It's been over ten years since I posted anything on this blog, and truth be told, to go back and skim over my previous posts...I just internally cringe.
Back then I was trying to make a name for myself in the world in any way possible; first with YouTube videos (extreme cringe), and then trying my hand at blogging. I think the way social media has developed and evolved over the past ten years has made blogging obsolete. Tumblr is still hanging in there (I think?), but instead of posting blogs and thoughts on individual pages, people just post what they want on Facebook, Twitter (aka X), Instagram, Tik Tok, etc. If you look up a recipe online, chances are you'll find a post someone created that (eventually) gets to the recipe, but first explains how they came up with the recipe, their family history on the recipe, etc, so it's 'blog-esque' at best.
Not to mention the fact that EVERYTHING online now has to be monetized via ad space. You can't even look up the weather on your phone without having to sit through a 5-second ad (or maybe that's just me?). It's become absurd to the highest degree. Sure, everyone wants to make money somewhere, somehow, and they say, "Oh, we use ads to make up revenue so we can keep our product free/lower cost to you!" But I think more accurately it should say, "Oh, we know the consumers can't keep away, so we are going to exploit them while making even larger profits and forcing them to sit through goofy/dumb/irrelevant spammy ads!" And then of course, "If you don't like seeing the ads, you can always pay us more money and we will stop showing them to you!" Either way, we lose and they win.
It's gotten to the point where I see more ads on news articles than there is article content. I'm sure I'm not the only one who gets drawn in by a clickbait title, only to find:
Paragraph of article
AD
Two sentences of article
AD
AD
Paragraph plus two sentences
AD
*Click here to read more*
AD
AD
AD
AD
And if you accidentally click one of the ads? Heaven help you. Or you miss the tiny button that tells you to click to expand the article, and you're scrolling endlessly through senseless ads that will do nothing to improve your life in any way.
But speaking of news articles, even legitimate news sources have their monetary gains. I hate going to a news article that I'm really interested in only to find the dreaded PAYWALL. You get one article for free (if you're lucky) if you sign up, but then you have to pay for access to all other articles on their site. I understand it costs money to make articles and newspapers etc etc, but it feels like every second of our lives now are inundated with ways to make us give more money to a lot of sources that don't need it. I'm just waiting for the day when you have to put a quarter into the public bathroom stall to be able to use it.*
So all this comes back to pure blogging. No ads, no notoriety, just honest-to-goodness vomiting thoughts onto a page and having others read it if they happen to come across it. Does it happen anymore? I don't think so. But I am going to try and revive doing just that. Will my thoughts be epiphanic and spectacularly mind-blowing? Of course!** But I've distanced myself from social media for the most part over the past year and a half, so I figured I could use this old blog as a way to sort out my thoughts and feelings.
If you happen to read this, please don't hold me at 30 and writing to the same standard as I was when I was 17-20 writing this blog. I'm afraid to even go back and revisit those old posts out of fear I will cringe myself into an early grave. A lot has happened between then and now, and I am definitely not the same girl that created Perspective of Irrelevance with the hope of having thousands of people read her blog and change their lives. Now, having just one person read it would be enough.
Well, wish me luck!
___________________________________________________________________________________
*Seriously, if this ever happens, I am done with humanity and have lost all hope.
**No, not really.
No comments:
Post a Comment