Okay. Now What?
I haven’t written anything new in about a month because it seemed kind of pointless and trivial.
When COVID started, I continued to write about what our life pace was like during the peak of our shelter-in-place. That felt about right. Yes, we were facing a pandemic but it was an entirely new situation that was totally new to everyone. We were all kind of feeling our way through the day-to-day and establishing what worked for us. I felt like sharing our family’s experience with shelter-in-place, working at home with kids, etc was useful for other people to hear about. The spirit of my blogging at that time was more of a “we’re all in this together” type of mindset.
Things felt like they might start shifting back to normal before even more history-making events started happening. This year feels like the most chaotic one so far in my 33 years of time on earth. If anything, 2020 has been consistent. Hasan Minhaj said it well: history is fun to read about but not nearly as fun to actually live through.
How Everything Has Affected Writing This Blog
I bounced around with whether or not to queue up and write some of the post ideas I had around marketing, technology and a few additional work hacks I had developed over the past few months.
You know, stuff I normally write about.
But it almost felt trivial. I had a video call with an old friend last week who also blogs and shared that same sentiment.
Whether you’re a “Bernie Bro,” “Making America Great Again” or floating somewhere in-between, we can all agree that we are in a heavy period of time. Brushing past everything and writing about my new favorite app seemed insensitive.
I had a couple of long runs after that conversation with Jeff and thought more. We are absolutely inundated with heavy content. There’s an oversaturation of posts out there talking about masks, elections, epidemiology and the like. My perspective writing about this, at least as far as this blog was concerned, would really just be white noise at this stage of the game.
So, I decided that writing about the mundane may not be such a bad thing.
What Will I Write About?
Honest answer: whatever I want to. It’s my blog. I don’t get paid for it. Sometimes people read it. Sometimes they don’t.
All that said, I plan on continuing to write about my favorite apps. How I’ve come around to reading on a Kindle instead of a hardcover book. Why I love my Apple Watch. My new productivity system involving my Outlook calendar and Asana. I’ve also learned some new stuff in the world of marketing.
I may even blog with cute photos of my kids.
There’s a lot of big stuff in the world and I don’t want to ignore it. We also need levity. The world is still turning even if it feels like it’s on fire. Many of us still have to get up and go to work. We have to raise our kids. Lawns still have to be mowed. Netflix shows have to be binged. Life is going to move forward whether we want it to or not.
In Light of Current Events, What Am I Doing Now?
Even though I’m not explicitly redirecting this blog to talk about politics of the day, that doesn’t mean I’m going to hide out and wait for all this to blow over. There’s a lot of opportunity for action.
There’s also never been a better time to speak less and listen more.
Here are a few things I’m doing offline.
Educating Myself Around Social Justice: There are a lot of books that I had on my reading queue that moved up to the top quickly (e.g., White Fragility, Just Mercy, The Color of Law, etc.) directly as a result of current events. If I am going to have an opinion on anything one way or another, it might as well be a better informed one. I have a huge queue of books on my list right now. Feel free to follow along with me on Goodreads, my new favorite social network. Speaking of social media…
Cutting Down on Social Media Consumption: At the beginning of the pandemic, I was actually on a Lent break from social media, really only using LinkedIn. It was probably the best thing for me in terms of keeping my head on straight and not panicking when the world felt on fire. I deleted social apps from my phone toward the end of last week to give my thumbs and brain a break. (Confession: I did scroll Instagram for about 15 minutes last night to catch up on what everyone did over the weekend with their families, then deleted it again). I’m still engaging a bit on desktop but the barrier to logging on is higher that way. I rarely pull a laptop out of my pocket if I’m bored for 30 seconds.
Subscribing to Local News: Between protests and election issues here in Atlanta, I felt the most responsible thing I could do was be informed with what is going on in my local community. After all, we had a bit of a front row seat to everything you see in the news. Getting our local paper delivered to our house was one step in that direction. State and local government likely has a greater impact on my day-to-day life than what happens in DC. I figured that my media consumption should probably reflect that. There was also a fantastic Patriot Act episode talking about the importance of local newspapers that pushed us to finally pull the trigger on that AJC subscription.
Supporting Black-Owned Businesses and Organizations: We honestly had already been doing this a bit before [waves hands around in the air] all of this. A few of our favorite spots in our neighborhood are black-owned businesses and have their own line items in our monthly budget. It’s something we are being more intentional about as a family moving forward.
Supporting local charities: We keep a small part of our budget that is set aside for charitable giving but not designated monthly giving (like supporting a missionary, a church tithe or other recurring gift). We plan on putting this more towards small local Atlanta charities and not going towards the big national ones. We know the current climate is making it harder for those small organizations to serve their communities and it’s a way we can help our neighbor.
Some of the above items I’ll go into more detail on in future posts. I’m reading a lot more and would love to share what I’ve learned. Just in the last few weeks, there’s been some good personal outcomes from cutting back on social media and leaning into local print journalism.
While I won’t ignore current events on this blog, I won’t focus on them either. There are plenty of much more (and less) qualified places on the internet for that. I feel like there’s a craving for the mundane. For the normal. I’d love for this blog to provide a space where people aren’t getting yelled at.
So that’s where I’m at. What about you?