It is Friday evening, the weekend stretches ahead like an unpaved road, and I have chosen to spend these precious hours issuing a formal declaration: that 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 currently lies 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.
Consider the arithmetic. 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.
Oddly enough, it was 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 populace will connect with his words and be enlightened.
The utter absence of readers is the precise moment one encounters Camus’s concept of the Absurd. The universe—represented here by the vast, indifferent expanse of the internet—simply does not care about one’s 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. One writes 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, who 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 own 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 own sense of self-worth. The true writer must write simply because he has 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 quite right. I have not spent hours engineering keywords, nor do I possess the slightest 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.