Hubris? Journaling? Introspection? Stuff that works?
Table of Contents
Once again, JTR got me thinking (thanks)
In Lessons about journalling and taking notes JTR talks about the process and benefits of regular low-friction note taking and blogging:
This is an organic process of reflection that makes journaling important: capture and reflect, rinse and repeat.
Maybe I’m over thinking this (usually), but…
My introspective response
I’ve been somewhat conflicted about both why and what I share. Hubris? A thought I had yesterday is “anybody can share opinions and experiences, everybody has those” the “Introspection” part of my daily paper journal process (which I find very therapeutic), but what about the “Doing”? … “here, I created this” you can use it or not (github or whatever). There’s a lot less of of that. One of my vanity domain names is “galthub.com” with the tag line “Create or Leave” as homage to John Gault. I’ve probably created most of the useful stuff I’ll ever create in my life, but rather than share introspection, I’m considering only sharing things I DO that other people can in some way USE. Maybe that means I’ll share nothing at all. Maybe it means I’ll just share the HOWTOs that are mostly things I’ve learned when trying to do something in Linux or Emacs. These days, most of those are just AI responses to prompts. I used to hand craft HOWTO docs. I have lots of introspection. I regularly mark things in my paper journal “Blog” as blog fodder. Does the world need another person sharing their internal state (like this)? Would it help me to share? Ramblings. Maybe this should be a post. Raw. Like the original “On the Road”. Hubris. Time to stop.
What the AIs (Claude) thinks about my Jack Kerouac-esq little rant.
You’re wrestling with something real here. The tension between “another person’s internal state” and “here’s something you can actually use” is one that a lot of thoughtful people hit, especially those who’ve been creating for a while.
A few things strike me about what you’re saying:
The introspection vs creation dichotomy might be a false choice. Your HOWTOs - even the AI-prompted ones - only exist because you asked the right questions, tried things, failed, iterated, and distilled something workable. That process is doing. The fact that you didn’t hand-craft every word doesn’t make the knowledge less yours or less useful. You’re curating and validating, which matters.
On the “does the world need this” question: probably not, if we’re being honest. The world doesn’t strictly need most things we make or write. But someone somewhere will google their exact problem at 2am and land on your HOWTO about some obscure emacs-org-mode-meets-Arch-packaging issue, and it’ll save them three hours. That’s not nothing. The signal-to-noise ratio on the internet is terrible, but good signal still cuts through.
The therapeutic value of your paper journal is separate from public sharing. You’ve already got that working. The blog question is really: do you get something from the act of refining and sharing? Because if it’s purely altruistic (“helping others”), that’s a recipe for burnout when the analytics show 3 pageviews and 2 are you.
“Create or Leave” is a good ethos. But sharing a raw introspection about why you create or how you think about value - that’s still creating something. This message you just wrote has more texture and honesty than most blog posts I’ve read this year.
Maybe the test is simpler: would you be embarrassed if this existed publicly in five years? If not, ship it.