I have been blogging in one form or another for about twenty or twenty-five years now. I was blogging back when the only way you could blog was mark up the HTML yourself and put it on a static page, then manually link to it. Then WordPress came out and made it easier, and there are a few other blogging platforms that are probably better in one way or other.
I blog because I am curious and I like to share my curiosity. I am, if not educated, at least minimally informed, in many different disciplines, including music, mathematics, linguistics/language, theology, science, physics, and a few other things as well. In fact, this is so important to me and so central to my worldview that I actually define intelligence not by IQ (of which mine is somewhere between 130 or 150, though as I will soon point out, I don’t think that matters), but more by the ability to integrate, or synthesize, patterns or data across multiple disciplines. This is something I am particularly good at, and teasing out patterns that very few people have discovered or understood before is something that is very satisfying to me. In fact, one could easily and probably accurately say that it’s the only thing in this world that truly makes me feel happy. Solving problems and succeeding at intellectual challenges is, perhaps literally, the only true source of joy there is in my life.
But this comes with some downsides as well. I see the spectrum of human ability as a series of an indeterminate number of sliders, each one specifying another aspect of human ability. The problem is, you don’t get to set each slider to 100. Every time one slider goes up, another goes down. It’s a very complex pattern of sliders, in fact, it’s so complex that no one person has the exact same slider configuration as another. My slider configuration is very heavily weighted towards the rational, and against the emotional. What I mean is, that I would much rather spend time trying to solve problems and improve processes than deal with the ambiguities of everyday life. Being of that kind of engineering and scientific mindset, it is very easy for me to hone in on things that aren’t quite right and need to be improved. But if something is already good, I see no reason to mention it, as it cannot be improved further. I imagine this is seen as negativity on my part – and, perhaps, it is – but it’s more my seeing irregularities in the pattern, inefficiencies that could be improved, and generally my intentions in pointing these things out is that once they’re brought into the light, then they can be addressed.
It is very easy – too easy, in fact – to forget the fact that those with my psychological makeup are rare. In fact, I know for a fact that companies out there – such as e-commerce companies – deliberately do not market to people like me, not only because we are rare, but we are mostly unmarketable. We see right through their BS, and marketing is mostly BS, with just enough truth not to get them sued. So why bother?
Personal integrity is also important to me as well. So the question, in my eyes, becomes this. Do I deliberately become something that is not true to myself in order to become more popular and stimulate engagement? Or do I continue to be myself and put people off because I’m too blunt and clinical? I know the techniques to improve this – I have been paying close attention to what Scott Adams has been saying, and he has some very good tips. The question is: do I want to?
That’s a question I have yet to properly answer. But I do know that if I have any intention whatsoever of ever succeeding in the online sphere, I have to figure that out. If not, then I may as well not bother, because “pissing into the wind” isn’t exactly my idea of a fun time. And yes, I’m knocking it and haven’t tried it.