- new year
- it’s 2026 and I’m a sucker for beginnings. Over time, the lingering aftereffects of my residual perfectionism eventually drag down every endeavor. The weight of all that accumulated history feels like such an unnecessary burden to bear. It’s suffocating and I’m claustrophobic. So I burn it all down and start all over again. The real challenge is to start once and resist the urge to run away when it begins to look old, ugly, and scary.
- new sub
- So I bought the subscription plan. The charges will auto-renew for years to come. My goal is for the blog to persist through change. Same but different. Older but renewed. Time will tell.
- same old disconnect
- my soul both craves and avoids connection. Words aren’t the only medium, but they are readily available tools at hand: as close as a thought but not as awkward or inconvenient as a face-to-face meeting. Language limits but it also enables, and I enjoy the challenge of balancing accuracy with clarity, accessibility with novelty, and simplicity with complexity. I hope practice makes progress.
- from scrolling to scribing
- Reading others’ words helps. But sadly my reading has lately been overtaken with doom scrolling. If I’m working toward a resolution this year it is to replace scrolling with scribing. Spend less time reading and more time writing.
- audience indeterminacy
- it’s now been over a year with no teaching, no preaching. I’m still speaking, but my wife and kids are my only real audience and they are beyond tired of listening. I’m bad at journaling, because I get lazy and mean when I don’t have to be intelligible to anyone but myself. Plus it’s lonely. A blog offers at least the illusion of an audience, and sometimes that’s all the motivation I need: if this were a conversation, then how would I best express this thought, this idea, this feeling to someone other than myself?
- too cheap to get paid
- it’s strange to return to WordPress after so many years. How many past blogs have I already abandoned? Dates are difficult, but at least going back to 2003. Last year I tried Substack for the monetization potential. But digital algorithms don’t sync with my internal rhythms. Even if only faint and subconsciously, the inescapable drumbeat of likes and views and subs moves at a tempo that I can’t quite match. The discrepancy constrains creativity and drowns out confidence with cacophony. Plus, ‘enshittification’. The ugliness of the term itself is appropriate, and the effects are real.
- idleness and idolatry
- I’ve been told I don’t value my work enough to charge people a fair price for it. That’s true: I don’t understand how to reconcile incommensurate values. Money is a dread sovereign uttering profane blasphemies in an occult tongue I am hopeless to translate. I flee idolatry.
- can’t afford a job
- I’m not committed in principle to the ‘starving artist’ cliche. I’m not much of an artist, and I’m not even starving in practice. I’m freeloading off my wife’s hard work and my kids’ potential futures. I pretend it’s noble, but it’s probably fear of failure. Self-protection from the harsh reality that if I try to compete in the ‘marketplace of ideas’ no one would be foolish or desperate enough to buy what I’m selling. Better to avoid the embarrassment and just give it all away for free.
- jobs, part 2
- But I’m also working in a new direction. Maybe it pays off. But it doesn’t scratch all my spiritual itches. I need a counter-balance. So I blog now.
why blog now
Written by
Dim Reflections 
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