• 27 Dec, 2025 *

Ever since I can remember, I’ve been using the internet in a passive mode rather than by being an active contributor to it. From message boards, to social media, from youtube to twitter, the amount of information I’ve consumed largely surpasses the amount of stuff I put out there (I do eventually post things but if you check my twitter profile for instance the amount of original posts it’s not even a fraction of the amount of retweets).

It’s easy to rationalize this as there are plenty of reasons to avoid putting yourself out there on the internet. The one thing the internet has in abundance is people that would go out of their way to try to make you feel bad because they don’t agree with you or don’t like you for whatever reason. I always thought the ~dangers of strangers online were the main reason why I’ve always been a lurker and never a poster but lately I’ve been talking about this in therapy and it is making me reconsider this reasoning.

Turns out I just default to passive consumption in a lot of other aspects in my life as well. I love art, especially movies and music but I’ve never made anything and put it out there. I’ve been playing guitar (despite not being very good at it) on and off for more than a decade, but I’ve never made music like so many of my friends have. I’ve always liked movies but I never wrote about them (not to mention trying to make one) like many people do. Again, it’s easy to find a rational explanation as to why that is. Like I mentioned, I am far from being a good guitar player and, as this text is making abundantly clear as I write it, I am not so much of a writer as well (though english is not my first language, so I give myself some grace there). But at the end of the day it doesn’t matter that I’m not good at these things. I won’t ever improve any of those abilities if I don’t practice them and try to put myself out there some more.

And this is something that is inherently hard for me. I identify myself more than I would like to admit with that meme with the skeleton saying something along the line of “Am I immediately good at it? No? Then I’ve lost interest“. I have so many interests that it is very easy for me to stop doing what I am doing whenever things get boring and/or hard and find something else to occupy my time. Even now writing this text I can feel myself fighting the urge to close my laptop and go back to playing yakuza 6 or watching a movie.

Me, unfortunately.

This default passivity in how I interact with art and media in general combined with the growing feeling that my brain is succumbing to brain rot (or however you want to call the fact that I am constantly drawn towards my phone to keep scrolling through twitter/instagram without any reason and without ever feeling satisfied) is what motivated me to start this blog. Every year I like to set up some goals for myself and, even though some of those eventually get abandoned, I usually manage to achieve most. So I’m using the new year as an opportunity to reflect on some things I want to change next year and set some goals related to creating things instead of only consuming.

I have some modest goals. I don’t even pretend that I’ll be able to go from not doing anything to creating something grand and amazing but I want to be able to experiment this year. I plan on writing at least 12 posts for a blog (I know it sounds like a low goal but considering that I do not write AT ALL right now, putting out a blog post a month sounds like a reasonable challenge to me). I also plan on taking painting/ceramics lessons this year to see if I can find another manual hobby I like doing. I did cross stitch for a while, and, even I’m very proud of the things I made, I find it hard to maintain as a habit for some reason. I’ll add some examples of things I did in cross-stitch

The Kiss, by Gustav Klimt.

The Son of Man, by René Magritte

So that’s basically it, I know it’s the most cliche thing in the world to start a blog by justifying it’s existence but I feel that actually sitting down to write this post was actually beneficial for me by giving me a taste of what I’m signing myself up for. I don’t plan on forcing myself to write just for the sake of writing, but I’m hopeful that once I get over the initial strangeness of doing it and the gnawing desire to just go back into consumption mode by going on my phone/videogame I will start to get some pleasure out of this. If this doesn’t happen is not as if I made some big investment in time/effort so I guess I’m alright with it too. It just a matter of giving it a shot, an attitude I can hopefully carry to other areas of my life this year :)