¿Why a blog?

(This post has been translated from the Spanish version with help of ChatGPT, of course it has been afterwards reviewed by me).

Even today, after four months since the first publication on the site, and after countless hours of work to make sure that everyone who comes here is respected, I sometimes wonder why I have dedicated all this time to this website and if it will be worth it.

I also had a website at university called Contra Reloj, which was dedicated to publishing my suggestions for new entrants from the voice of “experience”. It didn’t receive much attention, especially considering that you had to go to the university computer rooms, after classes finished, to access it. This meant getting back to the student residence very late, sometimes even after the meal time had ended. Additionally, I had to compete for the little time we had for internet access with Facebook and YouTube, and reading blogs was not a popular practice at our small campus. It’s clear who lost.

Contra Reloj lasted a few months until I realized that no one was interested, and the time I dedicated to it could be used for other, perhaps even less productive things. Now it’s different, as connectivity problems are a thing of the past for those inside the Island, and much smaller for those outside of the Island. However, I still have the same question from six years ago: will anyone be interested in what I write? Can I compete this time —and in a certain way, win— with social media?

I can draw several conclusions. One of them is that obviously, the idea of starting the website was not organically mine, but arose from a certain influence from the content I’ve been reading in recent months (other blogs). Social media has never attracted me, and I consider it a space where —except for some creators— everyone has a second intention, where most opinions are dishonest and cynicism abounds. I open accounts in them and close them after a few days, I don’t find anything profound or real. However, people’s blogs are different, there are no second intentions or cynicism, only the person transparently exposing what they think of the world they interact with, and doing so with intention, as depth as each one can go. There are no likes, no advertising, no algorithms dictating what is shown or not, no one tracks your clicks, no artificial intelligence writes… just people expressing their thoughts for anyone who wants to read them and use them.

Of course, the feeling of having created something with your own hands has also influenced and motivated me a lot. Despite not knowing how to use Hugo or manage a Virtual Private Server (VPS), it was what I selected. These tools do not provide a visual interface like Wordpress, Kirby, or another Content Management System (CMS), and their simplicity, efficiency, and speed once the system is set up come at the cost of many hours of research and code writing. This website is the simplest thing I have known how to do to make it both aesthetic and respectful of the freedoms of anyone who comes here. It would have been easier and cheaper to go with Wordpress and put up Google Analytics/Ads. However, this would denigrate the readers, their freedoms, and would have treated them as consumers. It would have turned this site into what I detest. But more importantly, everything I would have published would not have been a reflection of myself as a person, but a confusing image influenced by an ever-growing hunger for visits and profits.

But undoubtedly, the return in value of all the time, dedication, and consistency devoted to the website is having a concrete space to write what I think. Not simply showing it, but because it has begun to constitute a medium that forces me in a certain way to capture the ideas that pass through my mind, and in the process of expressing them, I really come to analyze them in a deep way —at least relatively— and internalize them. Having this kind of space, rather than connecting with others, makes you find yourself, allows you to externalize your thoughts and see them from different points of view. In this way, what we thought we thought, without even having thought about it, begins to find structure, forms, sense. Sometimes, what I thought I was thinking was the result of not having thought about what I thought.

Finally, a fundamental trait that has always characterized human civilizations is the storage and distribution of knowledge. There is a manifest need to document our experiences, so that new ideas can be built on them. Of course, I am not suggesting that a website like this should be documented in a library, but somehow what I think today could serve others tomorrow. Very close people have had very clear and wise points of view of life, but never externalized and documented their feelings so that today, others could rise in them and even feel them closer.