One of the detriments of digital life is that it all boils down to numbers.
Whether it’s the number of friends or followers, the number of likes and shares a post gets on social media, the number of page views on a blog, the number of pages of search results before your thing pops up, or just the basic numbers of 1 and 0 that it all boils down to anyways… the internet, and our presence on it, is composed of numbers.
The dashboard of my blog has a stats widget that shows me how many visits I get per week. It used to be daily, but I changed it up to try and game myself into not caring quite as much. Even so, I still give it a quick glance on log in, before I start writing my post for the day.
Although I can’t see the individual days, and therefore the individual posts, I can tell which posts bump the numbers upward. I’d like to say that they’re the better written ones; but in actuality, it’s a matter of what appeals to the most people at any given time, and not a mark of quality.
I can also tell which weeks I hold back posts from social media because I don’t want to deal with the foolishness that comes with topics and posts that aren’t popular or shareable. Those are the ones I know will generate a bunch of comments that will put me on Facebook High Alert for a couple days and suck away my will to live.
Is that cowardice or critical thinking? Honestly, I’m not all that interested in the answer, because as long as Facebook isn’t being a complete drain on my energy, I mark that down as a positive.
In fact, the only two places I’m interested in keeping score right now are: 1) the fantasy football league I’ve been pulled back into for another year, and 2) my daily writing chart.
So if you’re really interested in what I have to say and think, feel free to subscribe to the RSS feed for this blog. If not, I wish you well in finding a blog that better suits you.
Either way, I’m not keeping score.