Day 100: Reflections

It’s day 100! I didn’t realize it until I made today’s entry and started typing in the day. I had planned to write about the changes that I made to Intention’s landing page, but I’ll reflect on the last 100 days instead and save that post for tomorrow.

Wow, time has really flown by. When I made videos every day on Facebook two years ago, day 100 felt like a monumental achievement that took an immense amount of effort to reach. With Road to Ramen, it quietly snuck up on me, like that darn tick that bit me (aside: my roommates want me to order a home test kit but it’s only been 3 weeks, and it’s recommended you wait 6 weeks to make sure there are enough antibodies to reduce the chances of a false negative).

I’d guess it’s due to two major factors:

• Road to Ramen posts usually take around 30 minutes to an hour and around 2 hours at the longest to write, but those videos were all day affairs. I would wake up in the morning, plan out that day’s video, shoot it during the day, and edit it at night. Spending your attention in that way for a prolonged period of time actually changes the way you start to see reality — everything becomes a potential story, which distances you from reality and the people you’re with. But I digress. In terms of effort and hours spent, writing Road to Ramen is much, much easier than making those videos.
• Besides the difference in time and effort, my attitude toward the project is entirely different. The DK the Human videos themselves were the main focus back then, but I see Road to Ramen as more of a by-product of everything else that I’m doing. R2R also doesn’t have the performative element that the videos did. Back then, I would look at the likes and views on my videos every day and evaluate how well they did; with R2R posts, I have no way of knowing how many people read this, and I love that. I can be an old man yelling at a cloud. While I do try to make my posts understandable to people other than myself, the general spirit is still that I’m writing for myself and just happen to be publishing it publicly. I’m glad it is that way.

I still very much enjoy writing these posts, and I’m excited to be creating an artifact that captures the behind-the-scenes process behind the work that I’m doing and how I’m thinking about everything.

In my February review on Day 56, I wrote that I wanted to share Road to Ramen more and build an audience for it. Now I’m not so sure. This feels like my tiny corner of the Internet where I can write freely without concern for whether my content is of a certain quality or if people find it interesting. I can just be meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Anyway. Besides the Lyme disease test kit, my housemates have suggested that I create content around digital well-being and using technology mindfully. That’s been something I’ve wanted to do for a while now because I’m quite passionate about those areas (surprise, surprise), and if it works as content marketing, that’s great, too.

Do I want to change anything about the way I’m writing these logs? Besides writing better, not much. I guess I’d like to incorporate more visuals in them because (1) I want to get better at creating visuals and (2) a simple visual is often more powerful and clearer than a wall of words.

For those of you following along, thanks! I don’t know who you are or why you’d subject yourself to reading my mind vomit, but I’m glad to have you here.