Why did I start a blog (again)?

Savvas Kleanthous
Introduction

The problems

I have been having quite a lot of very interesting discussions lately on multiple subjects, and I kept facing the below problems repeatedly:

  1. I needed to explain the same things again, sometimes with some minor details changed
  2. The medium through which the discussion was being had didn’t help in expanding adequately
  3. Sometimes people interposed in the middle of an argument, or the discussion would change subject slightly while I felt there were things not adequately covered

After some thinking about it, I decided to start blogging again (what happened to the old blog is a story for another time btw), and start writing in a way that will help me address the above problems.

My personal reasons

However, in the past few days, in an attempt to structure my thoughts, I came to realise that there are yet more reasons why I want to start blogging, reasons which I believe are far more important for me at least.

For one, even though I sincerely hope people would benefit from what I write here, I am mostly doing this for myself. I want to learn how to properly express my opinions, and also say some things that I feel need to be said about some sacred cows 1. The past few days have proven that I need work on this, and learning to structure my thoughts and ideas will only help me convey my message better and eventually have more meaningful, and hopefully more beneficial discussions.

I believe that communicating through a blog will give me the time I need and help me properly structure my thoughts into a cohesive argument. Moreover, I am confident that the form of a blog encourages being comprehensive, and (equally importantly) encourages an actual narrative, which is near impossible in the character limited nature of twitter or the fast-paced discussions in Slack.

Finally, (and quite importantly to me) the inherent delay will allow me to respond in my own time, and dedicate the time I want to my family and the stuff that I want to do, instead of participating in live discussions (although I am sure I’ll be doing some of that too if something interesting comes along).

Anyway, family comes first, opinions second.

EDIT (2020-08-19): Someone said that I have to have a meme on each post. Apologies for the transgression, and here you go:

one does not blog without a meme