This Is the Intro

This is the first blog post. I feel almost obligated to talk about the motivations of (re)starting a blog.

Why restarting? Because I used to have a blog. I always enjoy writing because I take pride in my thoughts – can't lie, the first and foremost motivation of all writers should be "sheer egoism." George Orwell could not have described it better in "Why I Write":

Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one.

I really enjoyed the clapping emojis I receive at the end of my blog posts. When some friends reached out to me and said "I saw your blog post about this topic and found it really interesting, let's talk about it more" – that always made me so happy and eventually deepened my friendship with that person. These things used to be the only fuels I needed to keep going.

But when social media creeped into every aspect of my life, things started to change. The focus shifted from authentic self-expression, to gaining exposure, followers, and profit. It felt almost wrong to start a blog just for the purpose of writing; no, you have to know how to get more views, make them subscribe, build an online following, partner with a brand and promote their product, to come out and say "here's how I made xxxK as a blogger/youtuber/tiktoker." I was definitely influenced by this thought that if I can't get more audience, then I am wasting my time blogging: No Money = Useless Hobby.

I tried to ride trends. Less personal stories and ideas; More political commentaries & discussion on latest news. I definitely got more views and more subscribers, but not enough for me to make big money. Most importantly, that was not something I enjoy. Blogging began to feel like a chore for me before I decided to abandon the site for good.

I stopped thinking about blogging for a long time until last month. I am a second-year CS student now and I have been looking for job opportunities. So as you may have guessed it, I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn. I came across this profile though, this dude works at a startup that I want to work for, had some interesting projects listed. Cool, I thought; then I clicked on his website. He has a medium blog and he wrote about these things:

• Three Months of Monkhood: How Disciplined Self-Observation Can Make You a Better Person
• Blogposts are better than essays
• 5 months -> 5 weeks -> 5 days: How we launch products 30x faster
• How I turned an apartment into a monastery
• Tinder sucks. Let’s talk.
• How social media operantly conditions us & what we can do about it
• A Brief Intro to the Attention Economy
• No more half-baked writing

Reading these blog posts were so refreshing, it made me want to know him more as a person. If he didn't have a blog, I wouldn't be able to know anything about his interests, what does he care about, what's the way he talks etc. He would just be a random CS major that got shuffled into my LinkedIn feed. But because of this blog I got a glimpse of his thoughts, and now I know him way better as a person without a second of interacting with this guy.

That was when I felt convinced that I need to start a blog too. This time not for publicity, profit, influence – no nothing; but just to reserve a sacred place for me to share my thoughts and be myself. Whoever wants to be my audience, gets to be my audience.

So to summarize the purpose and motivation of this blog:

1. Capture my ideas because they are valuable. Too many ideas slip through our fingers. It might be a funny joke that you told, an interesting "what if" that got you thinking; your observation, your reflection, your vision. We rarely realize how much information our brain processes just in a day, and we rarely realize by the next morning most of the things you thought of will be forgotten. Everything comes and goes but I want to keep the important ones with me. I also want to leave a trace so that I can look back and say "look how far I've come."
2. Help people know more about who I am. This was inspired by that dude's blog and its effects on me. I know I connect better with people who likes to think and aren't afraid to share their thoughts, and I believe many of us do. I realized my closest friends are the ones who shared their thoughts the most with me – doesn't have to be all deep and philosophical; but always authentic and full of life. That is also what I want to achieve in my blog posts, talk as if I'm talking to a friend. To my friends who are reading this, imagine I'm just talking these words to you face to face; to my soon-to-be friends, this is a good channel for you to know what I'm like.

So here's my first blog post. Or in other words, there gotta be more to come.