Why Blogging is a Waste of Time
Tuesday evening, and I’m not melting for a change. I try not to moan about the hot weather. Soon, it’ll be raining, cold and dark all the time. It’s time for a new blog post, so I’m limbering up the fingers.
Blogging is an absolute and utter waste of time. I arrived at this conclusion earlier today while reviewing the state of my own digital empire. My literary output lay scattered across three separate website domains, not one of which resembles a proper job.
Naturally, having realised that three blogs were failing to attract an audience, I responded in the time-honoured fashion: I started a Substack newsletter on a fourth platform. It seemed the logical solution to the problem. Or, it did at the time.
Consider the maths. There are currently over 600 million blogs in existence, with seven and a half million new articles unleashed upon the world every single day. My own modest efforts in this vast, shouting wilderness make not the slightest ripple. I could delete the entire enterprise tonight, throw the server into the canal, and return to quiet obscurity without a single soul noticing my departure from the great unread.
That sounds like a moan. A “poor me”. It’s not. It’s a simple indication of the reality for most bloggers.
Oddly enough, it was philosopher Albert Camus, who provided the explanation for this madness. A blog post is an attempt to impose order, insight, and shared understanding upon a chaotic world. The blogger operates on the innocent belief that if he expresses himself clearly enough, a grateful readership will connect with his words and be enlightened.
The utter absence of readers is the precise moment we encounter Camus’s concept of the Absurd. The universe, represented here by the vast, indifferent expanse of the internet, simply isn't concerned about our profound thoughts, no matter how carefully punctuated.
Camus noted that when confronted with total absurdity, man has three choices: he can give up entirely, he can embrace religious faith and pretend meaning exists where it does not, or he can choose rebellion.
Rebellion is the true blogger's creed. It is the recognition that the act of writing is valuable, even if no one reads a single word of it. We write not for an audience, but as a deliberate act of defiance against the silence.
Greek mythology offered a similar lesson through the story of Sisyphus. He was condemned by the gods to push a massive boulder up a mountain. Only to watch it roll back down to the bottom every time he neared the summit. It was a repetitive, exhausting, and completely pointless punishment.
Blogging is fundamentally Sisyphean. Drafting an essay is pushing the rock up the hill. Seeing that it has received five views, three of them from your laptop, is the boulder rolling back down to crush your toes. The realisation that you must do it all over again next Tuesday is the sentence of eternal damnations.
There is also the matter of existential "bad faith”. The trap of relying on an audience to validate your sense of self-worth. True writers must write simply because we have something to say, regardless of whether anyone is listening.
No doubt, experts in Search Engine Optimisation will observe that my lack of readership is entirely due to my failing to observe basic marketing protocols. To be fair, they are probably right. I haven’t spent hours engineering keywords, nor do I possess the desire to hawk my soul on social media.
Yet, the concept of rebellion appeals to me immensely. Blogging may well be an utter waste of time, but it happens to be an enormously enjoyable waste of time. I intend to carry on regardless.
Long live the rebellion.