What I Want

    I love blogging, but I've more or less given up on anybody discovering me. In some ways that's a good thing, I can write whatever I want and not worry about criticism. In other ways it's a bad thing, like I don't know if anything that I'm writing is good. I keep wondering if I should move on to another platform, but despite having blogged for about two years total, six years if you want to include all of the years I couldn't get a daily blog going, I know nothing about anything other than the writing side. I suspect that if I could get my head wrapped around the SEO side of things, I'd be doing a lot better, but every time I do I get horribly confused and I can't find any really good sources. I get the feeling that doing more would mean doing things that go against my rather specific moral code.

     I think that the problem with blogging is that these days the internet is designed for instant fame, to create overnight sensations that everyone gossips about for months on end before completely forgetting about them. From the perspective of those at the top, this makes sense, since it means that you get a constant stream of eyeballs on your platform and thus the advertisers see a constant stream of people buying their products. From the perspective of those who are trying to make it on the modern internet, that means that unless you're amazing at getting people to notice you, you're doomed to complete obscurity. I don't think this is bad just as a creator, I say this as someone who used to love finding weird, obscure things online, but who can't find them anymore. If you casually browse, you'll only find the things that a lot of other people found interesting or insightful. I suppose it does increase the quality of the things that you do find, but it means that you'll never find the one time someone with generally banal opinions came up with something genuinely insightful and interesting, something that makes you sit up and go, "Huh, I hadn't thought about that." 

     I know that it's also an issue that so many people are trying to make it as bloggers, influencers, content creators, what have you. I know that even if I could work out how to convince google to list my blog, my chances of anyone finding me are incredibly remote. Success, even if I understood the system inside and out, is incredibly remote. That's a lot of the reason I'm not trying that hard, and if all I wanted was fame than I'd be okay with being the losing piece, as much as one could be when one is denied what one is supposedly owed. But I don't want fame. Not exactly.

     I keep imagining myself in a community of losers. I imagine myself among people who, like me, talk like their the greatest creators to have ever come around but, like me, know that isn't true. We all love what we do, and you can hear our passion when we speak, and all of the things we produce just suck. We aren't deep, interesting, or insightful, we just pretend that we are, and we pretend that the world hates us for being honest. It's a myth, this place, a paradise meant for those who create but will never create anything extraordinary, and I've dreamed of finding it since before I started blogging, but all I seem to find are places where you have to be amazing. I don't want to be amazing. I love the art that's poorly made, that comes from an artist who wants to bend the rules without knowing what the rules are in the first place. Sometimes you get an artist who wants to prove that people will be wowed by anything, sometimes you get an artist that makes something stupid, and sometimes you get an artist who makes something that's just for their friends and family, and is incredibly wholesome as a result. You can find all sorts of things in bad art, including copies of anything famous as desperate artists rush for attention, and I wish that our world was built to appreciate that. I think that, deep down, most of us wish our world was made for the love of bad art.