Writing for Others versus Writing for Myself
One of the biggest stumbling blocks that I faced when starting this blog was a question of why I am writing these articles and what the purpose of this whole undertaking is. Some days it feels like writing is a complete waste of time, a weak form of expression that is always incomplete and never perfect…
Am I writing for the money? Am I writing to become famous? Am I writing to reach a higher state of consciousness?
Should I write for others? Or should I write for myself? To me that’s the equivalent of the question: to be a teacher of life vs. to be a student of life.
After long contemplations I realized that writing, first and foremost, is important to ME. There are moments when I enjoy writing, and it brings amazing clarity to my thoughts. If my articles ever provide value to anyone else, that’s great. If not, that’s fine too, because at least I had a good time writing them.
How often do you see bloggers who are trying to game the system by writing posts in a specific format that caters to popular tastes, or deploying multiple SEO tricks that bring more traffic to their site? I caught myself doing it just recently, when writing the “Fighting Internet Addiction” article. After starting to write that article, I became concerned about the title and decided to rename it “How to Fight Internet Addiction” in the future. The former article would describe my own journey on the path of overcoming internet addiction, the latter would give advice from the position of a teacher. Of course, the “How to” article might become more popular, since people like receiving advice from a teacher, a Guru, and not from someone who is just beginning to struggle with a problem himself. The original article, however, would describe my early ideas, what worked and what didn’t, my progress and the whole journey on the path of liberation from the internet from the position of a student, not a teacher. To be fake or to be authentic, that’s the question!
It’s a pity to see so many people imitating each other like monkeys, creating blogs with similar layouts, style of writing and monetization schemes… How can they not understand that just copying other people will not bring them fulfillment!
I don’t want to write for the money. I don’t want to write to become popular. For me writing is not about trying to become someone else, but to discover my own inner essence. I am writing to improve my life, not the other way around.
