IndieWeb Blog Carnival—“Renewal”

This month's IndieWeb blog carnival topic is “renewal”—here is Jamie Thingelstad's introductory post on the topic.

Initially I wasn't sure if this topic would apply to anything on which I currently had the inspiration to write, but I read Juha-Matti Santala's post for the carnival and something clicked for me. He writes about

the often observed dilemma that (especially) we techies often run into: how to resist the urge to rewrite the website every time you start writing a new blog post.

I have a similar desire to tinker on and “renew” my site, and recently that has interfered not only with sitting down to write for the site, but with my project and leisure time more generally. In addition to my website tinkering, I'm going to discuss my relationship more broadly to leisure and to projects that interest me.

Writing about Projects

I have received positive feedback for some of the writing I've done here, and I find myself chasing the high of having someone else appreciate something I've made. The kind of writing that I most want to do requires an additional step beforehand. I want to do write-ups of interesting code or music projects and that requires me to actually do a code or music project. Because the writing I'm most proud of requires these extra steps, when I contemplate writing for my blog I'm really thinking of two separate things—the project itself and then the writeup.

Since this site is one of the more public-facing expressions of my skills and personality, small changes to it can feel like easy ways to seek validation of those skills. Rather than having to do a whole project and then still know I need to complete a writeup, if I add an interesting feature to the site, I can share about that on Mastodon or Bluesky and the feature is immediately legible to a viewer without needing much of a writeup to communicate it.

A second motivator to endlessly tinker is that my compulsion to stare at and revisit my own site tends to reveal small “flaws” in it, and leaving things the way they are when they aren't “perfect” feels like a little itch in the back of my head. Even if I feel intimidated by the prospect of getting a personal project to the point it can be written up on my blog (and then actually doing the writeup), poring over my existing website and writing can let me revisit nice things that people said about specific aspects of it, but since looking at it naturally reveals any small flaws, I end up with a laundry list of things that could be tweaked, and that I might prefer were a little better.

The Character of My Projects

In addition to the ease of receiving feedback on my site and the list of small flaws I accumulate, most of the other projects I want to do (audio software development, composition, sound design in Max/MSP, etc.) are more complex and/or subjective than site tinkering. My website already exists, and HTML/CSS are a little more forgiving than C++, so (for example) starting a brand new audio plugin or tweaking an existing one both feel more intimidating.

Composing music (and since designing Max/MSP patches is part of composing for me, that too) also feels much more subjective than frontend development. If a new site feature does what it's supposed to and fits my existing visual design, I'm happy with it. With composing, what constitutes “objectively good” music? It's at least my personal value that there is no truly objective measure of “good” and “bad,” “better” and “worse” art—see for example, Philip Ewell's provocatively-titled article on how our exaltation of Beethoven is much more subjective and based on cultural biases than we might like to admit.

Overall, it's much harder to get myself to start these more subjective and intimidating projects, and much easier to perseverate on tweaks to my site.

Instrumentalizing Leisure and Creation

I found an essay by Anne Helen Petersen via Tracy Durnell's blog that was helpful for me in thinking about how I approach all of my projects, both in coding and composing. Petersen writes about the way she notices herself and other millennials approaching hobbies and leisure. This approach is

…big and ambitious. It’s swallowing. It’s barely keeping the impulse to optimize and monetize at bay. It’s not unique to millennials, but it is endemic among us.

She notices she and her peers grew up feeling that

if you’re doing something that’s not directly related to grades, then it should be extremely legible as a line on your college resume.

If you did what we called an extra-curricular, it was less because it was fun, or because you wanted to, but because “it looked good,” or communicated something “interesting” or “well-rounded” about your personality. […]

It makes sense that whatever hobby we find we like doing…we struggle not to turn it into work. I don’t even mean getting paid for doing it, although we’ll get to that later. We make it hard because when something’s hard, and [we] complete it anyway, it feels like we’re “being productive.” And the more productive we are, the better we feel.

This essay resonated deeply with me and my ongoing search to find recreational activities that don't feel like work, and with which I don't feel like I need to prove myself and do the hobby “well enough.”

I first picked up coding in around 2021–2022, first in sparse explorations here and there, and then in mid 2022 (i.e., right after I finished my composition PhD) much more seriously. I had long been interested in pursuing it, but there was an additional thought—that because the market for college music teaching jobs is rough to say the least, having skills in tech would give me more opportunities for employment and stability. Even when I'm explicitly trying to code for my own enjoyment only, it's hard to break away from the feeling that I need to “optimize” the topics I pursue for capitalist market logic.

Composing was not even an “extra-curricular,” it was just a “curricular” for me. Since all my degrees are in music composition, my skill at composition was central to my academic success, and while I greatly appreciate my teachers' pushing me to think more deeply about how to communicate my ideas clearly in music, it's a pretty big transition to go from receiving weekly feedback in private lessons to being completely in charge of evaluating my own music.

This difficulty extricating my favorite activities from ideas about “productivity” and capitalist utility further contributes to the anxiety around pursuing these activities, again, making small tweaks to my site much less intimidating by comparison.

Reconnecting with What Drew Me Here in the First Place

What do I want to do with this information about how I approach the things I enjoy? First, I want to allow myself “mess around“ more. If something doesn't have immediate capitalist utility, that's OK—it's desirable, even! It sounds much more healthy to let myself do things simply because I feel like it. I want to share what I do in smaller, easier-to-create chunks, without worrying whether each chunk is “impressive” enough.

I also want to allow myself to write about exactly what interests me, regardless of how I think it will be received. For example, I've written a few posts about sound design in Max/MSP and they seemed not to get as much attention as some of the other posts I've done. This wasn't a surprise — Max/MSP is a little niche, and in contrast, some of my posts on databending have a lower bar of entry, only requiring basic use of the Audacity sound editor or a hex editor. It may also be that I had fewer people following me at the time that I posted about Max/MSP. Regardless, I don't want to allow chasing “likes” to dictate what I write, and I think it would be nice to write more about what I do with Max/MSP.

Overall, I want to take a step back and reconnect with my interests in a way that affirms what I most enjoy about them and lets go of the need to impress or be “productive”—a renewal of sorts for the spring.