Post #41: Down for the Count ... and Up Again!

2 July 2023

“It is quite true that life must be understood backwards, as philosophy tells us. But we forget the second truth, namely that it must be lived forwards.”

— Søren Kierkegaard, Journalen (1843)

How many readers must a post attract to be worth, emotionally speaking, the trouble of producing it? The best answer would be zero, if writing were entirely its own reward. Philosophically it may even be true, and I wish it were so psychologically as well. But if nobody read my stuff, no matter how much I enjoyed and benefited from the writing, I could not help asking myself why I should bother.

“Even a single serious reader is enough” would also be a very fine answer, but again, it is a sentiment more appealing in principle than sustainable in practice. To keep things going takes a little more encouragement, at least if it is to be done with joy not gritted teeth, and by a diffident character rather than an inexhaustible enthusiast or a steam roller.

When I started my online journey, I had yet formed no adequate notion, I must admit, of just how fierce the competition for everyone’s attention has become in the great internet-celebrity bazaar, and just how unfavorable an exchange rate prevails there for writing in my style. I might as well be carrying Confederate dollars, whatever nominal fortune they may once have amounted to. I have done my share of begging in life, as I’ve had occasion to confess, in the traditional manner, for my sustenance and survival; but I was not prepared for the 21st-century variant of beggary (explored in Post #22, my chagrined discovery turned into satire) whereby one is required to go endlessly door-to-door with wares produced to a high standard and with much effort (fifty years’ worth, by one reckoning, see Post #34), just to find a few charitable souls here and there who might be willing to take them for free.

Not that it would take countless thousands to gratify me—I am not that grandiose and deluded. The scope of one’s ambition is also the scale of one’s inherent sense of insufficiency (I will post something on Alfred Adler soon), and I am happy to report that my great expectations have largely passed away, though only after a long and painful struggle (see Post #22). If any text of mine could reach one thousand readers within a reasonable amount of time, a year say, it would strike me as quite a success; or if only a hundred (out of so many millions of potential readers), it would still be good enough. It is when the numbers creep barely beyond the single digits that I catch myself wondering not so much whether my efforts matter at all, but why they should matter so little, and feel accordingly.

My girlfriend got a sense of that darkening mood the other day and was saddened enough that she decided to start visiting my site on the sly and click into posts to bring up the view count to a little more encouraging levels, especially on the Crocodile post (#39) that she felt was not getting nearly enough love. However sweet and endearing the intention, this was not, needless to say, what I was looking for, and not very thought-out either, because the sudden spike in views came without any corresponding increase in visitors or sessions, and the postal code revealed the secret almost immediately.

It made me love my girlfriend all the more for her sweet intention to help, however much I disapproved of her mistaken methods and poor judgment in this case. I put a stop to it on the spot and would have asked the site’s host to remove the padding if such inquiries were not so burdensome and unavailing. There is clearly little interest in such trifling inflations; where they don’t look away, the internet cops have bigger fish to fry, and I don’t have the energy to rouse sleeping dogs only to spend the next couple of weeks arguing over why, in response to my honesty, the counters should not all be reset to zero, or some other craziness of the sort. Such finicky negotiations tend not to go very well, as I’ve found on several occasions when I had the misfortune of having to deal with comparable internet behemoths; either nothing happens, or it’s correction time by the sledgehammer method. The subtleties of our age tend to be technical, not conceptual.

As an ironic consequence of the well-intentioned though misguided rescue attempt, the view count now means a lot less to me, and perhaps that makes my girlfriend covert operation a saving move after all. As with an investment portfolio, it is a terrible, maddening mistake to check up on the performance of one’s stocks first thing in the morning, and I am cured of the pernicious habit now. I will take the episode as a reminder not to let myself be lured again into caring too much about the wrong measure of success. My site was never meant to be a crowd pleaser, and I should have guarded more vigilantly against eying the ticker with green or yellow eyes. These are the follies of misplaced attachment, however understandable they may be given how much we all crave recognition and a sense of importance, whether we admit it or not.

I should have been more careful too about not worrying those closest to me with my overreactions, to this as to everything else. Easier said than done, alas. It’s not as if I get up in the morning thinking, “Let’s see how wound up I can get myself today about there not being enough visitors to my site; then let me try to overreact as much as possible to this and that other petty worry and disappointment, and let me be sure as well to drag those dearest to me into the quicksand as much as possible. Let me neglect my sittings, be as unmindful and impatient as possible, attach myself to as many inappropriate objects of desire as possible, all the while studiously nursing my aversions, cultivating dissatisfaction, and turning a deliberately blind eye to the all the funny micro-dramas and tiny tragicomedies unfolding in my life on a typical day!” That’s not quite how it goes, needless to say; I just end up there, even as I am trying to do better. It just happens, and that too must be accepted. But any reminder that there is a better way should nonetheless be welcome to me, even if it can take a day or two before it clicks and I can see the lesson and the humor in it.

I need to find a more detached way, and the blog is as good a place as any to do a bit more practicing. So no more anxious glances at the view counter for me, though also less excitement about the project, I’m afraid. That’s not a question of equanimity so much as collateral damage. My heart sank like a rock in cold water when I realized what was behind the longed-for surge, brief as it was, and it has not fully recovered from the shock. (I am not saying that I am right, either with respect to my longings or my disappointments, only that I am human.) Perhaps the enthusiasm will return before long; it is always welcome, this lovely state of “being filled with the divine,” to understand it literally.

In the meantime I intend to keep writing so long as the ideas keep flowing without too much repetition—although I can already see them beginning to do so now. I hope my pen will still be good for a post or two a week for the foreseeable future. But I cannot say for sure—both because I am unable to see very far ahead these days and because it will depend, despite everything else I’ve said, on whether I can generate enough lasting interest to keep me going. That remains to be seen.

For now, cough up the rest of the water, patch up the tattered sails, and out we go again!

PS: After being scolded by a friend over my supposedly poor handling of the situation, I braced myself and jumped through the various hoops to have the wayward clicks expunged from the record; as expected, I could get nowhere, at least not with a reasonable number of attempts at explanation. It would take the patience of a saint to resolve the matter neatly; mine is closer to that of a ticking time-bomb, and I declare defeat before I blow up.

It makes me wonder: if AI is really such a formidable force that we should all be trembling for our jobs (and I am not immune to such fears, see Post #40), then how come the artificial predominates so very painfully over the intelligent in current online customer service? And this even with everyday problems that would present no difficulties even to the most ordinary human mind, provided only that someone is listening and thinking along, and not merely pushing preset answer buttons while juggling twenty open lines at the same time. Humans are extraordinary problem-fixers when they set their minds to it, that is to say, when they are single-minded about thinking something through and coming up with a clever and creative solution—but they always turn out to be atrocious multi-taskers when you test them, not least those who think they excel at it. Yet we seem to be organizing much of our lives on the opposite premise, scattering our minds as much as possible and trying to do everything more or less at the same time.