Fin

This is the hundredth note in this category. I said in the very first entry that, if my pace of publishing in the past were an indicator, it would take me half a decade to get to a hundred entries, yet it took me only half a year. My output frequency increased by a whole order of magnitude. I wrote nearly 24000 words, more than I had written here in the time before combined. The experiment has now reached its end and ends, even arbitrary ones, are opportunities to reflect.

Why do I write in the first place? I have always enjoyed being in the realm of ideas, and I don't want to be there as a spectator only. So I must write: to learn, process and retain what I learned, to understand, to question, synthesize and hopefully in the end also to generate, to build. For all of this writing is a necessity. My memory is bad, not in any pathological sense, just very fundamentally limitated by the quirks of my protein-based CPU. These marvels of evolutions are, like it or not, a bit buggy for certain tasks. The magical number is much closer to four than I like to admit. The written word breaks up the dependence on a notoriously unreliable system, and enables the pursuit of ideas that are a bit more complex than the decision what to cook for dinner.

Having established that I need to write: why publicly instead of keeping it just to myself? One reason, and granted there might be quite fallible pop-psychology at work, it sets up an incentive for a better quality. Just raising the stakes by knowing that what I write can be associated with me, makes me shape my thoughts into a form that is at least not so bad that I'd be completely ashamed of it. So, I claim my little corner this still young, wild and untamed medium, what could happen in the worst case? That its existence helps nobody but me? I can risk that, it won't hurt anybody. To the extent that I hope in the slightest to someday contribute a tiny valuable bit to the world, I must create. I might in the end indeed be weighted and found wanting, but that I must risk, for if I don't that finding will be a certainty.

Therefore I'll simply continue. Thinking, reading, making things, writing. Slowly, piecemeal, as steadily as life permits, for if I keep it for myself I will not find out what I have in me.