Diaries, Experiences, and Reflections

I don’t know how to define a personal blog. Some sites serve as showrooms for personal branding — people put up their photos, titles, and achievements. Some are pure life-sharing, attending to the breadth and depth of existence in a quiet, unhurried way. Others are purely technical, leaning more toward the geeky side.

In the past, I always complained about myself. I treated my blog like a toy, constantly switching themes and frontend styles for the novelty of it, while the actual content was perpetually stuck in labor. I still remember once trying to tweak the style of a tiny page element, only to crash the entire frontend code. I spent ages trying to fix it and couldn’t figure it out — it was genuinely demoralizing. (Now, in the Vibe Coding era, these frontend barriers are practically zero.) Every time, after tinkering for ages, “redecorating” for ages, and finally launching a blog, I would just abandon it. Because I truly didn’t know what to write.

I have a habit of keeping a diary. I record what happens each day. I don’t particularly enjoy writing blow-by-blow accounts — it’s more of an atmosphere diary, mainly capturing the flow of emotions throughout the day. Especially when something bad happens and some dark feelings arise, I go and write them down. Pinning down those drifting emotions. But if you asked me to put these fragmented records on a blog, I’d be afraid. Because they represent the rough, unpolished me — sentences full of grammatical flaws, arguments that can’t withstand scrutiny. It’s hard for me to be willing to put them out in public.

Over and over again, I’ve lost count of how many blog sites I’ve set up, how many domain names I’ve bought only to let them expire. It seems like I’ve never truly built a complete, real personal website. I don’t know if this site will last. Maybe I need to be a little braver and just present my authentic self — there’s nothing wrong with that. (Besides, the traffic on this site is pretty dismal anyway. Barely any SEO traffic, and very few people come to read it.)

I think what I can write mainly falls into three categories. First, what I experience and realize in daily life — the diary part. Then there’s a layer of reflection — conclusions drawn from life — though it’s hard to draw a strict line between these and the stream-of-consciousness diary entries. It’s more like they’re intertwined. Then there’s experiential stuff, like tips and how-tos. This kind of content used to be very popular online, but after AI came along, most Q&A scenarios have basically been swallowed up by AI chat boxes.

But the meaning of writing things down may not necessarily lie in being seen. It’s about letting yourself live more coherently, with more evidence. Knowing that you’ve lived well.

So be it. I’ll stick with this blog and keep updating it with real content. I admit that the content I previously put here was all AI-generated (that is, the posts dated before this one). AI generation or AI polishing gave me a sense of security — tossing my raw, rough content or ideas to AI felt like expressing myself within a safe zone, without worrying about grammatical errors or immature arguments. But in that machine-generated process, the human touch was also lost.

I’ll try. I’ll try, from now on, to manually arrange every word on this little blog. Writing is a skill that atrophies with disuse. You really can’t rely too heavily on AI.