of post-rehab Trent Reznor 180º turning from “God is dead and no one cares” to soundtracking Pixar movies and having a litter of children and you’ll be in the ballpark.

Strapped in? Got your snacks? Let’s do this.

Onwards toward the void, my friend.

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