Blogging Nostalgia – About motivation and the feeling of accomplishment

Sometimes you have to go back to where it all started to remind yourself about your motivations, intention and goals you had. I started with my blog back in May 2012. You may say, I was among the pioneers in Germany, who created a platform for sharing advice and inspiration about fashion and beauty. Why I started?

Blogging combined all my favorite hobbies back then: Writing, photography, fashion and „tech“ – and with tech, I mean spending hours on the computer to figure out how websites and editing tools work. It was fun, innocent, not knowing where it could all lead to. I spent hours and nights, with so much patience, to just make tiny things work, like changing the color of an element on the blog. The sense of accomplishment afterwards was insane. I did this. I figured this out. Maybe it is because I did it for myself; not for anyone else. If I think about it, this whole blogging thing is something I truly enjoyed doing because I owned it. I controlled it. The reward was the creation, the output in itself, not the recognition or the approval by others. Nobody asked me to do it. I was not waiting for someone to clap for me.

Fast forward to the rise of social media. Things changed a lot. A shift from „I am doing it for myself and to live out my creativity“ to constantly seeking for likes, comments and shares from others. If that response is nonexistent, it means your creation sucks. It means the effort you put is meaningless. Why be proud of something nobody likes?

Now this is where it gets problematic. We make our sense of accomplishment dependent on others. We diminish our feelings of self-worth because we did not receive the social currency that is used today to value a creator’s content. You see yourself as a failure because you do not give yourself credits for the creation itself, but only for the response it did or did not get.

This is where I feel stuck at today. This is why I try to remind myself again of why I started blogging and why I felt so good about it.