I want to regain my habit of posting to my blog. Over the past few years I have taken on an unfortunate habit of neglecting to post my blog drafts. I am always writing. I have too many partly finished drafts, maybe 90% complete, which I mostly drafted then put aside for review after sleeping. The habit I want to change is indefinitely postponing publication.
I have considered making a habit of regular publication, such as briefly daily or consistently on a certain day of the week. I am not sure what I want to try. It is September and I find myself looking to the December break to catch up.
I already have delusions of grandeur that everything I do in my profession is of immense historic significance, and that I am at the center of a new paradigm of human engagement with society, and that I am an embodiment of changing cultural norms in publishing and accessing media. Too many times I have looked at what I published on Wikipedia and had the perception that how I spent my hours changed the direction of how entire segments of the publication changed their behavior or thought. I have given talks at conferences where I thought I was sharing controversial and radical ideas, then years later realized that somehow by professional routine gave me insight into a coming societal trend. Even outside of Wikipedia I interact with information repositories where I make decisions about publication and off wiki this changes the world also.
I have come to be aware of how I am different from other people in my thoughts and the privileges I have associated with ranks and titles which I hold. I do not see myself as having any remarkable skill, and I am not fated into a destiny, but I continually feel lucky or charmed to have found a string of fortunate opportunities to make high impact decisions with little effort in my day to day life.
Most of what I do is reactive to what I experience. I hear a lot of good ideas and sometimes I recognize when I can execute one of them because I have access to resources and a background which would make the ideas challenging for other people to manifest. I get to be broadly proactive to advance some of my ideologies, but in general, most of what I do is in the context of my socializing with someone else who contributes to a project with me. I rarely start anything alone, and almost always enter projects supporting someone else’s dream. I hear various dreams from all sorts of people and make the choice of which ones to chase with the time I have. Most of what I attempt seems to end in failure or not resolve in the way that I hope at the start. Some of what I attempt seems extraordinarily successful, or at least sets a precedent for a development path which I believe will follow from what I attempted.
Maybe all of this is overly dramatic. I thought that by writing what I feel that might inspire me to write more to reflect on how I should think about what I see and do. I do not want to be immodest about my routine but I think modesty has kept me from journaling. If I start writing then of course I like my projects and put myself as the protagonist of my narrative. I have the feeling that in the future people will ask how and why people like me did their daily routines. If I am one who journals then I will be the one to leave a record. I wish that I could do more to impact my values on the future and to others, including cooperation, the public commons, the rights of the individual, consumer protection, access to information, freedom of publication, and the rest. I feel that by journaling then when I do projects in the public commons that I am contributing to the narrative that the good things we have come from everyday people, and not from corporations, or wealthy philanthropists, or any other source than people collectively organizing to advocate for ourselves.