Anyone Miss Blogging?

This feels quaint.

I slowly stopped blogging a few years ago. I got tired of keeping up with it. I have always loved writing the posts and reading comments from people who read them, but at the time there was a lot of advice about blogging and a lot of people making money from blogging and if you weren't doing that it felt like a waste of time and all the advice I got about  blogging effectively made me hate it.

The advice was to post all the time, set yourself up as an expert in a niche, and monetize. I always had things to write about and wanted to talk about with other people and I wanted to have a good blog. So you start asking yourself, if it's worth saying then isn't it worth making it searchable and having a hi-res photo and promoting it on all your social media platforms? (Whew. That's a lot of work for a post about an ugly cat that made me dry heave.) It got to the point where you had to know how to code and do A/B testing and understand design to even keep up. Listen, guys. I don't know how to do anything and I have zero marketable skills. That's why I'm blogging.

How about you? I don't really read blogs anymore. I think a lot of people don't. Why click on a whole blog post when you can just look at a picture or read a tweet? I love Instagram and Twitter. It's fun there. Likes and retweets feel nice. You can tell a little bit about someone in a tweet or a photo or a caption and that's usually enough to kill some time. But we used to have pretty good actual discussions via comments on blogs and I met some of my best friends and favorite people this way. I've been missing it lately.

Maybe it's because I feel a profound and aggressive rejection of my values in the political sphere every day now. It's horrifying. It makes me feel lonely.

I think that's how blogging started for a lot of us who were home with kids and wanted to connect. Social media still serves that purpose, but the new things people are getting into—vlogging and posting videos to your story that people can watch and respond to—isn't my thing. Friend, if I were camera-ready I'd be out of the house actually doing something.

Posting videos of yourself defeats the whole purpose of online friendship for me. I'm also realizing that I care more about words than images. Words are more interesting to me. I want to hear more words from you. I want to stalk your blog and find out every detail of your life—not just how you look in all of your pictures, but what you think, what you hate, and how things are going. I guess I'm really nosy? Is longing for more than 140 [280] characters from someone considered nosy? I'd actually like to have really in-depth conversations with people I find interesting more regularly. I should make that happen more often. It's surprising, though, how long it takes to get into an interesting and meaningful conversation and how rarely it happens in real life. That remains the goal. Blogs are actually great for that: Bear your soul to me online and we can play it cool when we meet.

First-generation mommy bloggers are part of a bygone era, I know. Still, I miss my peeps. I took like-minded, friendly, smart, thoughtful, measured, interesting, competent people for granted. It feels like there's an abundance of the opposite kind of people everywhere now. They've taken the White House. Congress, too, has been infiltrated. The Supreme Court isn't even the paragon of independence and virtue we once thought it was.

They can't touch me here though! Actually, they can. If I don't post every now and then the Russian bots take over my comments. I hate them, by the way.