All my life, my biggest enemy on this entire planet is an easy to execute keyboard sequence that can eliminate hours, months or even years of work. This truly has been an enormous source of complication for a vast majority of my life. It has prohibited me from any sort of real tangible progress regarding publishing text online. I’m not exactly sure why this is, but it has really been a crushing weight these last couple of years.
Cntrl + A, DeleteWhen we are younger, we often will do things without regards to how it looks to the outside world, and it often results in them finding paths to discover themselves and who they are. When we get older, we fall into these grooves and don’t want to get out of them, for example, because of how it may be perceived by those you have established relationships with. Changing hard subjects about your character and sticking to them gets difficult with each passing year.
When I was younger and would post things on my website, I really didn’t give a shit how it was perceived. But nowadays you really must watch what you say, and who you say it to, and make sure nothing you’re saying has any sort of weird connotations attached to it. It’s all so strange. Now I don’t live in a big city by any stretch of the greatest imagination but, most of the things that has everyone all hot and bothered online are not the same things I see people with boots on the ground, Monday thru Friday concerning themselves with. I was raised in a time where you sort of took it upon yourself to have respect for others and when everybody started getting all triggered over everything, I just sort of shut the fuck up about life-things and random armchair philosophies online and narrowed my topics to solely tech-related topics. Learning in Public I suppose you could say, because, outside of what I would consider my extensive knowledge of Obsidian, all the other neat little things I talked about I only really played with, and if it didn’t play well with Obsidian, well then that play time got cut short in a hurry.
As much as I can delve into these topics and benefit from doing such things, every time I was working on an article, I felt like I was stepping on other people’s toes. The PKM community is sort of a new thing if you ask me, and a lot of the biggest content creators in that space are just finding their grooves. Many of these fine people profit from or seek profit from this work they put in on the content they create. I’m not sure how many PKM content creators in the space are doing it just out of love. We’ve all seen them here and there, but a vast majority are hoping to monetize their efforts the best they can. I can still write about Obsidian and whatever else and not have to pitch it toward the PKM crowd. I never really was trying to appear knowing things, it was more just my outpouring of enthusiasm for the application and everything that it can do.
This is not really who I am down at the core, my true authentic self. My Monday through Fridays look starkly different from those I read about online. Or maybe they are things that nobody likes to talk about. I’m accounted for in the trenches working with people who have real identifiable problems making ends meet, and whether they care to admit it, exhibit outwardly grand displays of unhappiness. The best of these actors truly appear to be authentic on the surface. Yet, give these fine people Just Five Minutes of your time and you’ll discover quickly just how superficial their persona to the public is. Everyone is paying over a hundred dollars a month to various subscriptions services seeking some sort of innate happiness and just hamster-wheeling themselves into a frenzy trying to find something that isn’t there. It’s like those friends you have that still do cocaine but are well into their thirties, still acting the same way you all did back in the 90s. I read articles about effective methods for reading “faster” and watching YouTube videos on when mindfulness when in reality four of the seven days on the working week calendar we’re scheduled to be back at work in less than 10 hours from the time we last left. Squeeze in eating, unwinding and “eight hours of sleep” into those 10 available hours and you’re left with only minutes — and with as much good intentions as one might have upon waking up at 2:45AM, reading for 45 minutes and also meditating before doing it all over again, often one or neither happen. Every fucking day trying to figure out ways to reinvent yourself. Is this not a side-effect of our feeds and timelines and social spaces that we voluntarily bubble ourselves into?
I’m not really sure where I’m going to take the content here, context-wise. There will always be Obsidian plugins that get me into a lather that I will want to discuss, something longer than a post on Mastodon, but these other social topics that influence my daily life, I want to spend more time here. I have a dedicated Obsidian vault for writing. One of the main directories is essentially a directory of random “writing ideas”. Two of these notes are about Linux, 14 are about Obsidian, and 24 of them are about either “Social Media”, “Society” and “Web Culture”. The notes in the Linux and Obsidian directories have creation dates all within the last three or four months, except for our running “Love Letter to Obsidian”. The other non-technical directories, however, have creation dates that are the same as the day I created the dedicated writing vault. That is to say, I’ve been sitting on most of these ideas since before June 2020 when I migrated life over to Obsidian. The goal, or at least the idea here — is to get some of those non-technical notes into their own directories, with their own Omission and Source files, and to move them to a new permanent residence in my “Out in the Wild” directory, where things live when they finally have been published online.
None of this matters in the end anyway, so I might as well just get after it. There is significant progress in the act of doing itself, nevermind the quality that doing might bring to the table in the beginning. It’s the act of persistence that brings on true greatness. Over-planning is as as detrimental as not starting at all.
If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you’ll never get it done.
Bruce Lee