I’m traveling on a train that left Milan Central Station at 10:15am, scheduled to arrive at Naples Central Station at 2:53pm. I have plenty of time to do whatever I want: I could play something, read a book, or browse the internet until I get bored. But instead of all that, I decided to write something here for the blog after reading the post titled “let’s blog like it’s 2004” here on Microblog.

In 2004, I was 10 years old — I’d learned to read just over 5 years before, and at that time, with social media still in its early days, blogging was how we documented our lives. As a kid, I didn’t have a blog, but I thought it was super cool to read other people’s and dreamed about one day having my own place to write about whatever I wanted on the internet. For about 10 years, I started and dropped several online projects, all revolving around writing and sharing knowledge, but it was only in 2014, already thinking about how to make money from something (thanks, capitalism), that I found a space where I could actually express myself consistently: Espaço Geek.

Espaço Geek was my tech blog, and it’s the one I managed to keep running the longest — three years, to be exact. Back then, I wrote reviews of apps, power banks, and even keyboards for iPad (guess I was already dreaming of writing from anywhere). I even got invited to smartphone launch events in Brazil and received discount codes for apps to share with my readers. But adult life gradually made our most precious thing more and more scarce: time. So I ended up leaving Espaço Geek behind until it became irrelevant and turned into yet another one of my projects that didn’t move forward.

Today, I have a solid career as a Software Engineer, and I don’t have any desire to make a living off the internet. But ever since I left all social media in October 2024, I’ve been flirting with the idea of having a space to express myself again — except I want it to be more intimate and without the pressure of algorithms. I don’t want to feel forced to post all the time or stick to a format, I just want to talk about my thoughts freely and maybe find some people willing to chat about these topics, too. A blog seems perfect for that, right? So why didn’t I start one sooner?

Now I realize we worry way too much about how things should look. A blog has to have a specific topic, I can’t write less than X words, no mistakes allowed, and ideally there should be photos I took myself to illustrate my ideas. But do I really, though? Do I really need to set all these goals for something basically no one will read, and even if they do, they won’t care enough to leave me any feedback, and then — just to top it off — it’ll be irrelevant again a few hours later in the never-ending feeds that make up today’s internet? I think we can take a deep breath and write about whatever we want, without worrying too much about what shape the text is going to take.

It’s never been this easy to write for a blog; today, we have constant internet access and a smartphone more powerful than any computer produced in 2004. There’s nothing stopping you from sitting down on a train, watching the landscapes fly by at over 300 km/h outside the window, opening a simple notes app with a white background and black letters, typing a few words, hitting publish and moving on with your life. Why don’t we do this more often?

Now would be the part where I promise I’ll be consistent and write here more often, but we all know that’s not how it works, right? So I’ll just invite you to do one thing: sit down and write. Whether it’s one word or a thousand, just do it, put them somewhere on the internet (ideally, outside the big social networks), and move on with your life.

That’s what I’m doing today, and it’s what I’m inviting you to do too!