About

What This Blog Is About

The premise is simple:

1. Intellectual honesty;
2. Hatred of self-deception;
3. Material analysis of my reality.

Everything on this blog follows this logic. And to answer the titular question:

The blog exists to describe my reality.

The post could end here because that basically summarizes everything: describe historical facts, explain my reality, and direct it at future historians who want a primary source of how our reality worked.

Not how you want it to be remembered, but what it actually looked like.

But then I thought that a more in-depth explanation could not hurt, so here goes.

What Do I Talk About

At the time of writing, I do not have a clear idea of what I *should* talk about.

It is very difficult to predict what future historians — 100 years, 1,000 years, or even 10,000 years from now — might be interested in. The hypothetical world placed that far into the future is unpredictable; I can't even be sure that anything that exists today will still be relevant to the people who will come after us. I have no idea what the future reality will bring, what it might look like, feel like, or whether humans will even exist at that point.

On the one hand, I want to talk about stuff that is actually *important*, i.e. things that are going to be relevant far into the future. This is because garbage serves nobody, and with the finite amount of time I have for writing, and a seemingly infinite amount of things I could possibly talk about, it feels like a one-time decision with far-reaching consequences: choose meaningless topics, and the important stuff will be lost to time.

On the other hand, how can I even decide what is "important"? There doesn't seem to be anyone with the authority or foresight to predict what is and is not "important". And I am not about to take myself too seriously and pretend that I am qualified to make that judgement.

State documents usually survive. Political aspects of our world are more than preserved at this point. That information is not going away, so I am wary to bring it up too much.

Peasant documents rarely survive; and even something as simple as a medieval shopping list often tells us more about the past than whatever state propaganda we can find in "official" documents.

The way I see it: I cannot predict what will survive. No one can. Many ambitious figures fought hard to resist being forgotten by history — and still lost control of the narrative after death.

The biggest, most explosive historical figures have been mythologized, doubted, and sometimes declared fictional. It is almost as if the harder you try, the more history will resist you.

Compare it with a priest whose clay tablet survived millennia, a peasant whose tool tells us about his profession, an ordinary Hungarian king whose reign was unremarkable...

It is easy to doubt big lives. Hard to question tiny ones.

And the tiny lives, I believe, are the key to understanding the past and the world we live in. Not what some wannabe hotshot wrote about himself and is remembered as a mythological superstar — exactly how history is taught most of the time.

Tiny lives are remembered by accident. Every time. But this kind of evidence is unlikely to survive, difficult to find, and largely obscure, even if it exists.

Big lives are usually stories written by those who wanted to feel important, even post-mortem. Not facts, but stories (!)

My reality is no different. These types of stories is what most people are familiar with; even if academics know better, the majority of humans *know* history through myths, fabrications, and a nationalist lens.

As a peasant with the ability to document my reality, I decided that this blog is a worthwhile pursuit; a project that would act as a counter to falsified and incorrect information that is liable to survive for a very long time and distort history if accepted at face value.

Peasant shopping lists notwithstanding, I decided to talk about anything people think is important and work my way down; from the most consequential aspects of my reality all the way to the less "important" ones.

I will not spend even a minute writing about the European Union because that information is pretty much eternal. But 21st century grocery lists? Those need documentation. If I don't do it, no one will.

I do not hesitate to talk about things that modern people would consider "random"; why would I talk about the Internet, for instance? Don't I know that the Internet is not "real life"? Why talk about video games? Movies? Cultures? Obscure individuals?

Why on Earth would future historians care?

But the trap that I can see is this:

These things seem obvious to us RIGHT NOW because that's the only reality we know. Modern humans don't need to be told that the grass is green, water is wet, and that the Internet is something that exists inside an electronic box connected via radio signals and undersea fibre optic cables to other electronic boxes.

But what makes you think future humans will live in the same reality as you do? That assumption is absurd. What is obvious NOW will not be obvious even 50 years from now, let alone thousands of years into the future.

Information about political events will be easy to find. But politics is a theatre, and modern historians generally seem to know that. Future historians will almost certainly know that, and be on the lookout for peasant voices like mine to make sense of our world. They will look for ancient tools, coins, debit cards, water bottles, car wreckages, photographs, drawings, letters...

Things you think nothing of, things nobody preserves... and things that historians crave the most.

Peasant lives are often forgotten entirely, and their voices never get recorded. This leaves massive gaps in our understanding of the world, and that spawns myths and legends. Myths and legends everyone believes in because they are the only things that survived.

Obviously, I will never be able to capture all of it. It is physically impossible. Not every peasant life gets recorded, not every peasant faithfully tells his or her own story, and finally, I do not have the capacity to document and preserve EVERYTHING.

What I can do instead is decide to talk about specific individuals and phenomenas — whatever that may be, ranging from political, through cultural, all the way down to mundane — and highlight patterns that reveal how our reality works.

Knowing how all office workers around the world go about their day is impossible. But highlighting how one or two of them live their lives, what they experience, etc provides us with a valuable anchor; we can extrapolate a few ordinary experiences onto the rest of the world to give us a better understanding of this reality. This way, we can differentiate between the ordinary — boring, monotonous, unexciting — and extraordinary — scandals, politics, affairs, etc. This grounding helps not only us — those who inhabit the very reality I describe. It helps those who would learn about us and want to understand us.

I will never be able to describe everything, down to every minute detail. Some nuance, for better or worse, will be lost in favour of brevity; what I will try to do is remain faithful to the overall picture that highlights recurrent patterns.

Think of it as:

Systemic analysis > Individual nuance

It is not perfect, and I always try my hardest not to omit important distinctions. But focusing too much on individual variations can obscure the systemic patterns which, I believe, are more important for understanding the world.

Nuance is very important too, but only after you've mastered the systems. Nuance alone is confusing, at best.

If this blog survives, and someone finds it far into the future, they will see a window into our world; no myths, no legends, no state narratives... Just the world we inhabit right now. The good, the bad, and the ugly. Everything.

That is not to say I will only talk about peasant lives because that alone would not be an accurate description of my reality; reality is layered, and to understand it fully, you need to understand the layers and how they interact with each other. All of them.

At any rate, knowing what someone like me values and decides is important enough to write about is itself a window into our world. Even if everything on this blog was fake — which it is not, I assure you, but even if you assumed it is — it would still tell you what kind of world we live in currently, and that is already better than complete radio silence for any future historian wanting to study us and our timeline.

Therefore, I try not to take myself too seriously, not overthink, and write about everything I see, everything I think deserves to be mentioned, and occasionally preserve whatever I reckon ought to be preserved.

I try to be sensible and not entertain garbage; at the same time, I know not what counts as "garbage" across deep time, so to resolve this paradox I usually just write whatever comes to my mind and publish it.

Before publishing, editing is one of the main things I do to eliminate glaring errors and to structure posts in a way that is logical. Even that is imperfect and I do not spend any more time than I have to just to make it understandable. So I generally write whatever comes to mind, leave it for a day or so, come back to it, edit it, then publish and not touch it again unless I realize a big error.

I write drunk, edit sober, publish after several days of abstinence — metaphorically speaking. (I do not drink)

This post may or may not be logical, contradictory... I may have tightened an argument or two to make it "polished". But I decided to leave it as is because, what do you know, the imperfect prose itself is a window into our reality — the real one, not the imaginary one where my writing is spotless. It would be nice if that reality existed, but it doesn't. And this post is proof.

My Motivation

My stance — non-interventionist, neutral, observant — is unusual. Most people are captured by ideologies, brainwashed, or otherwise motivated. The idea of not believing in "something" is almost heretical to some. However, "believing in something" is usually little more than a rationalization for materialist motivations.

This sort of ties back with the framework I described at the beginning of this post — the framework I generally use to navigate my life, and decided that it is the perfect way for any historian to document and analyze the reality he inhabits.

Most people are motivated by material gains even when documenting something real and important. Blogs, for example, typically exist solely to provide income for individuals or even entire businesses. Occasionally, they exist to spread ideology.

My blog is unlikely to ever make money. Best case scenario? It may cover the costs of running it — which is not that much money anyway, a shoestring budget is enough — but I hardly expect to make money off of it.

In my wildest dreams, this blog makes enough to secure my survival and allows me to work on this project full-time. I do not expect more.

Realistically, it is a personal project that I do whenever I can — whenever I am not busy surviving, dealing with daily logistics, or not cognitively hampered by insomnia. (Speaking of, I'm writing this post after a bad night's sleep. Not the worst night's sleep, but still inadequate. My eyes are stinging and I am fighting the urge to pause for the day. Years of insomnia are horrible, believe me.)

If I wanted to grift — start a blog to make money — I would absolutely not do this one. The masses reward outrage, tribalism, ideologies, and entertainment. My kind of blogs exist, too, but they are one in a million precisely because they are economically unsustainable.

My passion for history is perhaps the reason why I decided to start it. And I also seem to have an analytical mind that cannot help but analyze every facet of reality. And I have done both from a very young age.

I do not wish to change the reality I inhabit, nor do I believe it is even possible; using a blog as an ideological vessel could, in theory, change the world to be a little more like what I want it to be. But then I wouldn't have started this one, would I?

The amount of time and effort you need to invest to affect the world events even a little? Not worth it, in my opinion. I would be at it my whole life, and nothing fundamental would change anyway.

Resources and time spent doing something I do not want to do? Performing ideologies I do not believe in? Pandering to people I consider stupid, or at the very least self-deceived and dishonest with themselves?

That kind of cognitive dissonance is not worth a theoretical possibility of a tiny change across decades. I just... don't think it's worth it.

So here I am: blog for future historians, likely to stay invisible for years. And assuming I don't manage to preserve it, it might stay invisible for ever. I cannot know whether it lives forever or disappears. But I am writing it as though there is someone in the future wanting to understand my reality, and that this blog managed to survive in one form or another.

It's a long shot, but who knows?

Limitations

There are plenty of problems with this blog:

Firstly

I do not know everything. Omniscience is a lovely fantasy, but no: I am not omniscient — no one is.

Because I do not know everything, I will do my best to learn as much as I can before writing. But there are limits to what I can observe and analyze.

I can't possibly know everything, so I will try to know as much as possible.

Noble, but flawed.

But it's all I can do. I can't do better than that.

Secondly

The blog runs on a shoestring budget. This means that, at least for the time being, research and writing are done by only one person. And because I don't know everything, and the volume of material sometimes takes many days to review — whenever I can that is, assuming I am not managing everyday logistics of life — this means that there is a very hard ceiling of how much I can produce, even if I spent the rest of my life producing stuff. The realistic ceiling is even lower.

Thirdly

The discoverability issue: the stuff that survives is usually stuff that is preserved by nature — a freak accident — or that enough humans decided was worth preserving for centuries.

This introduces a paradox: if I wanted this blog to exist in the consciousness of millions, I would need to pander to them and their biases — by creating entertaining or ideological content. But if I do that, I effectively defeat the whole purpose of this blog; an objective analysis of my reality.

This ain't no circus or propaganda loudspeaker. I cannot do that.

At the same time, if I stay faithful to the original premise of the blog, I risk staying invisible in the sea of distractions and competing voices; I might get drowned out and never be heard by anyone.

And who is going to preserve the blog if that happens? I can preserve it for as long as I draw breath. Then what? I can't preserve it as a ghost...

The success of this blog hinges on blind luck: enough people discover it, give it a few minutes of their time, determine it is a worthwhile project, and preserve it personally for future generations.

Institutions will almost certainly not preserve it because of my pointed critique; institutions exist to serve themselves, and I won't pander to them because; a) that defeats the whole purpose of the blog, once more; b) institutions do what institutions do, so even that wouldn't ensure preservation; c) institutions are corrupt, and part of this project is preserving that information. As soon as I join an institution, I am disallowed to criticize them.

Even if I did: catering to an institution, only for that institution not to exist in 100 years, sounds very much like something counterproductive I do not want to be doing; if it does not exist, it cannot help me anymore, can it? It can only preserve my project until it gets replaced by another institution — one that does not care about me, and is happy to let this project vanish off the face of the Earth.

(But maybe that's what history is at its core? The lucky few survivors we know everything about, and the 99.9% we don't even know existed?)

Fourthly

I often say the analysis on this blog is "objective". In truth, I do not believe it is ever possible to be 100% objective. As long as I am human, I will always filter information through my eyes and biases. And if that weren't enough, new information gets filtered by my existing experience catalogue — some of the new info gets amplified, some ignored.

Additionally, staying 100% objective probably requires a robotic description I do not want to do because then it's not a blog anymore — and it becomes virtually unreadable. We are going back full circle to point three about the discoverability issue; I need to convince at least one person to preserve it after my death, or the project vanishes. A robotic prose is the surest way of NOT convincing anyone.

I have settled for a semi-academic, semi-informal prose. It is the style I feel fits best for a personal project, and it's the style I am determined to stay faithful to.

Occasionally, I take a stance when describing a topic — not necessarily because I want to, but purely because it helps to describe a human experience. For example: I might refer to an entity as "an oppressive state"; this is not necessarily because I hate the state, or side against it. A post written this way is meant to be critical and descriptive, but does not necessarily mean I am blaming the state or trying to reform it. I fully understand why states HAVE TO be oppressive, and I tackle it in different posts where, it would seem at first glance, I side with the state and blame citizens for being unruly and disobedient. Again, not because I side with the oppressive state, but because I need to take a stance to explain a different facet of the same phenomenon — oppressive states that emerge to rein in the unruly masses.

This kind of feedback loop is part and parcel of any complex system; states vs citizens, states vs institutions, institutions vs citizens, etc. Not to mention human biology influencing human behaviour, human behaviour influencing the states, material conditions influencing human biology, etc, etc. Untangling this farrago of feedback loops is a monumental task — and personal biases love to creep in whenever I describe such things.

A purely academic, descriptive, fully objective prose would not be easily accessible, would be hard to read, and the chances of it ever being discovered? Probably approaching zero.

Besides, the idea of a "peasant" describing his reality kind of means that, yes, it is not going to be fully objective because, well, peasants do not exist to be objective; they exist to reluctantly serve their lords, and I am no exception. Any biases and subjective opinions that I might include here and there are part of history and a pattern you would see among many people in my day and age if you could observe them.

Long story short: I will attempt to be as objective as I reasonably can, but it is an ideal that I will never reach.

And I think it's fine.

Fifthly

I am not qualified to talk about any one subject. While I think it is a de facto strength — because I am not limited in scope, and can write about a large variety of subjects — it does mean that I can never explore it in as much depth as a specialist would. Unless, of course, I dedicate dozens of hours to reading specialist literature before writing — which consumes time, resources, and still does not make me an expert in the field.

That said... do I need to be a medical professional to know about the dysfunction of healthcare institutions? Do I need to be a law enforcement officer to be aware of corruption?

Do I need to be a physicist to understand basic concepts and laws of physics? Do I need to be a distinguished psychologist to understand human behaviour and explain it?

For many people in my day and age: yes. Most of them will defer their opinion to authority and ignore everything else.

Good idea if you trust the authority. Bad idea if they are self-interested and corrupt — and the majority are.

Personally, I think the people who worship authority are gravely mistaken. But that's what I am having to deal with — hope my blog survives the onslaught of criticism coming from mostly brainwashed people and becomes preserved in spite of it. Because that is unfortunately the default mode for most people. And I need THEM to preserve it if it is to survive in time to be read by future civilizations.

I know it is a valuable project. I can see it.

But most modern people will disagree.

And that is the fundamental problem. And I don't see an easy solution.

Sixthly

Volume of information; this is good on the one hand — serious readers exist, and long-form blogs are a real phenomenon, so the conventional, modern advice for bloggers that you absolutely need a short-form, manipulative, ideological content to get any readers at all is fundamentally false. Reality contradicts it time and again.

The blog *should* survive despite having posts that can take more than 1 hour to read in full — which is highly unusual for blogs in my day and age, believe me.

On the other hand, it does mean that the potential pool of readers — people I need to find the blog, recognize it is worthwhile, and preserve it for future generations — is a lot, lot smaller than if my posts were 300-1,000 words in length.

Very few people are willing to read stuff this massive. And it's not that people "don't have time", because everyone has time to waste on distracting propaganda and entertainment. That is not an issue.

The issue is that reading an intellectual, analytical, long-form prose usually registers in people's minds as "hard work". So most people avoid it like the plague unless they are really, really captivated by something specific.

Some of my posts are short because they do not require a lengthy analysis. Others are massive and take weeks to complete.

The massive ones, I reckon, are a huge gamble; they might be highly popular, or highly unpopular. They will not be anything in between.

I am entering an unexplored territory. And the fact remains that many successful blogs are successful precisely because they are not long-form content; they are short, crisp, punchy, and clickbaity. Mine is none of those things, and at least on the surface, that is a significant weakness.

Here's what I am banking on: short-form content is worthless. It's everywhere, low-quality, and forgettable. It exists not because it's objectively "good", but because it's addictive — like a slot machine at a casino.

A long-form content can only exist if the author invests enough time to craft something genuinely valuable and detailed — and that tends to be a lot more valuable than short-form alternatives. Not every time, but at least most of the time.

If I really want my blog to be remembered and preserved, it has to be quality. It has to be lengthy, detailed, and high-quality.

Or that's what I think, at least. I might very well be wrong. Hopefully I am not.

Seventhly

Controversy; the topics I talk about, and the way I describe them, is not, shall we say, palatable to most people in my day and age.

I do not seriously expect corrupt institutions or states to come down on me because of my pointed critique. They have bigger things to worry about than some guy in Norwich writing a blog.

But the lack of cushioning does mean the pool of potential readers is smaller than if I created a happy-go-lucky post praising something most people like. Or if I avoided controversy altogether and settled for low-risk topics.

Thing is, my reality is not perfect, and an accurate description of any topic will be deemed controversial by somebody. Yes, I could minimize controversy and make it more palatable, but if I am going to sacrifice accuracy and honesty in favour of palatability, I might as well abandon the project and become a tabloid journalist.

But the controversy aspect is problematic even for future readers; because if I sound like I am angry, or if things I describe sound utterly absurd, there is a danger that nothing I will write would be taken seriously by anyone. Especially if my version of events contradicts everything else that exists out there.

This then ties back with the first point in this chapter — the "I don't know everything" admission. Maybe I wasn't malicious, but perhaps I was mistaken? My pointed critique, unusual descriptions, etc could be construed not as faithful depictions, but as mistakenly or deliberately constructed narratives or grudge pieces. ESPECIALLY if the primary sources do not survive.

This is especially problematic whenever I choose to describe a specific individual as part of a systemic analysis. Especially when I admit my sources are limited, and especially when I do not have a personal or at least working relationship with a person. Everything hinges on educated guesses, and those are easier to doubt than commonly accepted narratives and preexisting assumptions people have.

For example, an evil teacher with 160IQ sounds absurd; why would such a capable individual not be valued by his society? And why would he act so irrational despite his gift? After all, it is commonly known that all teachers are good people, so what am I even talking about?

I decided not to defend my integrity and simply describe my reality as it is; it does mean some of my posts will be rejected just because of the controversies they create. But the time spent trying to convince biased individuals is the time not spent writing about other important topics.

Controversy will hurt the blog, but I hope that the value it creates more than compensates for the inevitable skepticism.

The bottom line is

It is not perfect. It would be a lot better if it were funded by a wealthy patron, institution, or if it was a group project. For the time being, at least, it is a 100% personal project that is rough, semi-unprofessional, and imperfect. I strongly believe it is valuable as is, but I recognize it could have been even better.

Whatever the case, I will do my best to improve it over time and create an accurate historical record of my times.

I can't control the result, but I can control my effort. And I will put in as much effort as I can.