Uncomplicated beauty

I haven’t written a blog post in a long time. There are many excuses for this, none of which have anything to do with how much I love writing. There are various other reasons, and I am not sure which one is the most valid or whether any of them is valid at all, for that matter.

These are weird times. I for one am completely disgusted by the quick rise to dominance of genAI models. Let me be clear: I don’t particularly care that people want to be more efficient and believe that these models help them achieve that. Maybe they do. Maybe they don’t. I think in the long run it is an accumulation of missed opportunities that will result in most people becoming less good at what they do. To me, it is devolution. And that’s fine, I guess. I choose ‘the grind.’ I believe doing the hard work has value, even if perhaps it would make me less efficient. I am not sure I want to be more efficient. The old levels of efficiency had enough problems, most of them pertaining to quality control. I am not sure ‘more efficient’ will make that better.

As a result of the quick rise to power of genAI, it is virtually impossible to figure out what is sourced and what isn’t. Is my writing here used for training AI? About one and a half year ago, when I tried out an interview with ChatGPT (whatever old version that was, I don’t know) I was pretty certain that it had no clue about me, or my blog. It was bullshitting pretty hard on who I was and what I do, based on a very (very!) old affiliation of mine. I was pretty happy with that actually. What I am less happy with, is the personalized BS that is produced by genAI these days. In part, this has been enabled by us blindly handing over virtually all of our data to big tech for many years. I maybe dodged a bullet in part by having curbed most personal social media long ago. Nevertheless, there was still a lot of personal writing on my blog, this blog. Some of this was quite personal information, many posts also accompanied by personal pictures. This has led me to take all my ~1000 blog posts offline. And, indeed, this internal struggle regarding what kind of work I am okay with having online has caused me to be very quiet.

Like, nine-months-or-so-without-posting quiet…

But I don’t like giving up my blog. I love my blog.

A second reason for not being very active had little to do with technology, but also with the personalized nature of my writing. I always liked my writing raw and honest. I guess that is just the kind of writer I am. However, a couple of months ago someone I trust raised the possibility that other people would frown upon my honesty. I had certainly considered that. But although they didn’t explicitly state it, they gave me pretty hard vibes that they thought it was probably not positive for everyone to be vulnerable. I thought about that one a lot, and to be fair, in the past I have written about it a lot as well.

So what’s next, then?

To be honest, I don’t really know. I know I still want to devote some of this space to my ecological work, and this is something I will actively put myself to over the next weeks.

Another thing that could be nice to cover is that I picked up bird photography as a side obsession. What can I say? It is (I think) rather uncontroversial. It is also beautiful. It is uncomplicated. It is raw (pun intended? who knows.) It is also something that for 39 years I barely knew existed. But I am glad I discovered it now. Better late than never.

And perhaps it will be some of that: writing about the complexities of nature through my work in ecology, combined with sharing the uncomplicated beauty of nature. Sharing some of this journey that is quite personal in some ways, but in ways that I am quite fine with people reading about.

Below is a picture from today’s lunch stroll… Do you see how beautiful the natural world is if you really look? Taking this picture was three minutes of mindfulness. Forget about an apple a day. One bird picture a day keeps my doctor away.