Blogging: A Balanced View

It's not all doom and gloom

(A brief note: a bunch of other bloggers are at a place called Inkhaven where they’re trying to publish a blog post every day this month. I’m not at Inkhaven, and have other stuff I’m doing like applying for grad school and doing school work, but I’m going to see if I can do that too. Okay, back to your regularly scheduled program).

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Ozy Brennan

has a new article out called Why you should write blog posts and not be a blogger. Ozy is one of my favorite bloggers, and yet seems pretty disappointed with the whole blogging enterprise. Ozy writes:

All of your coworkers are also in the three-to-five-posts-a-week content mines, and nobody reads a post that’s like “Ozy Is Smart And I Agree With Them About Everything.” So most of the time when you engage with other bloggers, either they’re dunking on you or you’re dunking on them.

…

And then there’s the parasocial aspect. Regular readers of any Substack feel like they have a close relationship with you, even if you have no idea who they are. So if you have a Substack with a wide readership, people will devise takes about your marriage, your sex life, your friendships, your traumas, your hobbies, your relationship to your children, and whether you cry yourself to sleep at night and if so about what.

…

So why do I do it?

I have a compulsion to write. I have written an average of something like 500 words a day every day since I was twelve years old, except when I was very severely depressed. (Moderate depression isn’t enough to stop me.) Writing is an activity that simply happens for me, the same way that eating naturally happens, and with somewhat more regularity than brushing my teeth. I have no volitional control over it.

Since I’m going to be writing regardless, I figured I might as well try to make a living at it, and now I make somewhat more than I would as a barista for much more interesting work.

But if you don’t have the compulsive writing itch, I don’t think you’re the right kind of crazy to become a Substacker.

Now, I’m not a full-time blogger. I’m currently in school, and tend to blog alongside doing other things. There have only been brief periods of my life when blogging was what I did full time. But I found Ozy’s description of blogging quite alien to my experience.

I’ve never had a compulsion to write. I didn’t write regularly until I started doing high school debate. And when doing high school debate, I wasn’t really writing in the traditional sense. I didn’t write essays, but instead would prepare “blocks,” which were prewritten responses, with sources, to things other people might say in a debate round. High school debate is, to quote

Michael Huemer

, “an activity that mainly teaches kids to make completely implausible, sensational claims in completely unpersuasive ways.” Fun stuff!

In fact, until I started a blog, I wouldn’t have said I really liked writing. I like thinking about stuff. I like arguing with people. But I don’t find writing especially thrilling. It’s just a fun medium to record ideas. What’s nice about blogging is it gives me something to do with ideas beyond just thinking about them. Merely having ideas isn’t enough—it feels like something must be done with them or they are forever lost. Blogging is one thing to do with ideas.

I do somewhat agree with Ozy’s assessment that when blogging, you feel like the entire world is against you. People don’t really leave comments telling you that you’re correct, so it can feel like everyone is constantly disagreeing with you. This is a bit unpleasant, but normally the people explaining why they disagree with me give arguments for why. Those arguments tend to be bad, and I don’t really feel bad when people disagree with me for silly reasons.

The only thing I find distressing in this vicinity is when people I respect disagree are harshly critical of me. Many years ago, I wrote a post that one of my favorite writers was critical of. I found that upsetting. But aside from that, I don’t really mind pushback. I’m not too bothered if u/niceicecreamguylmao67 thinks that my article is full of fallacies or whatever.

A lot of this was mitigated by reading the responses from to my reader survey. Lots of people reported finding my arguments persuasive and told me that I’d convinced them of various important conclusions. Sometimes the thing I convinced them of is that they should give money to effective charities, and thus many people and animals are made better off. That’s awesome! So if you’re a blogger and you feel like your readers all hate you, send out a reader survey, and you’ll find that some of them actually agree with you from time to time!

I also find it really exciting whenever I learn that some big-name reads my blog. Throughout high school, probably the person I most admired was Scott Alexander. Throughout middle school, the person I most looked up to was Sam Harris. Now, they’re both paid subscribers to my blog. Cool stuff!

As for the parasocial aspect that Ozy mentioned, I haven’t really found that at all. You guys are dropping the ball, and totally failing to develop a parasocial relationship with me. Do Better. When I meet people who read my blog, I usually find it pretty cool. I have yet to have anyone make weird comments to me about marriage, sex, or trauma. This might be partly because those aren’t subjects I write about.

Ozy’s description of blogging pretty strongly doesn’t match my own. I find it really fun to blog! I get to make silly jokes on the internet, and explain, to an audience of several thousand, what’s wrong with various bad arguments. I get to advocate for shrimp and insects—fighting a moral crusade on behalf of unfathomably large numbers of mistreated animals. It’s lots of fun, and I just don’t at all share Ozy’s assessment that it’s devastating to the soul!

As far as hobbies go, it’s a pretty good one, especially because it enables one to better the world and make money. My mood was definitely affected more negatively when, in middle school, I would have Magic The Gathering losing streaks or in high school debate, I’d do badly at a tournament. I think being a blogger is pretty much like being a gamer—you’ll feel bad sometimes when you do poorly, but it’s mostly pretty fun.

There are some annoying things about blogging. One is that you (by which I mean me) get pretty fixated on the growth metrics. When I lose paid subscribers or when my free subscriber growth goes down, it does have a somewhat negative effect on my mood. I check random stats an embarrassingly large amount, and I often have this worry that my star has faded and my blog is becoming increasingly irrelevant—that the days of

Glenn

(who hasn’t blogged in a while :( :( :(),

Amos Wollen

, and Bentham’s Bulldog hegemony are fading and being replaced with a multipolar philosophy-substack world that mostly consists of people being snarky about miracles.

By far the most annoying thing, though, is irritating commenters (though not you, of course, whoever is reading this, who is the light of my life, the fire of my loins, my sin, my soul, etc). When someone posts something very overconfident and confused, I have trouble letting it go. I get really really annoyed by lengthy back and forths with arrogant and confused people. If I stop responding, I feel like I am admitting defeat to a confused person. If I keep responding, then I get increasingly annoyed because I am making no progress arguing with a confused person.

For example, I wrote this article in a state of extreme irritation, because I was so irritated by the piece I was responding to, which consisted of an enraging combination of schoolmarmish self-assurance and basic failure to address literally any counterarguments or even acknowledge their existence. The curse of writing about anthropics or any other area of philosophy that’s hard to get your head around is you’ll have to hear 4 million different people confidently strut about claiming to have solved all the problems in the domain, without even reading about what the problems are. It’s utterly maddening and by far the most annoying thing about blogging.

A few months ago, I came across some decently widely-read blogger making fun of the way I look. The article didn’t bother me at all (in part because the article wasn’t very good and the author didn’t seem very good at tracking). No matter how gratuitously nasty you are, you will never cause me as much mental anguish as if you post something long-winded, overconfident, and confused about anthropics. In fact, you will never cause me any mental anguish. I don’t really care what negative things strangers on the internet say about me. I think I’m psychologically abnormal in that respect.

Other than that, I mostly just find blogging to be fun. You can hear what smart people think about whatever you’ve been thinking about recently. You can get thousands of people hearing your thoughts, and have as little of a filter as you want. If you’re very lucky, you can save 600 million shrimp from a torturous death!

Lots of bloggers seem to carry a Van Gogh-esque morosity concerning the whole enterprise. I have no doubt that this accurately reflects their experience. But I would like to register, lest you think every blogger is dark, moody, and brooding, that I think it’s mostly just a fun thing to do, and it often convinces people to do really good stuff. I highly recommend it!