Switching to consumer mode

I've been blogging (almost) daily for the last year and a half or so. Mostly, it's been a collage of links with some long form posts here and there. I read a lot of websites and I like to curate collections of things that made me think a little bit.

Somewhere along the way, I started feeling like I had to be a "creator." Like even though I do this for fun, with absolutely no intentions of ever monetizing it, I kinda felt like I needed to update the blog daily or...

...you know, I never really thought about why. I just felt an obligation to post.

I was carrying the toxicity of algorithmic social media and 24/7 news into the place I went to escape it. I'm very online; there's no denying that. But I'm a little burned out.

I got to thinking: what am I doing here? Am I trying to show off? Maybe a little, subconsciously. I had this vision of an old school link blog that always had the coolest stories as soon as I caught wind of them.

Who gives a shit though? I do thoroughly enjoy running a blog. And I think the biggest motivator for why I felt the need to post something every day is because there are so many great blogs I come across, then I check the latest post and it was from like 2017. Someone just like me, who felt so passionate about having their own little corner of the web and then one day, whether they knew it at the time or not, they wrote their last post.

Part of it was fear of losing momentum. When you do something every day, you get into the groove and it's just part of your routine. But then when you press pause for a minute, it's hard to find that drive and jump right back into it. That doesn't mean I should stay stuck in the hatch like Desmond, pushing The Button every 108 minutes though.

(Yes that was a Lost reference, a decade and a half later...)

So I'm cutting myself some slack. It's okay to be a consumer. You don't have to create all the time. You can actually live, and simply take things in. You can't create something from nothing, and that's where I'm at right now; a void.

I'm feeling a little numb to the constant waterboarding of batshit crazy news headlines. I'm all about staying informed so we don't sleepwalk further into the collapse of the Western world, but you can't be always on all the time.

I've seen a few posts lately about taking a break from the noise. I guess that's what this is. I'm not going on some extended hiatus, but I'm definitely turning down the pressure. I might even read a book.