Being unremarkable: a space for silence and perhaps perfection

One of the things I’ve been thinking a lot recently (and again) is that we are surrounded with too much buzz that we don’t “own”, that is not ours but that may affect our thoughts and actions significantly. And it is harder and harder to resist it. I mean both social networks, that trigger debates and conflicts, but it is not limited to them — it is also marketing buzz, investment into AI (how many industries and problems lose attention because of AI talks and not just curiosity and research of its opportunities, but also because of the fear of being pushed out of the spotlight?), endless competition and efforts to get extra money or just to keep ourself afloat. It is like standing in a crowd where everyone shouts at you — demanding, accusing, provoking — until you no longer know which way to turn.

It may sound vague, but I don’t want to dive into this right now, as it is more about emotional level and me feeling tired in this stream of noise. If that is the result of technological singularity that was predicted by Kurzweil — yeah, I don’t have any passion regarding it anymore.

I want to have more silence around, to be able to listen to myself more, than responding to external circumstances.

The topic is tremendous, but one of the things I want to start now with, is the search of balance between this need for silence and opportunities that we get nowadays with communication technologies. And one of the thoughts is that I miss a bit the Internet as it was before: individual blogs, more text content than video (that helps to keep my own pace), less concentration on being effective, or “good for everyone”, less recommendations of shit things I don’t care about, but that try to hook me. I miss something like Norwegian “slow TV”, but in terms of information exchange — remarkable in its unremarkable approach, but still giving some individuality and value. Not for everyone, of course, but that is not what is needed. Not needed, because there is no sense to fight for being best, and the sense is to find yourself and similar individual people to share thoughts, ideas and values.

And of course, it is not about isolation, it is too simple and radical thing that I don’t like and can’t afford right now, as most of us too. And not about reverting the time, it simply doesn’t make sense. So, proper balance? Maybe.

I need more time to catch and analyse this feeling.

But from these vague things, that require more time to go through and make any statements, I would like to jump to something more concrete — to this blog. Starting it in 2025 also sounds not very remarkable. Even, not actual — if you want to be remarkable, it is better to start Tik-Tok, make Instagram reels or Youtube videos. But I don’t want. So, I would like to consider it as an experiment (with all the limitations that I have) to make it unremarkably different. Simple, even primitive, with minimal set of features to support the aforementioned “buzz” (I still need to find the readers, and that is the compromise) , but more to support content, speed of load, and paying some attention to details. Maybe even too conservative and… boring.

But at this moment the set of ideas looks like this:

• Very simple text oriented layout
• Fast speed of loading
• Using semantical approach of HTML, back to the origins. And to be as close to original HTML/CSS/JS as possible.
• Make it self-standing, independent from other platforms, owned by me, but still usable, discoverable and traceable. This is one of the hardest things I think — because it still implies some competition with more loud and dominating approaches.
• Combining both more dynamic, periodical stuff like these posts, with more static content, that (I hope) will be useful longer.
• Get some extent of integration with other, more “loud” tools like Facebook and X, because in current circumstances to be completely away from them is impossible. It is isolation or even something that is close to social death, when you just disappear on the radars of other.
• Limit the blog with cookies from the third parties as much as possible (while sadly I can’t control it fully and also I still want to get some analytics about my content). Big topic to dive into.
• And because I still consider reading as a time-tested alternative, of course I want to invest more into typography, features like callouts and so on. Again, without too much fashionable things. I know people who can make quite amazing things with Arial and Georgia — probably, I don’t want to be that radical, but this is another point of balance to investigate.

As it happens with any personal research in uncertainty conditions, the list is not complete and will change in time. Of course, I’m limited with the set of tools that I know (and I’m not a developer to make it fully “owned” at this step), so I will just try to take as much as possible from WordPress platform. Maybe later I will try to make it more lightweight, but that is too early to consider even as a plan.

And yes, I’m not sure that I am able to create anything unremarkably remarkable, but let’s see how it goes — I believe it is definitely worth to try.

That is all for now, but I need something to start.