When Blogging Becomes Bitter

Blogging is a tool whose versatility allows for many uses and the benefits that can be derived  are myriad.

Oftentimes, we read about the positive aspect of blogging; the Utopian escape it provides and the cash cow that it apparently has the potential to be.

It is not very often however we hear about the grimy side of the experience.

“…I must have a dark side also If I am to be whole”- Carl Jung

Like everything else in life, all things should be done in moderation, lest the scale of balance be disrupted thus unleashing chaos.

Here are some of the things that can happen when the blogging scale is thrown off balance:

Kills productivity

If you are a full-time, money earning blogger, then spending excessive amounts of time on your blog is justifiable.

If however you are blogging as a hobby (like me) then blogging can turn into another productivity killing social medium.

The scrolling syndrome is real; you sit behind your screen for hours, scrolling through your reader, over and over again. You visit other blogs, you change your blog layout, your font, your site title, everything!  Essentially obsessing over your new found  pass-time.

If you are doing this without any clear indication of the direction you would want your blog to take, then all you are doing is wasting time and being unproductive.

Breeds jealousy and self doubt

Don’t pretend like it doesn’t suck when you see someone whose blog started the same time as yours mutate into a super blog and they’re publishing their post on “how I reached 10k followers in 3 months,” say what?!

It doesn’t take long for the green-eyed monster to rear it’s disdainful ugly head, “Bitch you know you bought those damn followers!”

“Make-up? OOTD? Really?! That post had so many likes?! So much interaction? Damn those readers are either seriously vain or has their priorities mixed all the way up!”

Then you turn the focus, “What am I doing wrong? Aren’t I good enough? Does nobody like what I write? I wrote on the same topic and they got more likes than I did. What are they doing that I’m not?”

You are on to your blog to scrutinize what you ‘think’ you are doing wrong. You re-read  your posts, you begin comparing your blogs, your style, your interests, the very thing that makes you, You!

This can cause you to become discouraged. You can also lose confidence in yourself and your own abilities to the point where you deprecate yourself and it can even push you to quit blogging altogether.

You become shallow and disingenuous

“He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.”

Networking, genuine networking takes a lot of work because it requires you to actually visit a blog, genuinely read their work and genuinely comment. With the way in which everyone is strung out over numbers, this creates a certain level of shallowness and insincerity.

The hollow follows, the “look at me’ likes, the follow to unfollow. While these may appear to be innocuous as it relates to the craft. It unearths a darker side of human beings a certain selfishness, an insincerity that comes with all these self-serving actions.

You join the Facebook groups, the twitter groups. You take part in all the networking activities only to find that the persons you’ve followed and in turn followed you back quickly unfollows!

This type of practice can cause anyone to become distressed and even become the very thing they despise by doing the exact same thing.

Blogging like everything else can become grim, remaining true to yourself and your purpose significantly decreases your being negatively affected by some of its unsavory by-products.

What about you? Have you ever felt like quitting your blogging career? How to you deal with the negative side of blogging? Let me know in the comments below… 🙂

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