When I said in a post three months ago that I wanted to start taking this blog more seriously, it would have been reasonable to assume that I’d be posting more often, not less. For those who are curious, here’s why I haven’t posted in two months.
My initial plan at the end of January was to launch into writing a big, multi-part blog about the Irish housing crisis, and just post smaller, low-effort blogs while I was working on it.
One of those smaller blogs was to be about the coronavirus pandemic. But it turned out while I was writing that smaller blog that it was, in fact, a big blog. So big I would have to split it up into parts. And then it turned out that each of those parts was big enough that I started blowing past my deadlines for each of them. In a half-baked effort to still get them out on some sort of sensible schedule, I ended up producing some pieces which were both rushed and late. Not a good combo.
So I decided to abandon the schedule for the last post in the coronavirus series. It was going to have a more delicate subject matter and would require more reading than any other piece I had published in the series, so it made sense to do it right and take as much time as I needed.
But THEN I thought, “While I’m here, I may as well do a lot of preparatory work on some other posts so that they can all come out in quick succession, which will give me some good momentum for when I’m back posting regularly.” This might all sound like procrastination, but even if it is, it’s not procrastination I particularly regret. I’m a slow reader, so if I want to learn a lot I have to spend a lot of time doing it. Taking this hiatus has given me the latitude to explore ideas and topics I might never have gotten around to otherwise. As a result, the last two months have been some of the most intellectually stimulating of my life, including the years I spent in college.
Regardless, after all that work I finally felt that I was ready to publish the end of the coronavirus series this weekend. Just yesterday I was planning to have one long marathon writing session to get the last coronavirus blog out by today.
But then I got an e-mail I wasn’t prepared for. I won’t go into the details, but it appears that I have, unfortunately, despite my best efforts, gotten a full-time paying job.
Disaster! Where will I find the time to shitpost now? It looks like I’m going to have to put The Bad Blog on hold again while I find my feet in this new job.
I know, I know! I, too, am moaning and wailing and gnashing my teeth at the prospect of the world being deprived of my incisive social commentary, but there is a silver lining to this cloud. While on the first part of this hiatus, I spent some time considering what topics I should write about in future. I split all of my subjects of interest into three categories:
Things I’m familiar enough with to write about with confidence:
1) Housing
2) Media
3) Identity and identity politics
4) America
5) The 2008 financial crisis
6) COVID-19
Things I don’t know enough about to write on, but which I believe I urgently need to learn about:
1) Climate change
2) Local government
3) The EU
4) Textbook economics (apologies to everyone who taught me this in college)
5) Economic history
Things which I don’t know about, and which are important, but which I’m happy to leave to others:
1) China
2) Healthcare
3) Global Development
4) CRISPR
5) Irish history
6) The political effects of culture
7) I.T. infrastructure
8) Geopolitics
The good news is that the new job will necessarily involve me learning about three different topics from that second category, so I’ll be in a better position to write about the issues that matter when I return. The other good news is that there is nothing stopping you from scooping me by just learning about stuff on your own time.
In the interest of keeping the blog active and in the back of my mind, what I will probably do is start posting short reviews of the books I read during the hiatus. I’ll start with my review of Michael Lewis’s excellent new book about the pandemic, which I’ve just published and which you can read here.
That’s pretty much the gist of it! Leave comments if you’re bored and I’ll reply if I’m slacking off work.