Falling Off The Blogging Treadmill

Falling Off The Blogging Treadmill

I love to talk about treadmills.  You have heard me mention the hedonic, stoic, and achievement treadmills.  Why are their so many?  Because the financial independence community tends to be highly motivated and thus is at risk for falling into such addictive behavior.  When you are used to performing at a certain level, it is hard to back off and except good as a substitute for perfect.  So much so, that attempts at early retirement often lead to a transfer of addictions.  We might not be a slave to the one more year syndrome anymore, but we have turned our hobby or passion into a job that creates just as much angst and time suck as our former W2.  Needless to say, I find myself often caught in this same trap.  As I pull back the layers of my half retirement, I find myself throwing my energies into other activities.  These activities, like blogging, have their own pitfalls.  Sometimes I feel like I am climbing on and then falling off the blogging treadmill.

What the heck does that mean?

Writing and Blogging

I love writing.  In fact, I love blogging.  There is nothing better or more fulfilling than spending an hour a day organizing my thoughts and putting them on paper.  As I have said before, this is a life hack.  It is my daily meditation where I work out the hundreds of disparate thoughts and ideas spurred by being inquisitive.  My biggest decisions in life have all been preceded by a prodigious period of writing.

Blogging is a natural extension of writing.  Taking my thoughts and putting them out into the ether does a few things.  Of course it engenders the wonderful response and interactions with you people.  But it also becomes a stimulus to follow through.  Once my thoughts go public, it spurs me to action.  It coalesces the emotional energy as well as the step by step know how for what I want to accomplish.

I doubt my financial independence progress and move to half size my work situation would have ever gone this far if I had not publicly blogged about my intentions.

So what is all this talk about falling off the blogging treadmill?

Transfer of Addictions

I am an achiever.  Irrationally so.  I crave accomplishment.  Sometimes to the point that it is unhealthy.  When it comes to economics, I am an accumulator.  But you don’t win any awards for accumulating 110% enough.  100% enough will do just fine, thank you.

The same goes for my blog.  While the writing is a natural joy, the promoting and pushing content out to the world is sometimes not.  The blogging treadmill takes this happy healthy daily activity of writing, and turns it into a frenzied race to promote and reach some unobtainable google analytics stat.

Next thing I know I am pushing posts on Pinterest and Reddit.

But why?

I don’t need to generate revenue from the blog?

I don’t really need a bigger platform nor another notch in my belt.

Falling Off

There is no way I am going to stop writing.  Or blogging for that matter.  But I think it is time I fell off the blogging treadmill in the sense that promotion turns an enjoyable activity into something less.  All I have been doing is transferring my addiction from one accomplishment (work) to the next (blogging).

But like the hedonic treadmill, at some point it stops feeling so good.

I doubt any of you will notice the difference.  But there might be one less link on Facebook, one less post to Reddit.  I am going to try to rely on automation and stop checking stats so often.

I am going to try to bask in the glow of under achievement.

And see how it sits for a little while.