I have tried many things that has challenges and streaks throughout the years, and it never ends up being a good thing, I see with myself that I will keep on finding loopholes to get a “technical win” and it’s not just something I see in myself, I see it in others as well.

First take a reading goal, I see many set themselves pretty high goals, like reading 50 books in a year, which is well and good, it’s a good number of books to read in a year, but then it gets closer to december, and the number is still not there, so they start out reading smaller and smaller books, and just end up reading a comic or something and counting it as a book. At the same time they will avoid longer books which might have been great to read, because it will reduce the arbitrary amount of books that they have set as a goal. I for sure would not have read two 1000 page books this year if I had set a number of books goal to read. Since bookwyrm just really wants me to set one I set an easily achieveable one for me and go on.

Streaks also leads to the same kind of thing, I see “blogging challenges” like blaugust or 100 days to offload, and look at what comes out of it, and it’s the same thing happening, you don’t really feel like writing anything that day, and it’s getting late, you just want some sleep, and you end up writing 300 words of nonsense. It’s here where you stop looking at your post as some fun thinking through a theme, or something you really want to write to get off of your chest, and it turns into content, you have to make content for the content machine, and for many of the posts that I have read^Wskimmed that are marked as this would have had more content if they had just copy pasted lorem ipsum and called it a day. I don’t really believe in things being “content” if something is just there to be there, what is it then worth? If the only reason you write something is to get something out, what’s the point?

I have way much more belief in, and it’s something that I practice for myself most of the time, at just blocking out time to spend on something, for reading I have set times a day where I will at least get started reading, and then continue on. For writing, I some times write a couple of pages of something and just scrap it afterwards because I’m not happy with what came out. Sure it may not have a tangiable thing that I can show others as a result like a streak of 31 days of having written something, but I know.

This dillusionment with the result of challenges and streaks has caused me to stop doing things I enjoy many times, I’ve taken part in challenges for reading, then seeing I will not reach my goal deem myself an unworthy failure and just stop reading for a time, the same is with things like learning vocabulary, the one surefire way to get me to stop actually learning is to bring in some kind of streak system, because if I fail that streak once, my brain insists that I just am an unmitigated failure and it should never learn vocabulary again, because I’ve already lost.

Now let’s jump back to the blogging challenges that kind of triggered this post, I see that the more people who I usually really enjoy reading posts from write these less than lorem ipsum posts, it feels like they don’t care about writing it, they write not because they want to, but because they feel an obligation to, to not be a failure in not reaching their goal, them treating their writing more as a way of pushing out “content” than wanting to share something, or writing something they even care a little bit about makes me as a reader not care either. The insidious thing though is that this also colours their other writing, the more slop someone shares, the harder it gets for me to care as well, and the itching to just unsubscribe from something that neither the writer, nor myself really seem to care about grows.