It's done. I made it to the end. A Finnish proverb fits the situation perfectly:

Paska reissu mutta tulipahan tehtyä

Which translates to something like "A crappy journey but in any case it's over now". I forced myself to do this. It was not fun. I rarely enjoyed writing. Every day I kept looking at the word counter, hoping that it would be over already. Sometimes the text was not done when I reached 500 words, which meant I had to write more.

I did not manage to keep any buffer. Each text was written on the day when it needed to be ready, except for this one which I wrote five days in advance because why not. Sometimes I had fragments or notes ready, but most of the time not even that. Once or twice I wrote two posts back to back around midnight, but most of the time I finished a text and then did something else for the rest of the day. Doing it again tomorrow was bad enough.

I managed to not neglect my work too badly. Sure, I skipped a day or two because I had to write instead, but it's not like I don't do that to play videogames every now and then, something I completely avoided this month.

The thing I did neglect was the quality of text I produced. One could imagine that if the top priority for every day is producing a blog post, you could actually put some effort into it. I managed to put in a lot of hours, but I'm not happy about the level of effort spent. Hard to distinguish between quality and effort though, but most of the time I was tired and just wanted it to be over and picked the first topic that I could manage to find 500 words in. I did barely any editing except for spellcheck with ChatGPT. I didn't even read most of the texts myself.

Scott Alexander's quote from the Inkhaven site was something that motivated me to do this in the first place:

"Whenever I see a new person who blogs every day, it's very rare that that never goes anywhere or they don't get good. That's like my best leading indicator for who's going to be a good blogger."

Goodhart's law strikes again! Once there's a pressure to write every day, its usefulness as an indicator is over. There's a more fitting quote from Scott, in The Parable Of The Talents

On the other hand, I know people who want to get good at writing, and make a mighty resolution to write two hundred words a day every day, and then after the first week they find it’s too annoying and give up. These people think I’m amazing, and why shouldn’t they? I’ve written a few hundred to a few thousand words pretty much every day for the past ten years.

But as I’ve said before, this has taken exactly zero willpower. It’s more that I can’t stop even if I want to. Part of that is probably that when I write, I feel really good about having expressed exactly what it was I meant to say. Lots of people read it, they comment, they praise me, I feel good, I’m encouraged to keep writing, and it’s exactly the same virtuous cycle as my brother got from his piano practice.

So yeah. I guess I just have to be happy that at least one of my cycles was around something so financially useful as programming. Imagine trying to make a living or even waste all this time I have with my other interests; online chess and reading young adult fantasy books. Weirdly enough I didn't need any of that external feedback for programming either, perhaps there was no cycle at all other than my own fascination of what could be done with the closest thing to magic we have.

That said I'm still sad that I'll never be a blogger. But as the saying goes, everyone wants to be a writer, yet nobody wants to write. I certainly don't, I'm done. Or maybe I am a blogger now, given that I've written some 20 000 words over the past month?