It's time for me to acknowledge that this blog is becoming less and less of a priority in my life. I've tried to re-motivate myself for blogging by attempting to open a Patreon account last year, but that hasn't been very successful. For good reasons, I should add, because if you're going to spend money on Patreon there's a lot better places to spend money on than this silly place. I'm not intending to wipe this blog off the internet or completely stop posting, but the content of this blog has definitely changed from "I am posting at least weekly about important experiences in my life that have affected me deeply" to "I am posting once every few months about stuff that I have trouble motivating myself for". So I guess some closing words are in order.
There have been some major changes in my life lately. I got married. Bought an apartment. Bought and sold a car. Changed jobs. But I think the one major change that is a constant throughout everything is: I got older. I continue to get older. And as I get older, the amount of importance I place on my own life only decreases with time. I believe this is strongly correlated with intensity of experience. Ten years ago I experienced everything for the first time and was amazed at what life could be like. It was something that I felt I had to record, not even necessarily for others, but at least for myself. Formative experiences. The internet was a more innocent thing at the time, and a blog seemed like the right place. The internet was full of friends, not of crackers.
On all these fronts the zeitgeist has moved on. I am at a point in my life where I don't have many truly 'new' experiences any more. There's still loads of stuff I've never done, but I've done enough similar things often enough to be able to relate and use my experience in new areas. For example, my experience in touring cycling gives me a broader knowledge that can be applied to backpacking. It also gives me a starting point if I ever wanted to venture into speed cycling. My experiences in traveling to various countries means I've learned how to get started on exploring other new countries. My experiences in learning several programming languages and countless frameworks-du-jour means that it's pretty easy for me to pick up other new software technologies. It's a kind of meta-experience: it's the experience you need to be good at experiencing new things.
Having meta-experience is nice, but also not nice. It definitely seems easier for me to start any random new thing at this point in my life compared to ten years ago, but also, I could not possibly derive the same kind of enjoyment, the same kind of 'new-ness', from it. Less intense experience means less desire to blog about it.
Another thing that's changed since I started this blog is 1) social media, and 2) my relationship with my friends. When I started this blog Facebook was only just becoming popular. Video calls existed but kind of sucked, especially if you had to explain to non-tech-savvy people (my parents) how to do them. This blog was a great means of staying close to the friends that I made in Japan after we all went our separate ways. That was ten years ago though, and the amount that I communicate with my friends today seems to be a better fit for Facebook than for blogging. Even my un-tech-savvy parents figured out how to use Facetime, so there's no shortage of communication methods.
It's definitely worth mentioning here that the internet has changed. If you're applying for a job, companies you apply for will without fail find out everything about you that's publicly available. That's only rational. I've had a negative experience once where a potential contact called me out on something I wrote on my blog. That's fair game, but if, like me, sometimes you write things that could be taken negatively out of context, then you need to consider that your online presence can only have negative consequences for you in real life.
There's also the hacker angle. The more you put up online about yourself for anyone to find, the easier it is for someone to impersonate you, or to find out starting points that they can use to find out more about you. This was something that you only vaguely had to be aware of ten years ago, but is becoming way more important lately. There's probably already web crawlers out there whose sole purpose is to crawl information on the internet and group it by person.
I'm sad to write this, but I'm even worried about what governments can find out about me. Imagine you're on a plane to some country, go to passport control and get taken aside for a 'random' check. Then you're confronted with some silly blogpost that you wrote ten years ago that casually mentions "but country X is a shit country anyway and president Y is an asshole". This is not a far-fetched scenario. I have read reports of this happening to other people online. All it takes is for one person to jump on one silly thing that you wrote years ago and you're in for a terrible experience. You could argue "but then you should think a bit more about what you write on the internet", which is a totally valid argument, but also that's kind of what makes blogging fun for me and (hopefully) for the few people in the world who are actually reading my blog, so if given that choice I'd rather just quit blogging.
I am coming to terms with all of these things. The meta-experience/getting older thing in particular has caused me to review parts of my life that I always took for granted, that I am now starting to feel that I could live without. Cycling is one of those areas. It fitted my bohemian persona from ten years ago, but nowadays I find that I've got some direction in life. With that direction, my cycling hobby has been reduced to 'staying fit', which is something I can actually do indoors. It doesn't help that the UK is a lot less cyclograph-friendly that Japan either. Blogging is on the list of things that used to matter a lot to me but are just not having any effect on my life lately. So it's time to cut them out. Spring cleanup. I have gained (meta-)experience from all of these activites, but now it's time to let it go.
See you later, perhaps.