Comment by Supermancho
6 days ago
My style of online participation has been shaped by 2 ideas:
1. I rarely fully understand my own positions on minutia 2. Writing is rewriting.
I write forum posts to solidify my understanding of my own interests, beliefs, and reasoning. I often edit them multiple times before moving on and ignoring the responses thereafter. I can reference them and have to other people who ask my opinion. Sometimes I do respond back to replies immediately, and sometimes I revisit days later, after I've had time to put it in my day-to-day context. It's not a hard and fast rule.
Posting stopped being about convincing someone else maybe 20 years ago (around age 30). I do post to look back and understand myself. To others, I'm sure this sounds like existential navel-gazing and self-centered blathering, but I don't mind.
I do the same, except mostly I delete the responses. The writing was important to me, but the reading is rarely important to someone else. It would be wasting their time.
I would guess I post about 40% of the comments I write.
Lincoln famously wrote and never mailed letters as a way to vent emotions.
It's so bizarre to me that this works and I can't say I believed it until I tried. I shouldn't be surprised that it's so easy to trick our brains.
I assume the phenomenon where I write 90% of an email, save it as a draft to finish later, never remember to finish it, get asked about it and have irrefutable certainty I sent it, then finally discover it as an unfinished draft is a facet of the same trickery. Stupid brain... Grrr.
5 replies →
I wrote an email to my titanically incompetent leasing office mostly to vent emotions, then sent it anyway so I could receive proof that they had read it in writing for any future issues. It was quite cathartic.
1 reply →
> I often edit them multiple times before moving on and ignoring the responses thereafter.
"Sorry this letter is so long as I did not have time to make it shorter."
* https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/
1000% this. I write to force myself to think deeply and crystallize my opinion on things.