I was happier when I was on Gemini
Published on 2025-05-16
Around the end of 2023, I decided I wanted to post an article on my gemlog every day, and so I did. For about three months and then I sort of fell off. I don't write nearly as much as I used to, and I feel like I've been trying to get back to that place ever since.
New year's last year, I was reflecting on the time and I noticed that my life had never felt so put together as it did during those three months. Things have changed since then, I suppose. My role as a caretaker has gotten a lot more difficult as the world has gotten harder to live in. I've worked full time for the last year, and unlike watching television or playing video games writing is a very active, constructive exercise. It takes work, and energy. It was easy at the time, surely, because I had so much practice, but it's just as easy to let go.
Despite the title, I don't think it was the fact that I started publishing my writing on the web that pushed me to lose interest. I think I just slipped around the same time that I was witnessing a lot of change in my life and the world around me, and since then it's been hard to regain sight of what matters, what I truly care about. Writing has for a long time been the best tool I have to connect with people and I'm definitely not prepared to give it up.
A big problem I've been having lately is that I don't have ideas like I used to. For a while I was having so many ideas I couldn't keep up with them; my list of articles grew out of control. Then, I was having a healthy number of ideas, but they were all super depressing. For what it's worth I'm not above feeding readers a steady stream of articles about getting old and dying but it's hard for me to write about that sort of thing and not make it overly personal. These days, there's just not much of anything.
Interestingly, I think it was around that same time that I fell off with writing daily articles that I started aggressively listening to podcasts. On one hand, listening to podcasts goes a long way towards keeping me from ruminating. They make doing chores a lot easier. But on the other hand, I noticed the other week that all it took was me sitting down for a twenty minute bus ride without my phone and all of a sudden I have ideas for like, three or four new articles.
I've basically already written about this before:
and as I've since come to realize, there's a lot of really good reasons to distract yourself from the world. Often times the world kind of sucks. Someone living in a pastoral countryside probably has a much easier time eschewing music than me, a person who has to sit at a bus stop along side an arterial road every morning, with nothing to listen to except the rhythmic passing of pickup trucks and SUVs. But at the same time, it's incredibly hard to be creative yourself when you spend all your free time wrapped up in someone else's creative vision.
In other words, maybe there will be more articles to come…
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