Why do you want to be a blogger?
If your idea of being a blogger is just to sell ads or product or to look famous like some of these mom and lifestyle bloggers out there, let me discourage you now: there’s enough selling of crap and commodifying of art and personalizing of fame out there to thoroughly sink our culture. The rot at the heart of America doesn’t need your poison too. It needs an antidote.
Plus I know a good deal of these people. They run in some of the circles we run in here in Brooklyn. They’re not fun to be around, quite frankly, much as I love them in spite of their worst selves. They’re divas and frauds, people who completely curate this alternate identity. And the reason I chose the slow and steady form of blogging (and chose to get off social media) is first because I wanted to be honest and second because as a blogger I like writing articles that actually try to help people through some tangible way.
So what’s your intent?
If your intent is to be relentlessly helpful and generous to other people, I can help you become a great blogger. I’ve helped countless people move away from the “lifestyle brand” and fame-driven culture in order to find their real audience and sincerely, honestly help.
If your intent is to “sell product” or “generate content” or “offer a lifestyle” I can’t help you. In fact, you might be beyond help if you don’t make a change soon. Because the truth is most of these ladies and gentlemen — even good friends of mine — who blog towards that end often aren’t fun people. And frankly, they’re pretty damn insecure with no idea of who they really are.
You may think it harsh to talk about friends this way, but I see it as honest: I can talk this way precisely because I love them and bullshit doesn’t help anyone. And also, they know what I think this lifestyle is doing to them.
That said, I’m not saying that I’ve arrived or anything.
I’m saying that I have a different intent as a blogger. I want to help people. I want to be generous with my best work over time.
And I want to be honest with who I am.
That means several things, but first and foremost it means building lasting connections with my readers through being relentlessly helpful with an eye for making them friends for life. See the easiest way to keep away from the whole celebrity-idolizing-creepster types is to actually build steady relationships with readers and make sure they know they’re invited to your home, into your life, and that they can actually take part in humanity. Not your brand. Not your lifestyle products.
Just you and your family.
And that you give to them and are willing to accept help from them.
Just like normal people — your mechanic, your pastor, your mayor.
So what’s the intent of your blog? Or your blog post?
What kind of blogger do you want to be?
Recently, I settled on the title of Lancelot : On Fiction, Mythology, and Bedtime because it captures (1) works that favor meaning over reason or nonfiction, (2) the deep metaphors that give our lives meaning, (3) readings of bedtime stories and poetry. All of that fits into my overall goal to:
…share my words and lend my voice to try to help people think cleverer, feel deeper, and act truer.
I believe that art should not merely entertain or sell product. I believe art should cause us to change our minds, soften our hearts, and motivate our activism to be true and good.
Should art entertain? Of course it should, but there’s a difference between the manual arts and the fine arts. The fine arts exist to call us beyond ourselves and beyond the things the manual arts create. Fine arts exist to call us beyond function and into the forms. That’s why I hate the utilitarian culture that Apple infused into most design schools — it’s one of the worst things to come out of the 21st century because it made art solely about a minimum viable product. Even Stephen King falls prey to this, though he gets offended when critics criticize him for it. He knows, deep down, that his works cause people to think through issues he cares about.
And yet he claims to only write to entertain.
Look, there’s a spectrum, alright?
Amusement — Entertainment — Wonder
Amusement literally causes you to not think. It’s stuff that has been stripped of the muse. That’s why I don’t go to amusement parks anymore: I don’t need a place to sell me prepackaged entertainment. It’s also why I don’t use Instagram or its counterparts anymore: I’d rather reflect deeply about one piece of art than to skip like a stone over several in a span of minutes.
Entertainment can be good or bad. For the blogger who simply is trying to put a flash in the pan or to dazzle someone with the products companies looking for “thought leaders” want to sell, it’s actually an awful thing because none of their art will do anything but entertain a potential purchase. Their art is only a sales pitch for someone else’s goods.
But entertainment can also be a sort of deep, powerful flirting. You can entertain new thoughts. You can entertain new emotions. You can entertain the option of a direct action.
And when good entertainment does this, it rises to the level of wonder.
Socrates said:
Wonder is the feeling of a philosopher and philosophy begins in wonder.
Here’s the guy who said he didn’t know himself, let alone anything else — that the root of all philosophy and wonder is an admission of one’s ignorance. That’s the EXACT opposite of the hipster culture just north of me in Williamsburg, Brooklyn — the seen it all, done it all, don’t mean shit culture. Wonder is the opposite of amusement. Wonder forces you to think. Wonder forces you to encounter the muse in every rock and stock and stone. Amusement simply exists to say FIRST on the comment thread. It exists to say, “I knew that band when…” and to claim, “I wore Hush Puppies before they were cool.” It’s obsessed with the new because it’s wonder-starved. But wonder doesn’t worry about that because wonder can look at the tree that has grown outside its great-grandmother’s house for a hundred years and see it anew and aright still again. Wonder never entertains divorce because wonder knows — deep down — that the soul of his spouse has an infinite depth and therefore marriage could never be boring, never grow stale, never seem dull or routine.
Wonder, in short, uses every encounter to think a little cleverer, feel a little deeper, act a little truer. Wonder knows that it will encounter something new even in the old and cliché. Wonder is, in short, the feeling of learning and experiencing something new applied to every moment, every space, every object, every person, every time.
That’s my intent: to help people develop wonder again. I want to be there for them in every need they have and help, as much as I am able, to get them to participate in wonder. And I want to give away as much of my best work as possible to make that a reality.
That’s why I’m a blogger.
Why do you want to be a blogger?
And how can you be helpful and generous to your future readers?
You’re so welcome!