are non-bloggers with (seemingly) no inner life happier?

Do you have to be troubled in spirit to be a good and consistent blogger? I've been pondering this lately. I'm surrounded by friends who seem to have no inner lives: they're plenty smart, but they seem perfectly happy to be wrapped up in their own activities without pondering them in writing. I write for my small cohort of five readers and what I presume to be my now army-sized cohort of bots that give me several thousand views per day. The bots, at least, definitely have no inner lives, but what about the humans?

Obviously, you can be profound and reflective without being a blogger. But I'm beginning to wonder whether there are other issues at play, too. I've made no bones about the fact that one of the reasons why I blog is to vent—whether to a handful of people or to thousands doesn't matter to me. Writing is an act of communication, but if my only audience is God or the Buddha or the cosmos or just myself, I'm fine with that. But what of the people who feel no urge to blog at all? I have one friend who'd promised to read my walk blog, but even though he teaches reading and writing at a well-known Korean university, I know he hates reading and writing, and that he doesn't look at any of my blogs except for once in a great while, which is why I know he knows nothing about my heart attack in August.

I have another friend—friendly acquaintance, really—I haven't seen in over thirty years. She's the one I'm sending a care package to as she completes her doctoral work. She's extremely smart, but she seems to have almost no online presence, no interest in writing a blog (unless she has a pseudonym). Maybe, like a lot of women, she doesn't want all of the male attention she'd get online: after all, we men are great at creating unrealistic fantasies in our heads, then imposing them on women and expecting those women to somehow live up to our stupid expectations. Or maybe she's just happy the way things are, and that contentment (along with her doubtless crowded doctoral-work schedule) strips her of any motivation to blog. Or maybe it's as simple as: some people just don't blog.

You'd think, though, that people who are brimming with thoughts (be those thoughts worthwhile or not) would immediately turn to a keyboard and pound the thoughts out. But maybe a concern for (or urge toward) privacy prevents them. As I think about the issue of why people with thoughts don't blog them out, I'm beginning to realize that there's no single behavioral rule. I started this piece off wondering whether contentment might be enough of an explanation for why some people just don't write, but I've come to realize, through this process of thinking "aloud," that every individual has his or her own reasons for being the way s/he is. My uni-prof buddy, mentioned above, has never struck me as all that introspective; like a Korean taxi driver who turns on the radio because he can't stand the silence, he flits from activity to activity, either working a ton of uni classes or doing his side jobs, seven days a week. My doctorate-pursuing friend, meanwhile, is a profound person, but she's likely just too busy to maintain a blog: a blog requires commitment, and it's just not a priority for her. She's also pretty and athletic, so she has a social life, unlike us trapdoor-spider introverts hiding in our holes in the ground. I should also mention that I have a couple readers and commenters who often leave substantive remarks, but I have no idea why they don't have their own blogs. They seem to have a lot to say but prefer saying it on someone else's platform instead of on their own. I don't get it, but whatever. I'd happily subscribe to their blogs.

In the end, I can only speak for myself, and I can only guess at other people's motives. For me, the blog is a place to vent, to think out loud, to work out ideas and express creativity. Over the past eight years, it's swung in a much more political direction, but I suspect that that's just a phase. I started out writing a lot more about religious matters since that's what my master's degree is in, but after Mom's brain cancer, religious issues became largely meaningless to me, and I'd rather talk more about what makes for good and bad teaching (buy my book). Ultimately, my blog is just a humble dungheap, a molehill among mountains. And people both shallow and profound have a right to blog or not to blog. There is no question.