Most bloggers burn out. There isn’t much reward for it. One talks about it in terms of grind and struggle, but it’s entirely voluntary, as everything on the internet is. So a grind that can end with no real cost… just by stopping? I get it.

I think the trick is to match expectations with reality. Blogging regularly is the first step. “Smash the damn keys,” as Christian Mihai put it. A couple hundred words a day is a good and doable goal. It’s a grind, it’s unlovely, but it doesn’t have to be genius every day. It’s your window on the internet, and you have to maintain it.

The problem can often be “I don’t know what to write about”. I can get bored pretty easy just commenting on what others have written, which is what I did for a long time. So you really need to write about you: what you’re seeing, what you’re doing, what you’re reading. That’s a perspective, rather than a member of the Internet peanut gallery. As an artist, as a philosopher, as a human, you have something to say. It doesn’t matter if it gets hits or not. It doesn’t matter if it becomes a virus. What matters is that it gets said.

Keep the churn going. “Essay” means “try.”