This is an intentional choice that comes from a deeper reflection on how metrics have shaped my online behavior.

I’ve been conditioned for years to care about vanity metrics, such as likes, shares, and views. This is one of the main reasons I created my own website: to carve out a quiet space where I control what I don’t want to see. On major social media platforms, we’re constantly bombarded with these numbers. It’s clear that a lot of people are at a breaking point as we’re fully realizing how much collective harm we’ve experienced by engaging with all this noise.

There’s an online game which I think summarizes the experience of the contemporary web perfectly. Stimulation Clicker created by Neal Agarwal is frighteningly addictive to play. It really captures just how much chaos we inflict on our brain for all that sweet dopamine rush from notifications and stats.

I don’t want to write things that make all the numbers go up. If I wrote a blog post that became popular, I’d rather not know about it. There’s a likely chance that I would start changing what I think about because I’m trying to cater to the big numbers. Public validation inevitably turns into over-optimization, which dilutes and distorts all thoughts. I want to write more and this is motivated by a desire to engage and document my thoughts more clearly.

While it might sound cliché, there’s truth in the observation that the most meaningful creations often come from people creating primarily for themselves. There’s an unexpected liberation in writing something and not knowing whether it reached a hundred people or none at all. Not knowing turns into not caring. For me, this leads to a pure mental space of simply creating.