How to Dissuade Yourself from Becoming a Blogger

What a buzz all the bloggers are making these days! It seems like just about everybody is pouring their musings into a text box. Are you feeling tempted to start a blog of your own? Here are some ways to bypass the trend.

Steps
Find five completely random blogs, and read them daily for a month. After thirty days, you will absolutely dread your self-imposed requirement to read all that dreck. Any blog you create will most likely be on par with what you've been reading. Don't put anyone through that.

Consider that your voice, even if it is truly a good one, is a tiny peep against the massive wave of tripe out there. The odds of anyone you don't already know finding your blog are low.

Write on a regular basis in Wordpad instead. If that doesn't satisfy your urge, and you feel that you must post your blog online, then you might just be craving attention and validation--which you'll never truly find in a blog. If you give up on your Wordpad journal after about three days, you'll do the same with a blog that just takes up server space.

Ask yourself if you really have the time to commit to a blog. What about that treehouse you wanted to build? Or the book you wanted to write? Or the car you wanted to fix up? Or the restaurant you wanted to take your wife to? Or the new career you wanted to pursue? Instead of writing about pretty much nothing, or whining about all the things you wish you were doing instead, start doing something that'd actually be worth writing about. And if it's really worth writing about, you'll be having too much fun doing it to tear yourself away from it.

Tips
If attention and validation is what you're looking for, know that you will get neither from blogging. As above, very few people will ever know that your blog (or you, by proxy) exists. Of those who do find it, a large percentage will be flamers and trolls, who will only post comments to you about how you suck. The remainder of comments posted to your blog will be sappy treacle, which you won't trust as being sincere anyway.

Consider writing on a wiki instead. Unlike most blogs, wikis like Wikipedia and wikiHow are read by millions of people each month. Several wikiHow authors receive "fan mail" messages every day from appreciative readers. In addition, many authors discover that they enjoy the wiki collaborative writing process more than writing in solitude.

Warnings
The information you post on the Internet is likely to linger for years and years to come, as web pages are archived by "snapshot" services like the Wayback Machine. Once it's out there, you can't take it back. An employer running a Google search on your name years down the line might be turned off by your now documented obsession with your cat.

Keep in mind that, unless you expressly make it otherwise, blogs are extremely public. This is not your secret diary that you write your innermost thoughts in because only you have the key and you wear it around your neck 24/7. If you have stuff that you don't want your mom, your best friend, your significant other, your secret crush, or your aforementioned cat to know, don't go blabbing it to complete strangers on the internet. You cannot assume that the people you don't want to see what you're saying won't somehow stumble across your blog and know all your dirty little secrets. If you must record these thoughts for posterity, do so offline.

From wikiHow:

"Even a fool, when he holds his peace, is counted wise: and he that shuts his lips is esteemed a man of understanding."
Proverbs 17:28 American King James Bible

One of the most obvious and significant attributes of humans is the ability to communicate through speech. An interesting corollary is that we can also communicate our thoughts in real time; we do not need to plan what we’re going to say before we say it. This has both advantages and disadvantages. It would be clearly undesirable for us to have to formulate our thoughts before we issue an immediate warning ("run!") and communication would be dramatically slowed if we were unable to respond, naturally, to people in normal conversation.

On the other hand, this innate ability is often the source of consternation when what we say on the spur of the moment is something we later wish we had either not said, or said differently; it happens to everyone, sometimes, the trick is to remember when. Typically, this happens when we are responding quickly in stressful situations, or during confrontation, although it can happen at any time. Recognizing that we do not always say what we would like to communicate is an important realization – how to help mitigate that issue is not complex, but does require some behavioral changes. The goal is to be aware of when to talk naturally and fluidly, and when to think before we speak... and when not to speak at all.

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