Why I Blog And Why You Should Too

Jeju, 2017.

Back in 2006 when the FIFA World Cup was being staged in Germany, the English national daily Himalayan Times used to have a post everyday on one of the 32 teams participating in the event. I was and I still am a huge fan of Das Mannschaft (German National Team) and I was naturally looking for some build up action. I was the weirdo who liked to hang around the periodical section at our school's library. The daily was there but the information they provided only piqued my appetite.

I needed something more. I needed rumors. I needed gossips. 

Enter Das Blog. What a revelation. Some guy in the internet would post information on the German National Team and I would be all over it. The paid internet center at our residential school had a couple of computers connected to an amazingly slow internet. I was there every day to check if there was a new blog post. They usually had pre-game and post-game analysis. The format I really loved was reading 7 Conclusions: Germany Vs Some-Shit-Team. The blogger had a German "Ja" sense of humor. I was absolutely hooked. 

Germany ended up losing to Italy in the semis, the blogger stopped posting and I was left with having to deal with the pain alone. If only I could find something as engaging as that, I thought. If only the internet had something that would write about Arsenal. The team I followed from EPL. If only...

Enter Das Arseblog [HERE]. Andew Allen, the blogger behind the blog, who also calls himself Arseblogger, has blogged about Arsenal every single day since 2002. Yep, every. single.day. So much so that he quit his real job and is now a full time blogger, podcaster and news writer for his two websites (arseblog.com and news.arseblog.com). He's prolific, witty and has a I-don't-give-a-f**k style of writing. I basically ended reading his blog everyday (the blog used to be out at 3 pm local time in Nepal and around 6 pm south Korea) since 2006 up until late 2016. After Arsenal started sucking (again) midway through last season, I stopped investing my time and energy thinking about the football club which also, unfortunately, forced me to stop reading. I still listen to their arsecast extra from time to time. That's about it. 

The reason why I am trying to give a lengthy four paragraph background about the history of how I ended up associating with this weird thing called "blog" is to show you that I was unconsciously familiarizing myself with the concept of putting words into that internet, letting it out there for everyone to see, being completely OK with it (most people aren't, with good reasons). You can see why, when I decided that I wanted to write about something -just anything- and wanted a platform, I just used the only thing I knew well; to blog. 

In essence, blogging is such an incredibly selfish thing to do. You write and shove it on everyone's throat. You place value on what you say and force people to come over and read your perspective. You leave no ground for debate if you simply disable the comment section. Provide no email address and that's a one way traffic of information my friend. 

Yet, who am I not to? I lead an interesting life. I have a story to tell. Everyone has a story to tell. Everyone  has their own struggles. Everyone is an everyday hero. That's what makes everyday people so interesting to me. Don't think so? get them drunk and see how comfortable they become. I learned that the easy way here in South Korea. 

What most people don't end up doing though is to document that. Document in some form. With ubiquity of smartphones and cloud storage, people have been able to do that through pictures. While pictures do "speak the thousand words," it only speaks with the people who have had that experience. But there's a serious psychological trigger in writing something down in words; either electronically or otherwise. To see your thoughts into something tangible, something that you can see and share and laugh about is an incredible thing. Something that's personal to you is now open. Open for anyone who has access to it. 

That could be why I find blogging incredibly therapeutic. I go into depression, I blog. I have nasty breakup, I blog. I have nothing better to do? well, no I don't blog. I watch some dog videos. Puppies, precisely. After that, I blog. 

I seriously think doing it because it solves my problem. I write when I find a topic difficult and I need to think deeper. I write when I create something and I have to document that. I write when I don't agree with certain principles but I don't have anyone to argue with. I just write. I just blog. 

And I put it out there, into the vast expanse of internet, expecting really nothing in return really. There's nothing to lose for me. I am unimportant [HERE] but at the same time, weirdly, I am important. Blogging has given me a voice to express myself better, tangibly mature as a human being (read my posts from 5 years) and have a tangible proof that I am not the shittiest person in the world.

I live thus I blog. 

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