ain’t it fun
I only write in my blog for fun, and when I make it more important than just having fun, I really get in my own way. Yeah, I announce the cool things that I get to do, the cons I’m attending, I share my work and my podcast, and things that are work-adjacent, but if it isn’t fun to sit here and write about something, I just don’t do it. I won’t even go into how frustrating it is when I feel like I have to force it.
And I forget, every single time, how much I enjoy posting in my blog, how much I enjoy interacting with anyone who reads it in comments, how good it feels to make the human connections that, ironically, don’t seem to happen on social media, on account of all the bots and trolls and endless efforts to disrupt our peace.
This might be the most important and least-followed principle of internet culture: the thing you’re doing should actually be fun.
Which seems obvious, but we keep forgetting it.
Most people online don’t seem to actually enjoy themselves.
So why are they doing it?
Why do they keep posting?
Likely, some combination of: professional obligation (it became their brand), addiction to variable rewards (occasional validation amid mostly tedious interactions), identity protection (they’re Someone Who Writes Online), and simple habit.
The trap works like this: You start blogging for fun → people read it → you start thinking it’s Important → you optimize for engagement/influence/brand → it stops being fun → you quit or do it resentfully → eventually you remember it used to be fun → repeat.
There’s a simple lesson here: keep asking yourself “am I enjoying this?”
If the answer is consistently no, that’s important information.
“Of Course We Use Basecamp…”
Think about the actual mechanics of how someone ends up as a 37signals customer. They don't wake up one day and think "I need more control over my project management" and then systematically evaluate which software best delivers control as a concept. Even if they pretend that was in fact their process, what actually happens is more like this: they've been reading Jason Fried's writing for years, or in my case, following since the Bootstrapped Profitable and Proud days. They liked the swagger, the contrarianism, the implicit promise that you too could be one of the enlightened few who saw through the enterprise software bloat. Eventually they start a company or join a small team, and when it comes time to pick project management software, Basecamp feels like the obvious choice.
Of course we use Basecamp.
We're the kind of people who use Basecamp.
Re: identity based products.
On Competency Porn
The pleasure in competency porn is seeing a group of highly-skilled and in-control people collectively pull off something that would otherwise seem impossible. They’re not super-human in any way, so we can dream that we too could act and win as they do.
There's this great study (I think by Kahneman?) about how experts are only actually better than laypeople in fields with fast, reliable feedback loops - chess, weather forecasting, that kind of thing—but terrible in fields like political punditry where you can be confidently wrong forever without ever updating. Competency porn always takes place in Kahneman's first world: Ocean's Eleven robs the casino exactly as planned, House diagnoses the lupus (okay, it's never lupus), and nobody's plan gets derailed because a vendor changed their API without warning or because Carol from Accounting has a different interpretation of the reimbursement policy. Maybe what we're actually enjoying is watching people live in a high-trust equilibrium where other competent people do their parts and systems work as documented? Which, now that I think about it, might explain why these stories aged so badly during the pandemic.