A New Discovery

I recently noticed something about myself that I never had before. It was a little like noticing for the first time that you tap your foot incessently while you work, only to find that your officemate has always, always known that about you. It's just a little quirk, but I'm surprised I wasn't consciously aware of it before.

I am constantly manipulating myself. What it breaks down to is that I know myself pretty well, and sometimes, I don't feel like doing things I want to do. So I trick myself into doing them anyway. For example: this new blog space.

Now, I know I've mentioned a few reasons: broken blog software, friends, and so on. But let's face it: I'm a UNIX admin and a programmer. Making computers work is what I do for fun, as well as work. My friends use aggregators, and if they don't, they're more than capable of clicking one extra link. I didn't move here for technical or social reasons: there are actually two real reasons why I moved to Blogger, and they're linked.

1) I hope that someday someone will read something I write and like it enough that a lot of people read it. I need to be honest, here. I'm a writer, and I want an audience. Getting a Digg's worth of hits would be a dream come true for me, and I'm not ashamed to admit it. (Okay, maybe a little. But anyway.) At that point, I don't want to be thinking about my home server's bandwidth and so on. I know I could handle it with some tweaking; I just don't want to think about it right now. I want to think about writing. If I started getting that kind of traffic regularly, though, I'd probably switch to my own software just so I could keep my self-respect. My inner geek is pretty laid-back, but he has his limits.

2) In order for #1 to occur, I have to actually start blogging again. And Blogger, like any new tech (well, new to me), is a toy. I know myself, and I know that I like playing with toys. When I wanted to make sure my foray into photography wasn't a one-time event, I got a midrange-professional camera, and now it's my main hobby, taking up far more time in my life than programming. I've had a show up here in MITRE's corporate gallery space. Make no mistake: I do this to myself because it works.

So see notice the pattern: I realize I'm not going to do the thing I want to do, so I utilize my intimate knowledge of myself to get myself to do it anyway. It's just like manipulating another person, but I'm doing it to myself. And my guess is that this isn't nearly so unusual as it seems at first. Think about it.