Glowing lightbulb cutting through a wall of generic content blocks

Most blogs fail because they’re optimized for readers that don’t exist yet. You write for an audience, the audience doesn’t show up, the feedback loop breaks, you quit.

Blogging as a thinking tool first, publishing platform second, flips the whole thing. The writing process itself is the value, not the readership numbers.

Writing as Presence

Half-formed ideas floating around your head don’t become clear until you sit with them. Writing forces that, you can’t multitask your way through a paragraph. Unlike scrolling or consuming, writing demands you stay with one idea until it resolves.

AI makes this even more effective. Instead of staring at a blank page, you have a conversation. Not “write this for me,” but actual exploration: what’s the core insight here, what’s the counter-argument, what’s missing, does this connect to that other thing? The thinking is the work, the words are just serialization.

These conversations do something solo thinking doesn’t. They keep you engaged with the idea longer than you’d stay on your own. The back-and-forth demands what Anthony de Mello called presence — staying with your thoughts rather than being carried by them. By the time you have a draft, you understand your own idea better than when you started.

Conversations also generate more ideas. Exploring one topic leads to two others worth writing about. The backlog grows longer, not shorter.

The Dead Internet Problem

There’s a broader reason to publish even without readers. The internet is filling up with AI-generated content, SEO-optimized slop designed to rank rather than inform. Dead Internet Theory used to be a conspiracy theory about bots. Now it’s just a description of what most search results look like.

Actual human thought from real experience is becoming rare. Publishing it adds signal to the noise, even to a small audience. Someone searching for a specific problem in 2027 might find a post written today, and it’ll be more useful than the AI-generated listicle that outranks it.

Blog posts are indexed forever. The value isn’t immediate traffic, it’s building a searchable archive of thinking that accumulates over time.

Low-Friction Systems

The reason most blogs die isn’t lack of ideas, it’s friction. Setting up the post, formatting, publishing, promoting, all the overhead that makes “I should write about that” turn into “I’ll do it later.”

Automation fixes this:

  • Weekly publishing through GitHub Actions, no manual deploys
  • Social media posting automated too, no copy-pasting to platforms
  • Writing is conversation with AI, not blank-page paralysis
  • Ideas come from a second brain, already half-developed

The actual work: have an interesting conversation, clean up the output, push to git. The system handles the rest.

When the bar is low enough, you do it anyway even on weeks you don’t feel like it. Once you’re in the conversation, you find something worth saying.

The Point

Blogging optimized for readers requires readers to work, blogging optimized for thinking works regardless of audience size.

Every post clarifies an idea, every conversation generates new ones, and the archive keeps growing. If readers show up eventually, great. If not, the thinking already happened.