Resurrection, or, Why I'm Rebooting An Old Medium For Myself

For the best experience, text that follows below would best be read while this plays in the background.

Guess who’s back

When I had set this site up, the world felt like a wholly different place. The coronavirus was raging outside and to stay stuck inside four walls became the definition of solace, mental and physical. All socialization shifted to WhatsApp and Discord. Suddenly you could carve out time for personal things, like maybe building a blog to plonk your thoughts into.

Because I have to make everything complicated for myself like every developer does, I decided to go the whole, custom hog (okay, semi-custom - I used a template after all) and put my blog on a software development platform of all things to be cheap. Put out one post about a very peculiar personal interest to inaugurate it. Planned a whole set of personal thoughts, and code experiments, to put on it.

And then, I just put it aside, and let life happen. 5 years to be exact.

What happened?

Truth be told, nothing, really. Like about every human with the luxury of broadband internet and being holed up home mid pandemic, I just thought that chasing dopamine by doom-scrolling and chatting would be a better use of time then. So this site just fell into a valley of neglect. Pretty sure even you had some grandiose plan mid pandemic to do and then you just sat on it, and then vaccines and herd immunity happened and boom, we are all stepping out of our homes and returning to normal, albeit a new normal?

For better or worse, many things changed because of the pandemic and after it not just to, and around me - or you - but in our shared world too. Which is why this blog went into neglect.

• One is the pandemic birthed alongside the coronavirus: doom-scrolling. We all became junkies indebted daily to the worst drug ever: cheap dopamine. Continued supply meant bowing in servitude to its dealer of convenience, the social media algorithm. It had already been taking over our lives, but being deprived of human connection for two whole years sealed its grip on our minds for good. COVID caused us all another loss: that of our attention span.

• My post-pandemic trait was to get fully hooked on to Twitter (which I still prefer dead-naming, one of my sins). My penchant for randomly engaging everybody on about everything, and triggering the cesspool accounts there, became my core interest instead of “grinding” (remember when crypto bros threw that word everywhere? that was a thing?). And then I discovered that Delhi Twitter really likes reading about food in the city and around, and that there is how most of you know me now.

• Some scientists who seemed then to be committed to building responsible machine intelligence for humanity rolled out an experiment on the internet: a chatbot. Now it’s shoehorned in to everything we use or see daily, people are getting laid off because of its unaffordable bills, and we are burning our planet trying to run more of it while it still stays madly inefficient. I guess those scientists got lost in the way. I won’t pretend to be a saint who is fully pure and free of AI: I have recently started using it. Actually, work kinda compelled me just to keep up. And now I have to prepare for a future where I give up more of my mental faculties to this thing to be considered employable and “skilled”. (It did get this site back up though, which I had given up on when I had issues earlier.)

• And, well, life really did happen to me. I left the four walls and moved back to the new normal away from my hometown. I finally discovered how to hit the gym correctly on my nth attempt, discovered a pair of nice shoes and got into distance running, ran a couple 10Ks, my first HM, became my fittest ever….then lost it all to an injury and self-sabotage. Discovered the sweetness and bitterness of love twice in the meantime. Spent my time in the job market. While trying to sort my life again, and doing decently at it, I decided to break my leg and be reduced back to four-walls confinement back in my hometown. Driven by the madness of indoor confinement, and a return to square one, here I am with this resuscitated blog.

(actually, wanted to embed another song here, but I’ve heard the singer ain’t too popular recently…)

Okay, you made your point. Why now?

It all boils down to the core experience I have been having with all of the above: they are stripping away my agency to put more of myself out.

More of what I think, what I want to say and be seen saying by word limits or care for someone’s algorithm, more of pouring my own fleshy intelligence and labour into the world than delegating it. Well, at least not delegating it to speak for me.

Honestly, I’m trying not to worry too much about whether people will bother to read it or not. And it is to be seen if this blog survives the near future when I return post-rehab to my second New Normal.

But here I am. To try. To be. Myself.

And if you’ve read till here….. thank you for indulging me, and I’ll see you around.

Oh, and - sign of the times, if checking this blog is too old-school for you (RIP, RSS feeds…), fret not: I am mirroring my posts on to Substack. Sub below, if you please?