I had an interesting conversation with my therapist, relative to my recent involuntary departure from Facebook. After a week of FOMO, I was pretty over it. (Sidebar: She asked if it bothered me about the non-justice of AI enforcement, and you'd think it would grind on me, but I don't really care.) But I told her that I still had an urge to post and/or share whatever happened to be on my mind.
It was her observation that most of her clients likely do it for the usual reasons, as in the likes or comments, the dopamine, or whatever they think it's doing to move the needle on some issue. But I'm a weird outlier (as usual), in that I never did it for any specific audience. This blog is kind of in that category too, in that I don't know who is reading it or why, but I don't really care either. My reason is that writing something down, and making it public or semi-public, allows me to process it and move on. That makes sense given the noise, thought spirals and constant context switching that goes on in my head. For whatever reason, writing composition is something that I can do quickly and clearly, in a way that the thought soup can't do. Making it non-private also, in my way of thinking, forces me to be authentic and honest.
When I see a cool music performance or funny comedy sketch, my first instinct is to share it, so it's a bummer when I can't do that. Oddly enough, if we're going back 15 years, this is the social behavior that social media was supposed to facilitate. Before the algorithms, ads, brands and ephemeral nonsense that fills the screens now. I still believe in this as a concept, I just don't know if there's a business model for it. I think paying something annually for it is the model, but I don't know if it's something that people would actually buy it.
There is another reason to post, which a friend of mine described as scrapbooking. This is where I wish I could have retrieved the data (their export after the fact appears broken), because especially as a parent, it's fun to see what you and your kid were up to ten years back. Sure, it's also an easy way to share the same with friends and family, but to me it's the analog to photo albums, only better annotated and tagged with locations.
I've been coding around software that covers the former scenario a bit, though I imagine it could to the latter. While I'm very much thinking about this for my own amusement, along with a few close friends, I suppose it could be a wider used thing, if they'd pay for it. It's not a complicated thing to build, and it's kinda fun to build, so even if it's just for me it's worth it. Then I can get the thoughts out.
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