Melanfolia Blogs – On Slow Content, Old-Fashioned Blogging, and Creative Burnout

The endless scroll, the endless search, the pressure to stay relevant. Fingers blurring across a screen, consuming a relentless torrent of updates, stories, and fleeting memes. A brand new trend explodes onto the scene, dominates for a glorious 72 hours, and then vanishes into the digital Nether. There's a certain unspoken rule to keep up, to post, to be seen, or vanish into the silent void of the internet. To post or not to post, is that even a question now?

What if there is another way, a chill way that lets you stay true to yourself and your passions? What if we all intentionally slowed down? This is where "slow content" enters the feed: a deliberate counterpoint, or a quiet, unassuming champion? The old-fashioned blog, as we all know and love it!

Slow Content Vs. Fast Content

Fast content, characterized by its immediate relevance and rapid consumption. It usually thrives on trending topics, viral moments, and bite-sized information. Think quantity over quality, reactionism over deep understanding. While effective for transient impact and broad reach, its shelf life is typically short, quickly overshadowed by the next trending sensation.

Slow content, on the other hand, embodies a more deliberate and thoughtful approach. It focuses on in-depth research, evergreen topics, and meticulous crafting, offering enduring value and fostering deeper engagement. Examples include comprehensive guides, analytical articles, well-researched documentaries, or informative long reads. While it may take longer to produce and gain initial traction, its longevity ensures continued relevance and a more profound impact on its audience, often becoming a trusted resource over time.

Why You Should Keep Blogging No Matter What...

Therefore, there is no particular, optimal content strategy...the best practices will include a meticulously crafted mixture between these two genres. But what is you can't seem to find yourself while working on fast content?

So, just keep blogging. Keep blogging, blogging, blogging. What do we do? We blog, blog.

I know that blogging may seem like a real-life Sisyphean task, and the size of that boulder just keeps getting bigger and bigger. The introduction of an ah-so-helpful AI only seems to bother the minds. While the old-fashioned bloggers barely seem to scrape an article a day, AI bloggers create a ton of material, which Google seems to index so much faster! Yet, a crucial truth remains: persistence in blogging is paramount. And the best would be just to keep blogging as you always did, without looking back at the Google algorithm updates. I'm even thinking that staying a small creator isn't such a bad idea after all.

It’s Not Just About Immediate Engagement!

Just fix in your mind that slow blogging isn't about an immediate reaction; it's about building a lasting legacy of authority and connection. Each post, regardless of its initial reach, serves as a digital brick, fortifying your expertise and expanding your online footprint. This cumulative effort not only improves your search engine visibility over time, drawing in organic traffic long after publication, but also cultivates a loyal audience (if it even exists nowadays!) who comes to trust your voice and value your insights.

Content Creation and the Negative Impacts on Bloggers

For creators, the pressure to consistently produce often transforms a passion into a grueling obligation. What begins as a joyous exploration of ideas can quickly devolve into a frantic scramble to stay relevant. My advice – stop looking at the engagement rates and numbers of your followers; it will only create a huge negative impact on your mind. It doesn't matter how many people engaged with your new blog post or the likes you have on your new TikTok video, if it makes you feel down and exhausted.

I've tried to separate the three typical feelings most bloggers encounter while trying to battle the race between everlasting updates and SMM specialists:

• Burnout and Creative Exhaustion: The incessant need to feed the content beast leaves little room for replenishment. Brainstorming sessions become less about genuine inspiration and more about chasing trends. This relentless cycle siphons away creative energy, leading to profound burnout where the very act of creation feels like a chore.

• Superficial Engagement: In a race for views and likes, depth often takes a backseat to virality. Creators find themselves crafting content that is easily digestible and shareable, even if it means sacrificing nuance or complexity. The metrics of engagement – a fleeting like, a quick comment – can feel hollow, failing to provide the genuine validation that comes from truly connecting with an audience on a deeper level.

• Feeling Like a Content-Generating Machine: The most insidious impact is the dehumanization of the creator. When success is measured by output, bloggers and content creators can begin to internalize the idea that their worth is tied directly to their productivity and motivation. The joy of expressing oneself, of sharing unique perspectives, fades as the pressure to meet arbitrary content quotas mounts. Creators can feel reduced to mere cogs in a machine, endlessly churning out material, rather than thoughtful individuals with unique insights and stories to tell.

Final Thoughts...

Summary won't be too fairy tale-ish today, rather bittersweet, as in George R. R. Martin's short story. I believe the old-fashioned form of blogging will still exist on the internet, even ten and twenty years from now. I prefer to think of it as a classic theater with elaborate decorations and a half-empty audience hall, or paper books. Yes, we all still love and read real books, despite their price!

Something similar is happening to the long reads on the internet. Whether you like it or not, whether you think this form of blogging will bring you money, or nothing more than a passive blogging that takes nothing but the space on the internet. They exist, they get indexed, and someone reads them, do you?

Sincerely Yours,

Teti L. aka Melanfolia🍃