So this blog started back in 2009, now about 6 years ago, which really isn’t supposed to be a long time, but for me, and for those in the internet world it’s a long time. It was inspired by a movie “Julie & Julia” back in 2009. The movie portrayed a time period (around 2002) in Julie Powell’s life as she detailed her efforts during a personal project to cook every recipe in Julia Child’s French cook book. She shared her efforts on a blog, which then seemed to get a large following, which then got converted into a book, which then became “Julie & Julia”.
The movie tickled my fancy to become passively popular while also making more money and becoming famous and share my thoughts. I mean I’ve been keeping up a journal for most of my life, I was craving for some attention, and so what better way than to start to open up my journal, and be more courageous to share part of my personal life.
In recent times my blog entries have gone cold. And so I see an end and possible moving on of a venture of sharing in my life. A big part of this thinking is just how I’ve seen the internet, and the climate of this world changing in the past 6 years.
The biggest issue is the increasing challenge I see for one to maintain a blog of substantive meaningful material for too long. When it becomes substantive it probably gets into opinions and views and gets controversial. If you write a safe, politically correct for all global views blog the life, enthusiasm and energy goes out. It becomes boring to write, and read. And if your blog gains any significant following, mostly by the many automated web crawlers and bots on the internet, it continually endures growing spamming attacks, and hacking.
It appears that this activity sort of lead to a internet provider, who at one time was eager to have my business gradually, grow ever more eager to have me go away. It seems my websites were getting attacked so much by spam postings on my blogs they were over burdening the tech support. So with great inconvenience I moved my blogs to another hosting service several years ago. But then shortly afterwards I got notices they needed to disable my websites until I got better security. My blogs then required the security of difficult passwords I can’t remember and even then every few months my blogs endure outages from hacking attempts.
Most outages are minor and the hacking has never resulted in any permanent damage to my sites, but I suspect if I was ever more active in my blogs and dared be bolder with my sharing the hacking would be more severe and my sites would be wiped out. I am realizing how hacking is the reality of everyday internet existence and it is well organized, and well funded by governments agencies, military forces, and entrepreneurs selling hacking software. All of this is a major and growing burden to wanting to blog.
Julie’s original blog that started this all stopped some 4 years ago. I noticed she had later started a new blog but it looks like that blog has gone amiss and probably inactive as it was over run with lots of inflammatory remarks. With internet savvy extremist, hacktivist and activist groups in play it also makes things feel just that much more unsafe to start sharing your self and be seen.
And when I started to blog Facebook was starting to catch on fire. Now I see it in many ways the replacement to the blog. The only shortcoming of Facebook compared to a standard blog is it’s not the best place to post long articles or share a chronology of articles. But otherwise Facebook seems to be the best way to be seen by many “friends” for maybe a few hours, until everyone else’s posts make you long history. And you don’t worry about someone hacking and erasing away your account — although I’m not entirely sure of the technical reason why.
In the end I have been recording most of my thoughts in the hack-free safety of my own personal journals, and often on paper. I mean now I better appreciate honoring my own privacy and the value to my own growth to allow myself the safety of my own privacy. But even more important I start to let go of needing others to see me to make me feel enough. I don’t give away myself for a little more publicity. And if I come across as ordinary to others, that’s going to be OK. Because in the end the ability to be ordinary is rather extraordinary, because it’s the ability to be fully in my body just as I was meant to be, without ever having to do anything.
Lately I’m getting more and more glimpses of how remarkably fantastic it is to simply be fully in a ordinary physical body, feeling my toes, marveling that I can walk, that I can feel the texture of the floor and that I can breath and be tired and sleep. Guess what? Want to hear something really sensational on this blog? I got up, went to work at my office, had a couple meetings. I ate some of my own home cooked slow cooked beef stew … Mmm Mmm Mmmm. I had a good day.