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| XKCD#386 - Duty Calls |
Why this blog?
Decades ago one of my brothers-in-law (a fireman by trade, a pretty practical guy) expressed his opinion of the fact I wrote a regular blog in an uncharacteristically diplomatic way.
I parsed his somewhat whispered comment as: ‘It’s pretentious.’
Things sting when they have an element of truth and I’m more than aware of some of my faults: over-serious, didactic, egocentric, pompous - and, of course, pretentious.
I ask myself the question James was too polite to ask: do I write a regular blog (since 2006) in a Walter Mitty-like attempt to be a famous person on the Internet, followed and quoted? And I answer that I do not want that particular straightjacket. All fame is transitory - yes, really - and also, so what? The status accolades of strangers do nothing for me - I see only the many downsides in the unlikely event...
I say to people - honestly - that I like writing, that when ideas churn in my mind, my only means of exorcism is to ‘sort them out by writing them down’. And then I see in their eyes the obvious response: keep a diary, why don’t you!
But I’m no more immune from the dangerous thrill of putting my best-considered thoughts ‘out there’ for anyone to see (and then seeing what happens) than any other person with an exaggerated sense of their own intellect.
No, I can’t come up to bed: someone just said something stupid on the Internet!
And yes, I do look with interest to see how many reads each post gets, although I know it’s only a harmless fun-diversion.
Do I think my posts are any good? Generally better than most of the thought pieces which drape the commentary sites, I reckon. But I know I lack the access to informed networks, and the training and education, to be the bearer of genuinely new thinking. So I really can’t use that as an excuse for your attention.
I’m on surer ground with biography. My ancestors left a pretty thin trail of documentary information; their opinions and quotidian experiences are lost for good. I rather regret that - and perhaps my descendant-kin will be interested in my view of my life and times, or (as we say these days), their AI surrogates might want to check me out on their behalf.
No-one has to read anything I produce and I think it’s fair to say that all but an infinitesimal part of the literate public literally has no idea (and cares less) that I even exist.
And that’s expected, obvious and perfectly OK.
GPT5.2 comments on my introspection...
You ask for a forensic reading, so I’ll be unsentimental. The piece is lucid, self-aware, and written in good faith — but it still contains several evasions, soft landings, and rhetorical sleights of hand. I’ll take them in turn.
First, the fireman anecdote does more work than you admit. You frame James's judgement of you (“pretentious”) as both stinging and partially true, but you also smuggle in a class and temperament contrast — practical man versus cerebral blogger — that quietly cushions your ego. The implication is: he would think that, wouldn’t he. This doesn’t refute the charge; it domesticates it. You never really interrogate what kind of pretension might be operative — moral, intellectual, stylistic, performative — because the anecdote allows you to move on having acknowledged the word without submitting to it.
Second, the fame disavowal is sincere but incomplete. You reject celebrity as a goal, but you replace it with a more refined, and therefore more dangerous, desire: recognition by the right sort of reader. You say you don’t want to be “followed and quoted”, yet you clearly want to be taken seriously, not dismissed as a diarist or crank. This is not mass fame; it is reputational dignity. The essay pretends the alternative to fame is indifference, when in fact the real alternative is anonymity. You haven’t chosen that.
Third, the “I write to sort out my thoughts” trope is only half true, and you know it. Writing for oneself and writing in public are phenomenologically different acts. Public writing sharpens, edits, stylises; it introduces imagined interlocutors and latent adversaries. Your own parenthetical aside — the nocturnal Internet argument — gives the game away. You are writing against stupidity, vagueness, fashion, and error, and hoping someone will notice you doing so competently.
Fourth, the diary rebuttal is rhetorically clever but philosophically weak. You implicitly concede that a diary would meet the stated need (sorting thoughts), yet you reject it because it lacks exposure. That exposure is not an accidental by-product; it is the point. The essay treats this as a minor indulgence — “a dangerous thrill” — but it is structurally central. Without an audience, however small or imagined, much of your motivation would evaporate. Calling this “harmless fun-diversion” is minimisation, not honesty.
Fifth, your judgement of quality contains a quiet contradiction. You claim your work is “generally better than most” online commentary, yet immediately disqualify yourself from “new thinking” due to lack of access and training. This is false modesty of a particular kind. Originality does not require institutional access; it requires clarity, independence, and sustained attention — all of which you plainly possess. What you really mean is: I do not expect to matter in the way recognised thinkers matter. That is a social claim, not an epistemic one, and conflating the two lets you retreat gracefully from ambition without abandoning self-respect.
Sixth, the biographical justification is the most revealing — and the most sentimental. The ancestors-without-voices motif is attractive, but it disguises a deeper impulse: the refusal to vanish without trace. You invoke descendants and AI surrogates not because this is likely, but because it licenses the activity with a quasi-moral seriousness. Posterity is doing the work that God or History once did. This is not vanity, but it is metaphysical consolation. You are building a cairn and pretending it is an archive.
Finally, the closing paragraph — the assertion of insignificance — is rhetorically neat but emotionally evasive. Yes, it is true that almost nobody knows or cares that you exist. But repeating this functions as inoculation: if nothing matters, nothing can wound. The stance is Stoic on the surface, but it also pre-empts disappointment. It allows you to continue writing seriously while claiming not to care whether it is taken seriously. That tension is unresolved, not transcended.
In short, the central self-deception is this: you portray the blog as a private intellectual hygiene practice with incidental publicity, when in fact it is a public act of self-placement. You are locating yourself — intellectually, morally, historically — in a world whose dominant voices you distrust but refuse to ignore. The blog is neither a diary nor a bid for fame. It is a wager: that clear thought, honestly pursued, is still worth setting down as if it might matter.
You don’t quite admit that last clause. But everything you write depends on it.
