At the Risk of Repeating Myself...

Ever pause to consider how often we repeat ourselves? It may not even be something we're consciously aware of, but patterns have a way of repeating themselves.

I've been a blogger for going on 25 years now, and I periodically worry that I'm going to end up copying myself. Not even kidding!

But if you stop and think about it, we tend to be somewhat consistent in our likes and dislikes and interests over time, so it would actually make sense that we would bring up the same ideas from time to time. And when your blog posts and articles number in the thousands you're hardly going to remember everything you've ever written previously, right?

I never had the greatest memory to begin with... so I often draw a blank when I start into a topic I am familiar with, and what I'm saying sounds vaguely like something I've said before, but I go ahead and write about it anyway. After all, starting over from scratch about something is quite quite different from literally "recycling" something you know you wrote previously.

Ultimately, I believe we do deserve to cut ourselves some slack. There are, quite literally, a limited number of ideas in the world, so the quest to always try to create something new is probably futile, at best!

I chuckled to myself at the realization that it's entirely possible that I have previously written about "the dangers of potentially repeating yourself!" I don't think so, though, I checked back through my old files and I couldn't find any evidence that I'd done so but that's not to say that I haven't had the idea before.

So why do I even care to ruminate on this particular topic?

Well, I got here because I was thinking about the whole concept of value, and what it means to add value in terms of what your content offers the community, and offers the broader Internet.

Of course, there's probably no sound reason to worry about that, given that wherever you look you tend to get hundreds and thousands of hits if you search for popular topics or even moderately popular topics with your favorite search engine.

Clearly, we all have pet topics that we really enjoy and they might be our hobbies, or some interest we're into or perhaps a line of work we really love and so it only makes sense that we would come up with new angles to look at something that we've already looked at probably many many times.

I think about all the myriad topics in the field of psychology I have examined, and I feel reasonably certain that I have occasionally shared "new insights" I previously shared as... new insights!

If this all sounds a bit nutty to you, just wait till you round 50... or 60... and you've already "said a lot more!"

I guess this is where some will point to the importance of finding new interests and taking up new hobbies and such, and perhaps that's a good point. That said, I prefer developing expertise in topics I already know a good bit about. The whole "eternally new" actually sounds more like a case of FOMO, to me!

In the meantime, I'm going to stop worrying too much about repeating myself!

Thanks for stopping by and have a great remainder of your week!

Comments, feedback and other interaction is invited and welcomed! Because — after all — SOCIAL content is about interacting, right? Leave a comment — share your experiences — be part of the conversation! I do my best to answer comments, even if it sometimes takes a few days!

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Created at 2024-03-27 01:24 PDT
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