August 26, 2024

An Exercise in Documentation

Getting better at the internet again means starting to exercise my muscles again a little bit at a time

My last post here was in October—and it was all about prioritizing my personal website. The truth is that I haven’t prioritized energy in putting much online anywhere. I did publish a few YouTube videos, but it doesn’t compare to the amount of footage that I started to record but never published, that now sits on my archival hard drive in a PC that I only turn on once a month.

Jess and I just got back from XOXO Festival in Portland a couple days ago. I want to put together a more thoughtful review about XOXO’s impact on my life trajectory—along with what we did in Portland as a whole. That will come in time. I figured I can start to break the barrier of me not publishing anything in a while to make that post a little bit easier to write.

My relationship with social media has fractured quite a bit from a year ago. I seldom post on any social network now. I have nowhere to blurt out what I’m doing, share any of my random thoughts, nor spew out any random idea I have (I have many). I intended to do that here on my website, but for some reason the motivation has yet to come.

I still have many things I want to share, however, they stay in my head and disappear in a matter of a few days. I always feel bad when someone I haven’t seen in a while asks me what I’ve been up to and I seriously cannot recall a thing. Is it age or is it because I have not exercised the recall function of my brain?

I see many reasons in documenting publicly. I believe it has value.

I want to share what I’ve been up to with other people. I remember when I vlogged every random thing I did each day during lockdown and my family saw it as a way to stay up to date with me and appreciated seeing how I was doing. When people that I grew up with and haven’t seen in a long time told me they were watching my vlogs as a way to stay in touch, it made me feel joy.

I enjoy having a more structured history of what I’ve done at certain points in time. I still watch many of those vlogs today. Despite all that I recorded feeling pretty normal and inconsequential in the moment, they’re still a delight to rewatch and remember what I did and how I lived at a specific point in time.

I arrived at a realization of how important it is to document the story of my life. It’s your story that makes you who you are, it’s not just your name. Living a meaningful life means sharing your story, it’s not all of a sudden coming out of a cave with a finished shiny product that many people buy. While I’ve tried to document my story on YouTube, I never can catch the whole story on video. I also still have trouble expressing myself on camera. That also needs a bit of exercise.

XOXO Festival (and Didi, the movie) made me realize that I miss the magic it felt like the internet had back in the 2000’s. I’m looking around my desk as I type this and there are so many things here that revolve around putting things on the internet. I would not be where I am today if it wasn’t because I loved making things on the internet. I need to continue to do that for myself rather than for other people and companies.

I hope that I can feel that magic again and fall in love with the internet again. I want to start sharing small experimental fragments online again without the fear of judgement.

Let’s hope that starts today with this little exercise. We’ll see if my next post doesn’t come several months from now :)