The Things Worth Doing: a blog post and my site manifesto - ✍︎ ∙ Post ur Writing

So I finally got around to writing up my site manifesto. Something I keep coming back to with the Web Revival and my engaging with art and all of this in the last few years is the amount of effort that it all requires, and how that didn't used to be such a barrier. Yea this stuff is more difficult than social media but social media is trash in part because of all that convenience. Anyways, I write it better in the post lol. Here is the link to my blog but I've also mirrored it below

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The Things Worth Doing

I do difficult things. Or rather: I do things in difficult ways. Or maybe: the things that I want to do, are those that cannot be done easily. However you look at it: this shit ain’t easy. (and that’s the point).

There is a considerable amount of effort that goes into my life, my photography, my art, this site, or the way that I engage with music, or cinema, or television. I can never manage to do something the easy way, and I always make things harder on myself than they need to be. My curiosity leads me to ask questions that are too many steps forward for the current situation, and so I’m always stumbling forward towards my goals. I’m beginning to consider that this is a good thing.

When I decided to start learning photography, for example, I knew that I was getting myself into a journey. I only had a kernel of a curiosity of photography, but I knew myself well enough to recognize that I wouldn’t be satisfied until I learned, and saw, and performed first hand every step of process in the most complicated ways I can approach it for as long as I could get away with it. Only then could I adequately understand, and appreciate, my curiosity. So I took my time, I saved some money, and I prepared myself to get into yet another new hobby. I already had a camera that had belonged to my grandpa, I looked up a local camera store where I could buy some film, and I was ready to start. And this next part is always the most difficult: I actually did it.

I forced myself to overcome my natural desire to remain at rest. That mental inertia, that desire to just continue laying there consuming the free and easy dopamine from the skinner box in my pocket. No, I forced myself to get up. Because my curiosity can only be satisfied by doing! Which requires deliberate action.

I dusted off my grandpas camera, read the manual, got some film, loaded it, used it, got it developed, learned from my mistakes, loaded more film, tried again. I signed up for a darkroom class, learned everything I could, asked questions, applied the answers, asked more questions, made mistakes, read blogs, learned more. I bought my own equipment, developed my own film, and printed my negatives in my bathroom under a red light I hung on the wall, letting my prints rinse in the bathroom sink. I put them up to dry and waited patiently before holding them in the daylight and beholding something beautiful. Light that had traveled on this journey with me. Light that I captured with my camera had made its meticulous way onto this paper, had become my art. An expression of myself and my relationship with the world.

All that effort! For a print on a piece of paper! And it is so worth it. The smell of the chemistry, the whir of the fan overhead intermixing with the clicks and clacks of the analog 50s timer turning off and on the bulb lying within the 70s enlarger head. The subtle, acrid smells of the developer and the smooth texture of the resin coating the paper. Bliss. I’ve never enjoyed an activity as much as I enjoy darkroom printing. What started off as yet another hobby in a long line of hobbies destined to be taken to the very edge of “intermediate” and no further has become some sort of obsession and love. Something I’m only recently realizing is called passion.

And my heart breaks, knowing that these kinds of experiences are withheld from so many others, because instead of Effort, people have learned to find virtue in Convenience.

Inertia is a law in all things, and our own minds are not exempt. Effort is the force that moves the object at rest, and convenience is the inertia that keeps that object resting: the desire to let it be. Resting is easier. Why put in effort to move when you have the easier option? It’s only natural. It’s inertia.

There is a particular insidiousness to the design of modern media that takes advantage of this inertia and drives people towards resting when they should be moving, doing, and creating. Music used to require collecting CDs and cassettes, which had art on the front and inserts to attract buyers at the record store, which you had to go to because it was the only way that you could acquire music. Before records people had to go to social spaces: pubs, taverns, fairs or temples, if they wanted to hear music. Listening to music used to require the effort. Today you have every song you could possibly want available in your pocket. If you can’t find anything you want to listen to now you can even ask “AI” to just “make” it and you can listen to anything you can imagine! But we’re sacrificing something to all that convenience: the opportunities to challenge ourselves and enjoy the consequences of our actions.

Taking advantage of modern conveniences doesn’t make someone a bad person. We aren’t doing anything wrong. The system has been engineered to encourage this behavior and so it is the inertia of convenience that keeps us at rest. It’s natural. It isn’t our fault, but it is a mistake. Because if we keep sitting there, the systems supporting that convenience are going to keep making it easier for us to keep sitting there, because those systems can keep making profit off of the inertia. So they keep supporting our resting. And we keep spending our resources on their conveniences and algorithms and infinite scrolls. With “AI”, Capitalism has now made a convenience that can be whatever we need it to be, always and forever. Anything to keep us from doing or acting or creating or thinking or moving. We remain at rest. And we become still.

Lifeless.

Effort is required to break free from the inertia of convenience, but by it’s very design modern technology actively discourages effort. My curiosity has led me to want to know things beyond the reach of modern conveniences, and I’ve discovered that in order to do those things that I desire, it’s necessary that I use anachronistic technology to accomplish them, and to find virtue not in convenience but in work. The fact that the experience itself is more rewarding is a very welcome coincidence.

And so my site is written from scratch, with assets I created myself with particular care, or borrowed from others who helped me to learn. This code I spend dozens of hours writing and breaking and debugging and fixing. I’m sure I’ll break it again tomorrow. My darkroom is small and cramped and it takes me an hour to make a print I’m happy with but it lets me make something I’m proud of: my art that I love. I use an ipad for drawing not because digital drawing is convenient but because it instead lets me turn the process of drawing into a complex and chaotic experience of layers and brushes and filters that lets me play and make mistakes and learn. My writing is crafted with thoughtful care: everything from a blog post to a forum comment is drafted, edited, proofread. I will never allow an “AI” to steal my voice. I do things the hard way, and I do it that way because it’s the only way to do the things that I want done.

The effort is the point. It gets me moving, and once I’m doing and acting and creating and thinking, the inertia of effort makes it easier to keep going. It’s only natural. It's inertia.

It’s the whole point of life.

And so I will continue to put in ridiculous amounts of effort for no good reason other than I want to.

And I encourage you to do so as well. Abandon site builders and craft your online space yourself. Forgo social media and reach out to your people. Make real connections and not engineered interactions. Right now, this moment, there is a thing, a task, some hobby or chore that you have been putting off, perhaps for years. Do it. Please. It will be difficult, believe me I know. But you need only reach out if you need some help, because I promise: I want nothing more than to help you do the things worth doing.

With Love,
Robyn