The Unimportant Blog
Recently, I attended a meeting of tech influencers, both “blown” and aspiring. I could tell that there was an energy in the crowd, some sort of kinship. I was on the side, disconnected, observing what I could. There I was, low-energy until one of the [blown] influencers proposed Web3 as a solution for interoperability. All my synapses came alight. See, all the interpersonal parts of a career are lulls for me. What really gets me going is anything that spurs me to think. With that ginger, I decided to challenge the probability and technicality of his proposition later. However, as the meeting progressed, the urge to pose my counter-argument during Q&A dwindled.
How arrogant would I sound if I said he was wrong in his assumption/predictions?
Would anyone think I was trying to hijack the spotlight?
Since his speculation and my dissent bordered on the hypothetical, did it really matter?
These were some of the thoughts that made me reluctant to participate in the Q&A. Right after Q&A, I walked straight to him and said what I thought. We argued for a while, but with people constantly vying for his attention, we couldn’t reach a conclusion. I wasn’t satisfied.
To say that conversation was a waste would be a lie; Failure can grant you perspective. If you lose the key to your apartment, you might devise another way to get in. Maybe the window. Or the roof. Or brute-forcing the door open. The point is that there are [usually] multiple ways to solve a problem.
Over the years, I’ve tried to solve my overthinking problem. As much as I want to highlight the processes to show my level of awareness, I won’t because it’s unnecessary. Revisiting the time I thought of challenging the influencer during Q&A, I made up a joke to start:
“Hi, what I do is Unimportant…please don’t look me up, my stuff is really bad. [insert argument here].”
Of course, I overthought the joke; I re-engineered it multiple times until I was convinced I couldn’t deliver it properly. And that even if I could, it would fly over most people’s heads. Also, a crucial part of the joke — that I authored a blog named Unimportant — was a lie. In the end, I labelled the joke unimportant to tell. In the same way, I have discarded a lot of things.
However, I know the importance of unimportant stuff. Unimportant people. Unimportant stories. Unimportant blogs. I’ve encountered blogs [with less than a hundred views and probably fewer actual reads] that validated my thinking. I’ve also read blogs that expanded how and what I thought about. So I decided I would write about my thoughts. About all the unimportant things. Wait, most — Well, the truth is, I can’t publish most of what I think. It’s simply too much. I’ll reserve some for my inner circle. And most for myself.
So what exactly will you publish?
The short answer is whatever I feel like. The long answer is a set of arbitrary rules like:
- The topic must be founded on something I’m passionate about. Hopefully, passion propels me to research. That way, I stray toward correctness more often.
- What I write should be more subjective than objective.
- I have to feel good publishing it; No matter how long I work on a post, the moment I sense dissatisfaction, I’m not publishing it.
- It has to be unimportant; I’ve decided I won’t publish trade secrets or solutions to particular economic problems [I do have ideas, but you’re not paying me for them] no matter how badly I want to.
That’s it.
Extraneous notes (in a bid to be more correct):
- The 3rd rule is crucial. I worked on Elegy for PlayStation for 5 months and hated it when I published it. I posted it anyway because I thought it was too late to abandon it. I’ve thought about editing/rewriting it. I won’t. See. Sunk-cost fallacy
- This one’s interesting. If you’ve ever wondered how many unimportant things occur on the internet per second, click here.
- If you liked the article or thought it was OK, clap like the old days, like the primary school days.
- If you hated it, DM me saying why. I love debates.
- Fin
