Why I Stopped Writing (And Why I’m Starting Again, Maybe)

For 7 years, I wrote almost every week about “hatching a rich life”. I started with personal finance: Saving, spending and investing, which was perfect for a confused boy going through life milestones and trying to make sense of the whole adulting thing.

Then I got bored with personal finance, so I started writing about other things: Career, travel hacking, productivity, skill acquisition, basically whatever I was interested in at the time.

The Dictatorship of Consistency

One big theme in my writing was the idea of consistency. If you want to be excellent, I argued, you have to be consistent. You have to put in the hours, show up even when you don’t feel like it, and the results will come.

I applied that philosophy to my life and my writing. For years, I’d get up at 7am on Saturday, sit down at my desk and try to come up with the right topic to write about. I’d spend hours researching, writing my shitty first draft, editing it, rewriting it and spending way too much time finding the right hero image to go along with it.

In a certain way, it worked: The blog got semi-famous (or so I tell myself): I built an email list, got featured in a bunch of articles & shows, got paid to write sponsored articles, and made some new friends. In the absence of brilliance or luck, I still believe consistent effort is the surest way for anyone to do anything well.

But the trouble with being too consistent is that it can turn into slavery. For years, I longed to spend more time with my family, learn a new language, or simply just spend an evening watching Kevin Hart movies without feeling guilty that I was “wasting time”.

In conversations with friends and family, I found myself drifting, thinking about my next article. While I was out with my friends on Friday nights, I’d feel listless around 10pm because I knew I’d have to wake up early the next day to write. And slowly, I started feeling resentful towards my commitment towards the blog. Without me knowing it, writing had become a prison.

The Unexpected Benefit of Stopping My Writing

All this came to a halt when I faced a crisis in my personal life. It shook my entire world, and many of my plans, including writing, were shelved. At the same time, unrelated but also much-needed, I embarked on a 90-day spiritual program for men called Exodus 90 which required me to abstain from using the computer except for work and essential tasks.

You know those situations when you stop going to the gym one time, and suddenly it turns into three months without exercise? This was one of those situations, except that my 90-day pause ended up being a three year hiatus from writing.

One of the reasons was because I needed the space to live through my personal crisis and get reacquainted with my prayer life.

But my 90-day pause also helped me realise that I didn’t NEED to write. Part of what kept me going was because I felt that my readers were expecting my article in their inboxes every week. But when I stopped for 90 days and nobody died, I realised that the only person forcing me to write was myself.

Writing had become a prison, but pausing it was the window I needed to climb out.

So What Have I Been Up To?

Aside from that, my three year pause gave the space to explore other interests.

In the past 3 years, I’ve had the space to: Brush up on my Chinese (and fail miserably), get a certificate in theology, get a job in my dream company, learn digital marketing, focus on building a healthy marriage, trying (and failing) to pick up social skills, and spend more time serving in my Catholic cell group.

Don’t get me wrong: I didn’t get particularly good at any of them, but I’m glad that I had the time and the space to explore them anyway. It gave me the opportunity to experience the richness and variety of life – both the ups and the downs – without being tied to a single pursuit or identity.

I also started getting inspired by writers like David Perell, Tim Urban, Paul Graham, Jordan Peterson and others who were putting really smart ideas on the internet, outside of the narrow self-improvement lens I had confined myself into.

But while I was exploring these interests and ideas, I realised that I was quickly forgetting them. Without an avenue to reflect on them and share my perspective, I was letting these amazing ideas slip away from me.

Why I Decided To Keep The Blog & Write This Post

A couple of months ago, someone offered to buy over cheerfulegg. I was surprised, because by that time traffic on the site had slowed to a trickle, and I’d pretty much written off any hope of reviving this blog.

The prospective buyer was polite, professional and carefully explained the reasons why he wanted the blog (for the SEO value). After thinking about it for an agonising few days, I quoted him an insanely high price. Unsurprisingly, he turned it down.

But the sense of relief I got from the rejection was a revelation to me. It confirmed why I unconsciously kept paying my website hosting fees every year even though I stopped writing. It confirmed why I kept the website alive despite many articles being too outdated to be useful or relevant anymore.

I realised that deep down, this blog is my baby and I don’t really want to sell it. It chronicles my life experiences, my learnings, my flawed assumptions, and my unrealistic ambitions. Most of the writing isn’t very good, and many of my posts was simply me rehashing the thoughts of other smart people.

But it was my shitty little blog, and the aggregate of all the stuff I found interesting. By writing about them and forcing myself to have an opinion on them, it’s also shaped who I am today.

So heck, I might give writing another shot. I may not write every single week, and my writing skills may be a little rusty, but I think this is something I’m going to try to do.

When I’m 80 years old and it helps me look back at what a crazy, confusing, difficult and wonderful life it was, it’ll all be worth it.

Starting with this post!