Ending 2019

This blog achieved multiple minor but personally enjoyable milestones in 2019:

• It was read by people in 143 counties, the highest in a single year since 2008 (when I started blogging)
• It was the second busiest year by traffic (after 2015)
• It was the year with the highest post engagement (as ‘likes’ on WordPress and shares/comments on Twitter and Facebook)
• It crossed both 1,000 and 1,100 published posts
• The number of subscribers breached the 5,600 mark
• 2019 was my third most productive year by total number of posts (169) and average post length (793 words)

Some notes

1. In 2019, most of what I learnt about writing had to do with straddling the thin line between populist and heterodox writing. Where populism dictates giving the people what they want, and progressively enclosing them deeper within echo chambers, the heterodoxy here refers to giving your readers something they don’t know they want but consume once they discover it. This is harder than it sounds largely because interestingness is a vague goal. Lots of things are interesting, and most people interested in interesting things aren’t interested in all topics. So if I’ve been as productive as I have this year, it’s because I think I got better at identifying what kind of heterodox content Root Privileges‘s readers like and which I also like.

2. I hit multiple rough patches in my personal as well as professional lives this year, and experienced at least three extended periods of writers’ block brought on by an overwhelming sensation of irrelevance on one occasion, of disgust and world-weariness on the second, and a protracted period of mental illness on the third. While I resent the occurrence of these episodes, I’m also grateful and delighted for having found a way on all of them to get back to the writing habit, one way or another. So if in future I find myself stuck in a similar rut, I will have one more way to motivate myself beyond discovering the specific antidote to the circumstances: to simply tell myself I did it before so I should be able to do it again.

On that note, I hope you have a great, happier, more productive and more gainful year in 2020!