I Don’t Want to be a Content Machine

So we’re clear, I am using “content” as in the noun, not the adjective. And either way I wouldn’t want to be a machine.

But what I mean is that I need to stop trying to use everything in my life as fodder for online publishing. There are plenty of things I can pull from to write – but not everything deserves a space online.

This came up most recently as I decided to do some daily self-reflection about my health. To sum up my plan, I am taking a closer look at my daily food logs and reflecting on the day through the lens of health and fitness. I am doing this because I realized a lot of what I was doing was out of habit, and not really serving a purpose.

I started writing my first “entry”, and very quickly I was thinking about where I could publish it – oh there’s this space (https://lwgrs.wordpress.com), but no I don’t want to do that because it’s not my “brand” here anymore; I could set up a new blog on WordPress, or set up a tumblr, or, or, or, or… I had to shut it down quickly. I should have done that as soon as I was trying to brainstorm a catchy blog name, but sadly it took a little longer than that.

(Note that I did NOT set up a new blog, and I DID shut down that misguided idea.)

This line of thought was interrupting what was a productive writing session. Just a few paragraphs, but those paragraphs were helpful for what I was aiming to do. But I was still distracted: I was figuring out formatting in Word, and was bothered by the page break and my mind was focusing on formatting way too much. So I switched to a text document and everything is much more focused and even better -organized now.

But I don’t like that my first instinct was to work out where I could post this online. Not everything I do needs to be a blog, or a post, or a podcast. When I think about what I want to write online, this isn’t quite what I’m thinking about. My mind goes to that place out of a desire for easy content. This is stuff that doesn’t require a lot of effort to produce, as compared to other types of essays I want to be writing.

In the future I hope that I think about what I’m writing and finish that before I think about whether or not it should be published online.

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