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Safia Abdalla
Safia Abdalla

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A purposeful hiatus

It’s the end of the week.

To be honest, I’m getting a little tired of reading through straces. And also reading through code bases. Maybe it’s just the weariness of working full-time and hustling on Zarf. Who knew that the most difficult thing about finally regularly blogging was running out of ideas?

So, I figure, I’ll just free-form this and write whatever is on my mind.

Right now, it’s ideas. I find the cultural fascination with ideas, well, fascinating. It’s closely tied to the fascination with creativity, but not just any creativity, productive creativity. The kind that you would be OK within a capitalist society. There’s very little room for pointless creativity in today’s society.

If you’re going to think of something, it has to make you money, or “advance your career,” or save the world in some way. I’m not saying that those things aren’t valid pursuits, they just make me feel a little claustrophobic sometimes.

I think this might relate to the “tired” feeling that I mentioned earlier. I’ve had a few ideas over the past couple of weeks but none of them that feel…productive. But what is productivity, after all, if not an arbitrary and immeasurable construct? Heck, at what point did I lose my spark and decide to pathologically smother ideas that didn’t mean some ill-defined measure of productivity?

Since publishing Exits, I’ve worked on a few fiction pieces but nothing that has yet to materialize. I’ve been publishing blog posts on here, but I’ll admit that they are not as good as I would like them to be. What have I been writing a lot of lately? Emails and code and more emails.

When I first started this journey of consistently blogging, I was looking to get better at writing. Now that I’ve gotten a grasp of that, I find that the difficult thing to do is figure out what to write. I’ve had a fair bit of luck solving this problem for my bi-weekly newsletter by implementing reader polling to determine what topics I should write about.

So I guess that this is what this blog post is about, me running out of ideas. At this point, I’m willing to take the mature route and say that I’ll write only when I have something to say, not based on some arbitrary schedule.

So I guess see you whenever…

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