Blogging is a long and lonely road

When I started this blogging journey, I wasn't sure where I will be in the few years that this blog has been around. Looking back, I realised that I have grown my one blog to a series of 15 blogger blogs, 2 wordpress blogs hosted on paid hosting services and 2 wordpress.org blogs that have been left rather inactive.

Not all blogs are equally active as I have the same 24 hours that everyone else has and need to allocate between personal time, family time and work time. Thus, with the few hours I manage to steal while my daughter is sleeping or when the spouse is not around or during lunchtime, I try to blog as much about issues that I'm passionate about such as personal finance and to also spend time reading about other blogs on lifestyle design and how I can improve my writing, blogging and social media skills.

The road towards blogging can be long. The road towards blogging can be lonely. When I first started out, it appeared that I was talking to the world but the world was ignoring me because hardly anyone visited my blog or dropped any comment in response to what I had posted. Over time, some of my blogs have become popular enough to hit 603,911 on Alexa. No mean feat when I started with a blog that didn't rank at all and back then I didn't even know what Alexa was.

Now I realise it's time to go back to basics, i.e. to be more focussed about my blogging to write about more in-depth topics of value. Partly as a way to express my thoughts that remain hidden in my daily life as a father, spouse and employee but also as a record to posterity should I die before reaching 40. Recently, I have undergone some measure of stress in my personal life because of the arrival of my daughter. It's not so much the lack of sleep that a baby brings but rather the impact on the family dynamics that makes it a much tougher experience that it needed to be. I am starting to feel very weary and thoughts of ending it all by giving up have surfaced but I realised that it's literally ALL IN THE MIND. The blues, feeling down and depressed and occasionally that I am a victim rains down occasionally and drenches all the passion and fire I have for life. In my army days, my instructors would have a choice word for this, they called it being, "WEAK"!

Sometimes I really feel WEAK in my spirit and my heart. I find that I am living to make others happy but deep down inside I am not happy. Recently, I read Chris Guillebeau's blog "The Art of Non-Conformity" and his manifesto "Brief Guide to World Domination" really resonates. The key to living a life that is remarkable starts with this statement:

You don't have to live your life the way other people expect you to.

This really rocks you to the core when you examine the implications of how you live your life. I find that living in Singapore is really one big game of conformity. Conform to parental expectations. Conform to societal norms. Conform to State Control which is so evident during the 2.5 years and 10 years conscripted service the State put me through which ended in two deaths I've seen in the Singapore Armed Forces.

I am getting tired and weary of following the "script" of conformity. Lifestyle design starts to sound so very attractive, much more attractive then ending up as a splat on the asphalt or to die a slow death of being mediocre and safe, to conform and not rock the fracking boat.

Will I succeed in being remarkable?