I’m happy to be back. I don’t have an excuse for my long absence. I simply didn’t write. I did however spend some time thinking about whether I should keep writing or just shut down The Bougnat entirely. The pro-shutting-down reasons were numerous.
Reason number one was the power of LLMs. Over the past 2-3 years, writing has become “so easy and effortless” because of it. Why should I make the effort to keep writing if anyone can just do it much better and much faster using LLMs, including myself? Would my writing still be valuable if I was to use LLMs myself? And even if I wasn’t using LLMs, who would still care about my writing?
Second, I found myself using all my time building Nini le Crabe and Kilomètre Zéro. These two projects have evolved a lot and it’s true that I could spent every waking hour working on them. This is essentially what I’ve been doing these past months. Not just for fun or for the passion of it, but also because I’m 30 and that’s the professional path I’ve chosen with all its benefits and consequences. In all of this I could clearly see that I didn’t even have enough time for my friends and family. So did I really have to write for The Bougnat on top of all this?
Third, there are two other online magazines, works in progress, and asterisk magazine which are very close to what I wanted The Bougnat to become. These magazines are so good, so well funded, and have contributors which I feel are a 10x better writers than myself. This made me rethink what the goal of my writing should be.
Fourth, every time I did sit down and tried to write something, I left frustrated with either an empty screen or scattered ideas that didn’t add up to anything interesting.
This fourth point didn’t sit well with me because I knew from observing myself in the past, that the better I write, the better I think. Not being able to sit down and to write a post or an essay, meant less than optimal thinking, specifically for the type of thinking I wanted and needed to be good at. I knew that eventually I did have to come back here to write.
Then I came across this tweet:
I read this tweet as: not writing and not reading leads to bad thinking, and bad thinking can be as bad for us as smoking. I’m not sure what the equivalent would be for lung cancer… but it seems quite obvious that loosing our capacity to think, even a little bit, makes our lives way worse.
This tweet confirmed something which I’ve felt for a long time and it gave me the push I needed to crawl my way back here. To make this comeback last, I decided to make a few rules for myself.
Rule 1: no LLMs, not even for correcting spelling or grammar. What you read is 100% my writing (or a guest writers writing) unless clearly mentioned somewhere as a human or LLM citation, or something similar.
Rule 2: two posts/one essay minimum every month. This seems to be a sustainable no-smoking-amount of writing.
Rule 3: The Bougnat is my no smoking area and nothing more. It will simply show my thinking about the topics that I need to think about and which I share with the people who want to read them. This by itself is enough of a reason for it to exist. Probably it will never rival other magazines or blogs, but at least you can be certain that the air will always be pure here.
So let’s end this post here. I will start writing the next two that I have planned very soon. The first one will be me laying out and explaining my long term plan for Nini le Crabe and the second one will be about the next steps for the bigger KM0 project.
