How the Mighty Have Fallen: Happiness and a Blogging Retrospective

Go Read Roosh's post on Happiness and Permanence (Today, not next month).


I figured out a long time ago, that I did not believe in true, contentedness, total happiness. Like Hunter S. Thompson said, it's a big word, hard to pin down. And only fools use it with certainty.
I try to find the small things I enjoy and do them with as much consistency as possible: train, drink good coffee, watch/read good narratives that discuss the nature of humanity and relationship dynamics. It's not much, but it's what I like, and that's all I need to know about it.

If you search for the peak of the mountain but think attaining it will innately change your level of happiness permanently or long term....you are wrong. Look at lottery winners to prove my point.
Find the small things that please you, savor them, and pursue the hobbies that give you satisfaction, the feeling of achievement, and teach you about yourself and others.

Sdtrack: Joy Division
I look around and see few of my contemporaries. Roissy. In Mala Fide. Countless, countless others.
Outed. Derided. No longer anonymous. Simply burned out. Or found better things to do. So many blogs on the blogroll that just stop getting updated and fade into obsolescence.

I can think of only a handful of those who were blogging when I first started that remain present and accounted for: Craigslist Dater. Roosh. VK's Empire of Dirt.

Craigslist Dater and I both have had our share of blogging-related fiascos and problems with anonymity.
She's had more brushes with fame actual notoriety than myself.
I've had my share of requests for web-zine and online publications/interviews but have always demured in the interest of self-preservation and professional circumstance. 

You blog for yourself. You blog to speak truth in a format so raw and unadaultered. But with success or rather notoriety, or perhaps simply impact.....comes risk. More precisely, risk to your personal life, your relationships, and ultimately, depending on your field of work, professional risk as well.


I've been discovered multiple times.
And yet, I continue blogging. Like the burned lips of a crack addict, my fingers keep finding the keyboard and keep blogging from the wasteland.
Though, my moral wasteland has become quite a bit more gentrified. The old remnants and graffiti of my ways persist, in actuality, I haven't cheated since I've been married.

I've had to take dozens of steps in an effort to protect what little anonymity I have left, and yet....the reality is....that when you blog for this long...each day is a step closer to being outed again. I've had to heavily sanitize events, descriptions, leave places and locations nameless or  simply imply their identity to protect myself. And even this....I know in my dark heart....is not enough.

The blog was at first a brutally abject depiction of my life. Straight forward. It came out stream of consciousness and I changed only names of persons and locations.
Then I realized just how large yet small the internet is. And that such writing will undoubtedly lead to being recognized.
I was recognized at least twice downtown, and with the blog's discovery by several of the women in my life, the death toll grew ever more costly.

I did a poll awhile back and found that the vast majority of my readers (who bothered to vote) had been following the blog for a year plus.
I'm glad the blog has staying power.
I'm sad that the sanitation of the blog and events and such has violated the one thing I had hoped would endure on this blog: truth in its rawest form.

Let's recount the ways I was caught:
 - carelessly left an email linked to the blog in a comment to a fellow blogger. a girlfriend googled my email address - led her to the blog and there was enough time stamped material, clear parallels to my daily life
 - internet history search of my laptop by a girlfriend
- guy i knew happened across the blog, put 2 and 2 together and facebooked it to a girlfriend
- one of the girls who'd previously found out about it above, messaged it to a girlfriend I had later.

At any rate, fame, no, notoriety, nay.....people reading your shit and it having impact....will catch up to you.

We all start a blog to be anonymous or semi-anonymous. Chance or fate or nothing leads to either leaving blogging entirely, abandoning anonymity ala Roosh (though now he must withhold information about his location), or heavy sanitizing of the blog are the only final results.

You have been warned. I say this not as a young chicken or fish in the blogging game. I say this as a blogger of nearly 7 years: 119k views on this current blog's incarnation, 32k views on the other one, and hundreds of thousands of views on my original blog, lost to the sands of being outed after which I yanked all the original material down.
     - Yrs. in Christ