Pick one or another! People only read blogs that cater to their particular narrow interest, so should I stop writing about a thousand different things?

The dreaded acronym tl;dr means “too long; didn’t read”. I hope the use of an acronym was originally ironic: If not, it shows the sad state of impatience that is widespread in the world.  As I mentioned last time, this is not entirely due to the Internet: The TV remote and the crazy jumpy nature of TV programming has prepared us for the world of soundbites.

But this time is not about how we got here. This time is about what I should do about it.

I have written literally thousands of journal entries. By coincidence, or inspiration, or copying Debra, I have included a picture at the start of my entries from the very beginning. This was smarter than I knew, because I know today that people turn and run at the sight of a huge screen of text. A pretty or funny picture puts them in the mood to stay long enough to overcome the backspace reflex, and possibly read some of the text.

That said, even I reached the tl;dr point of my own journal after about ten years.  That’s why I went on hiatus, and that’s why I eventually shifted my journal to WordPress.  The old HTML setup was great, arguably better in some ways.  But the link to the years-ago entries (1 year ago, 2 years ago, …, 9 years ago…) caused me to go back and read those.  And when I had done that, the day was pretty much gone. I did not have time to write a new entry too. So I stopped.

If even I cannot read this mountain of text I have produced, who else will?

One problem is that the quality varies randomly.  Not just the content, but the quality.  The content is one thing, you cannot expect someone who came for the Sims to stay and read about spiritual practices.  (Although the Sims do yoga and meditation…) But even when writing on the same topic, sometimes I write better than other times.

And of course I change over time, and facts change over time. So I may contradict myself, when I don’t repeat myself.

Perhaps I should just keep adding seemingly random stuff at this end of the journal, and leave to historians of the future to try to organize it. I mean, who else would, when even I myself can’t imagine going through it all?

Or perhaps I should split off different categories into different blogs. Actually I already have that.  I have a pretty much purely spiritual blog in English, a personal and a political / philosophical blog in Norwegian (that I rarely write in), I have my Sims blog on LiveJournal, I have Twitter and FaceBook. But I could go further.

I have considered  making a more systematic overview of my philosophy of the mind. A kind of one-man Wiki perhaps, with links between the different parts that relate to each other.  Or perhaps something more similar to a book, which imposes a kind of narrative and presents my thoughts in order.

Then again, should I really do that for the couple readers who don’t come just for the pictures?  If it is that important, historians of the future will do it.  If it is too long, people won’t read it anyway, right?

tl;dr: I don’t know how much work I should put into writing for a generation that does not read.