On Posting
I don't know if you're aware, but there is a somewhat new trend going around that I've managed to avoid up until this point. Apparently, people have started to take to these novel services referred to as "social media" and started posting about their lives on there - Their joys, frustrations, habits and lives, entirely on the internet, for everyone to see!
These people must have surely gone mad.
All jokes aside, if you ever find out who the person hiding behind this "unproductive creative" persona is, you will realize that there is not much to find about me on the internet (at least not prior to the start of this blog).
I would love to credit this to a deliberate choice of keeping a low profile and optimizing my online footprint in a way where different aspects of my online presence are hidden behind distinct and disconnected personas - a sort of "I'm behind seven proxies, you will never find me" master stroke to confuse both onlookers and greedy corporations trying to build a user profile and sell me their shit. That is unfortunately not true. The reality behind this lack of information about me is simply that I have never been the kind of person to post anything online.
Meaningful Posting
Part of that is surely that I figured out relatively early that anything posted on social media could (and maybe would) come back to me at some inopportune moment later in time. As a young teen in the prime age bracket when Facebook first started getting traction, I saw all the things my classmates posted and immediately went "Why would you share this on the internet?" Looking back, even in the little bits I actually interacted with that website (mostly in liking posts and sites), I still cringe at what that said about teenage me.
The other major part of why I was never part of this Posting lifestyle (with a capital "P") was that I just didn't have anything interesting to post. I was never self-absorbed (or phrased less derogatory: self-confident) enough to post my face on the internet, never felt the need to share what I did with the whole world, and never accomplished anything meaningful enough that I felt the need to share it with the world at-large. Plus I was an introverted gamer teen, so it's not like I went to social events, and there's a lot of photos existing of me anyway.
That point about having something meaningful to post is part of a larger personal issue that started relatively early on in my life and that I still struggle with to this day: I was and still am extremely self-critical with everything I do. Anytime I try something new (sports, creativity, pick your poison), I usually end up fed up with my perceived lack of progress relatively quickly, simply because
What I imagine doing looks great in my head, why does it not work in practice?
The most obvious example of this is drawing, because there is a world of difference between the images I can create in my head and the images my hand-eye coordination can actually produce on the paper in front of me. I know that this is 90% a question of persistence and honing my skills, but getting frustrated and quitting at the first hurdle of a new skill has been the story of my life so far (this might also be a good topic for a standalone post).
This unhealthy perfectionism is another major part of why I never really started Posting. Anything I shared should, according to this mindset, be important, or inspirational, or add something meaningful to a conversation. And with every year that passed where I didn't participate in the Posting lifestyle, this mental barrier got bigger and bigger - What if someone asked what I did in all those years where none of my activity is visible? What kind of answer is "Oh I just sat at home, read books and played video games. I never really did anything important." That's not an accomplishment! That's not something to be proud of!
Some may call this self-important, as nobody has that kind of entirely high-brow every-post-a-philosophical-banger social media presence. And that is true. Depending on your platform of choice, posts are made with more or less effort put into them (looking at you, Twitter), but I never felt comfortable imagining myself as the type of person to just fart out half-thoughts into the ether. Sorry, but I have standards. Don't ask me why I have them if I never post anything at all. I couldn't tell you and we'd get nowhere.
I think that influencer culture over the last decade-or-so has made this even worse. Because now I'm not only competing with the interesting things my friends, acquaintances, (then) classmates and (now) colleagues share online or repost, but also with all the professional Posters out there. And as much as I'd like to say that I don't care about these people and their staged (and probably heavily edited) posts - i think that subconsciously this does get to me.
This is also not just limited to all those influencers randomly ending up in front of my eyes. As someone who enjoys other people's creative output, I tend to follow accounts that post images, drawings, music or videos they poured a lot of effort into, and that accordingly are very high quality. Comparing my post ideas with the average content in my feed (Twitter was the worst in this regard, and unfortunately for the longest time also my platform of choice) made me even less inclined to start Posting.
Watching the Drama
Another reason why I was never much into Posting is that I was already busy in my time spent on social media platforms by watching and consuming other people's content. Back in the early years of my internet days, this was mostly hanging out in niche internet forums and reading posts about topics that interested me, but in these early days the seeds of another time-wasting tradition of mine was born: Sitting back with popcorn and watching other people's drama unfold.
As anyone who has ever visited any forum of notable size can tell you, there are people on there with strong thoughts about the forum's subjects. And sometimes, these opinions clash violently into one another for absolutely no reason - and that's very entertaining to read. There is nothing better than people getting worked up and hurling insults at one another over something absolutely irrelevant and inconsequential. Especially in nerd subcultures, where people base their lives and personalities off of becoming so obsessed with their chosen science-fiction or fantasy setting that fights get ugly. There is nothing funnier than reading a 200 post forum thread that spawned overnight after someone asked the innocent question "So why are lightsabers almost always blue, green or red?" I've seen fights burst out around this topic that were as ugly as they are meaningless. (I say that as I sit not far away from a probably more than 200 book strong testament to the entire Expanded Universe that I painstakingly collected over the last 15 years - I'm allowed to make fun of Star Wars fans and their arguments.)
As an avid Drama (with a capital "D") connoisseur, social media has been a gold mine for me over the last decades. I think that as a teenager dialed in to how social media operates and keen on seeing whatever stupid shit is going on out there, the last 15 years have been a treasure trove of content to laugh at and enjoy. Local drama on Facebook, Reddit posts going viral, the entirety of Twitter throughout its existence, and from 2014 onward the advent of political drama on social media in an even bigger form were a gold mine for a kid in my position.
To be completely honest, in hindsight I'm very glad that I was never into Posting and more of an onlooker. Based on the drama I was observing, if I had been just a little less self-reflected and more eager to Post or score ratios, things could have turned out very unfortunate if I had been actively posting and heckling people the way that many of the posters whose side I agreed with back then did.
Luckily for me, I just watched on most of the time. And luckily as well, Drama on the internet seems to be way less interesting nowadays. Twitter is garbage now (compared to back then, when it was my garbage, goddammit) and exists only to fuel artificial drama, forums are entirely dead and buried and will never come back, and most of the drama posts on Reddit are probably AI-generated anyway. Unless you dig deep into the political and societal extremes making fun of each other, there's really not much high quality drama left. And nobody should dig that deep into politics. Keep your sanity, it isn't worth it.
On Posting
I'm trying to work on my issues now. Getting rid of this perfectionism is hard work, but I think it will help me long-term. Lowering my expectations at myself and being more realistic at what I can and can't currently achieve is certainly not a bad idea. This is part of the reason I started this blog - challenging myself to get my thoughts written down and published somewhere in a not-perfect form, both to get some exercise in writing things and coping with my imperfections. I think that a blog is my kind of way to post (this might also be a good post idea for later), but I will toy around some more - I'm also trying out this Bluesky-thingy, and may or may not try YouTube if I ever feel like showing my face, or Instagram if I ever feel like giving drawing another go.
In fact, this whole entire entry was kicked off by me thinking about - and procrastinating on - actually using my Bluesky account and posting anything at all. I did post yesterday, got two likes and feel weird about it since then. Call this post self-therapy for what I did then. Or laugh at me, I don't care. I'm proud I managed to take that step.
I don't know if I will ever be the type of person to Post, but I certainly want to leave some sort of lasting presence (also something that might be a post topic). We'll see if that works out and if I manage to overcome my own mental hurdles and fart out some half-baked thoughts some time in the future... 😊
I said in my first blog post that I don't care if anybody reads this and I just need this as an excuse to sort my thoughts and write them out. I think over the last few days the realization has set in that I would like to actually contribute to the conversations going on out there. The internet and society at-large has deteriorated to the point where more people should speak to one another, share ideas and find common ground. Who am I to hold that position if I don't even try doing that myself?
I guess that's my new year's resolution. I'll probably shell out for a bear upgrade to be discoverable (it's honestly worth it as a kick-back for all the blogs I've read here anyway), try to post on Bluesky and maybe toy around with some other ways of expressing myself.
I doubt that I will become a full-fledged Poster - the urge to observe and be self-conscious is just too deeply ingrained in me - but posting every now and then would not be the worst idea.
Talking to people is never a bad idea, especially with the world as it is. I don't want to talk to only the Void anymore. I want someone to listen, to think about what I have to say. And to maybe have a conversation with me where we share our thoughts and understand each other better - that sounds like a dream.