Blogging is strange. Creating content on the internet at large is strange. I often find myself wishing I saw it all as I did two decades ago: then, I was free of the poisonous drive of associating any sense of "success" to what had been written. It was just writing.

Take the expression "pick a lane". I hear it used, typically derisively, to suggest that a person should just, well, pick one thing and stick with it. I find it difficult to escape this notion when it comes to balancing the desire for an audience and the desire to do something expressive, without caring about who looks at what you’ve done.

If you want an audience, the internet wants you to pick a lane. At least, that's the case if you choose to use any system that implements an algorithm for presenting your content.

Your little corner of social media thrives when you create consistent, reliable content that pulls in a specific kind of audience. You become an entity that an audience can turn to get what they seek. They come to feed.

The other week, I re-installed Instagram for the first time in several years to look for reference photos for drawings. It didn't take long for the algorithm to tailor its content toward me, surfacing fascinating, amazing pieces of work by a slew of artists. And what I noticed, was that once I went to look at those profiles, I found that they were consistently creating content that was very similar to previous "successful" content. And so the bind was immediately obvious, and it's one that friends of mine who are artists with large followings have also expressed the feeling that their audience is only interested in a certain kind of content. And that if they don't make that, they'll lose followers, fall out of the stream of the algorithm, and eventually lose clout or opportunities, etc.

I continue to think that blogging and running your own website is counter-cultural. It certainly doesn’t fit, literally or metaphorically, into any algorithms. At this point, to write here (or for any person to write on their own personal space) inherently rebels agains any lane-picking. Only now, I wish this had become obvious to me years ago so that I could return to writing as something that was purely a pleasurable act in itself.

The politics of being seen, of building an audience in this era, are seemingly unending. It is dangerously fascinating in its own right—and it all feels quite wrong if all you want to do is write.