Keep Writing
2026-07-20
After yesterday's difficult confession, I feel somewhat spiritually hungover, weirdly enough. One thing I have trouble coming to grips with is the fact that this website, while I enjoy cataloging my life here, seems to be the only thing truly within my control. In the same way I can remind myself about the power of this kind of thing, I also remind myself of how not-as-significant everyone else with a personal website and I truly are. That's a harsh thing to contend with, and while it's not as bad as I might think, the most significant thing on my mind is always just wondering where it all goes. Outside of my own maintenance of the site through regular updates and keeping my bills paid, there's still always that question: "Where is it all gonna be several years later?" At the pace and consistency I've written here, it might seem most logical to think that this project will only last maybe another year, tops; there could be some big thing that hits later on and gives my site a huge spike in traffic, but I'm not holding my breath.
I love writing, and it's all I want to do, and this idea that I am already creatively maxed out is a sad reality to encounter. Sure, there's liberation in that—which was the entire point of this project in the first place—but it makes me wonder, "Will I still be here years later, blogging every single day?" On one hand, that sounds awesome. This is really fun for me, and I enjoy this process very much, but I wonder if it'll make me stagnate as a person if I'm not careful. But in the same way that assuming constant growth is stupid capitalistic garbage, the same is true for self-development as well. Honestly, a few years of stagnation sounds awesome the more I think about it. Less volatility, fewer variables to think about—okay, that's it—noahie dot xyz, a hundred years! Kidding, but this rhythm has been so stabilizing for me, and giving it up for something potentially worse sounds awful.
I was reading up on Gwern's website traffic and according to his analytics, his site receives somewhere around 50–100k views per month. Over the last few months in particular, my site has received a similar level of traffic according to my Neocities stats, which I begrudgingly check every single day despite my own personal problems with metrics. Whatever, it's a fair enough trade-off, and hosting on Neocities is so stupidly simple compared to self-hosting that I'll deal with the pain of looking at my analytics every day. You know it's a problem when I know exactly what time (7 PM CST) a new day's worth of analytics pops up. For the past year or two, I looked at Gwern's work as this unattainable beacon and thought to myself that there was no way I'd ever get to where he's at because, well, I suck.
But now that I have the clout to look at Gwern as less of a beacon and more as a peer, it's a strange thing to sit with. What's funny is that even though I am technically on the same "level" as Gwern, I still feel quite isolated. I don't really get emails from readers these days anymore, and I most certainly haven't been invited onto any podcasts or blah blah blah. Even if the numbers say one thing, the reality says something different. However, I don't want to fall into that Hollywood trap of chasing relevance or using that as any kind of status symbol to prop myself up or put anyone else down. It's the Indie Web; we're all irrelevant here, and we like it that way.
Integrity matters far more to me than influence, and I will cash that in every single day. I know I harp on it all the time, but seriously, I do this shit for me, and no one else. For as chaotic and unstable as my internal world is, I enjoy the fact that I can come here, write something that I think is fine, put it out with my stupid deployment script, and call it a day. When I get done writing, I usually feel a weight come off my shoulders for the rest of the day. Well, except for when it comes back onto me after remembering that I have pieces I'm still working on. Will Somnia ever get a new chapter? Will that Palantir essay ever come out? The world may never know. The world sucks, and I get the opportunity to siphon just a small piece of it for the sake of my own sanity, and hopefully nothing comes in the way of that. If it did, I have no idea what I'd do.
Just kidding, I know exactly what I'd do; I'd keep writing.
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