On This Summer, and Why I'll Keep Writing

Summer’s ending, and I don’t think it needs a post for every single thing that happened in it. What it needs, I think, is one short, honest statement, and then I move on to the next chapter.

So, briefly: I tried a Japanese flip phone, a keitai, as an experiment in getting rid of my smartphone, and wrote about why that didn’t stick. I spent a good chunk of the summer restructuring my NixOS config and finally self-hosting Vaultwarden and Immich without the usual dread. I moved to a new apartment, and decluttered a bit along the way – I’m a minimalist, a fairly extreme one if I’m honest, but even I had a handful of things sitting around that I didn’t actually need, so I let them go. I also switched back to physical books, after about a year of reading almost everything on my Kobo. Each of those probably deserves its own post eventually. This isn’t that post. I’m keeping this one short on purpose.

What I do want to say something about is the summer itself, the shape of it. For a few months I had, essentially, total freedom – no obligations, nothing and no one I owed anything to, more free time than I’ve had in years. I expected that to feel like relief the whole way through, and it did, but it also taught me something I didn’t fully expect: freedom like that isn’t automatically good for you. Our brains are remarkably adaptable, and they’ll happily adapt downward as easily as upward – give yourself nothing to push against and you’ll quietly start doing less, not more. Staying disciplined without anyone or anything requiring it of you turned out to be its own kind of work, maybe harder work than staying disciplined under a deadline.

The rest of what I actually want to say is simpler than all of that.

Thank you, genuinely, to whoever’s been reading this blog. I’d wanted to try something like this for a long time before I actually sat down and did it, and now that I have, I like it more than I expected to. There’s something genuinely amazing about it, in my humble opinion – taking a half-formed thought, writing it down, rereading it, retyping the parts that don’t land, and ending up understanding the thing, and myself, a bit better than when I started. I don’t think I fully knew what I thought about half of these topics until I tried to write them down properly. And there’s a part of it that’s about being known by someone too, even a small number of someones, which I won’t pretend doesn’t matter to me.

I also like the idea that these posts will still exist in five or ten years, as a kind of record of who I was at twenty, written in my own words instead of reconstructed from memory later. Maybe I’ll read them back myself. Maybe my kids will, someday. That feels like a good enough reason on its own.

But underneath all of that, I mostly do this for myself – to be in accord with my own thoughts, to actually make a point instead of just having a vague feeling about something, and to close chapters properly instead of just drifting out of them. This post is exactly that: a way of closing this one, and telling myself, in writing, what I’m about to focus on.

University started yesterday, and I don’t have anywhere near the amount of time I had this summer. I want to be a genuinely excellent student, and that means being honest about where my time and attention actually need to go. So writing won’t be as frequent as it’s been these past few months – I’m aiming for about one post a month, maybe more if something insists on being written, or less; I will see. I’m not doing this out of obligation to anyone reading, only for my own pleasure, so that’s the commitment I’m comfortable making.

Thank you for reading, and see you in the next one.