how to be a microcelebrity by Janet G. '27

I’m not very good at impulse management. In my last (real) post, I spent like 15 hours writing ⁠01 to be fair, most of it went into sorting and captioning every image... this takes a shockingly long time, would not recommend about the food I ate for a solid month. At the end of it, I admitted defeat:

like a bear who has stocked up on food stores from the plentiful fall, i too shall go hibernate in my cave for the winter. see y’all later

… and proceeded to fall into a food coma for the entire spring semester. ⁠02 my blueprint liveblog doesn't count; i wrote maybe like 10% of the blog and everything else was from my lovely hackmit team Anyway, spring came and went, we’re now in the middle of summer, and last night I couldn’t sleep until 3am because I hit a critical mass of a desire to write. So here I am. Hello again! 

I knew I wanted to write something, but in my flurry of thoughts last night ideas kept on popping up and getting knocked down. So as a bit of a cop-out and hopefully a new jumpstart, this blog will be about how and why you might want to blog and become the microcelebrity of your dreams. Meta, I know.

For some background, I’ve barely written anything blog-like over the past half year for a multitude of reasons, mostly enumerated below. 

• Basically all my previous blogs were pretty high-effort and image intensive, which meant that they took at least 10 hours per blog. I was, like, actually dying in the Spring semester, so I definitely didn’t have enough time to write anything of substance.
• I shopped around three CI-H ⁠03 Communication Intensive classes, classes that MIT require you to take classes, all of which made me write a lot, and I did not particularly feel like vomiting more words after being forced to write so much. 
• As an international student, reading the news during the spring was not an enjoyable experience. I also couldn’t stop reading the news. I was trying to figure out what I can and can’t say, and the stress was all a bit too much. 
• Aside from the blogs, I also felt tired of writing about myself. I wrote a lot over the past two years. There are a ton of blogs that I have since made private; I wrote a yearly letter that was thousands of words; I write over 100 personalised Christmas cards to my friends every year. I publicised ~80% of my writing, and this really screwed with my self perception. Will talk about this later.
• I got really insecure about writing. I felt like my writing was too fluffy, too overdramatic, too self-important. I felt like I needed to live more life and read more before I had a right to put more writing into the world. 
• Finally, I felt really weird about the collapse of meaning with the onset of AI. Did my writing mean anything anymore? Or was it just a way for the scrapers to source information about me and construct a bastardised version of myself that anyone could query ChatGPT with? 

But here I am, writing about myself on a public platform, and planning on writing more. 

Why? 

Because I think blogging is worth it, and I think maybe you should consider it too.

0) What counts as blogging?

Blogging, as I’ll define it, is about jotting down personal thoughts/takes, and then putting them out into the world via one platform or another. If you jot down personal thoughts and keep them to yourself, that’s called journaling. If you jot down something that isn’t personal thoughts and then put them out into the world, that’s like, propaganda or something. 

1) Why you might want to blog

I think there are primarily three classes of benefits that come with blogging: personal, professional, and social. 

I think personal benefits are the most important, because they stand independent of any external validation/feedback that you might get. In any case, even if you write something and you only show it to a few friends/family members, it’s worth it. These benefits also apply obviously to journalling, so if your privacy concerns are too high for you to count blogging as worth it, you should just journal instead. 

1) Blogging helps you record down experiences and thoughts for later. 

You get to remember what past you cared about; there’s also something so idyllic about recalling the ‘good old times.’ You also get to review past mistakes that you made, and try not to make them again. I love reading old diary entries for this reason — how I’d felt petty against some kid who had laughed at my lack of loom bands, the little games I played with my siblings, the first time I took the courage to go to the local dairy and buy a 2 dollar ice block. I still read the letters to my past selves over the past few years, feeling bittersweet and relieved about things that happened and did not. 

2) Blogging helps you make thoughts legible and synthesize ideas in the context of your own life. 

I think many of the MIT blogs are great examples of this: I’ll reference Aiden H. ‘28 and Allison E. ‘27’s blogs here, although I know many many other bloggers have done the same. ⁠04 mostly just due to alphabetical order or something Allison’s recent blog on life tokens captures such a lovely idea about living life to the fullest; Aiden’s blog about boringness captures a different but similarly meaningful idea about being content with what is already here. Both of them made me think a lot, and they capture these ideas in grounded little snapshots in a way that made them stick in my mind. I was not lucky enough to write those blogs, but I have had a similar case with my blog about instagram and choosing to not engage with social media. I can tell you for sure that it made me think more deeply about the life I’m living. 

Beyond these personal benefits, I think professional and social benefits are also pretty important and tend to scale up with audience.

3) Blogging helps you with articulating and communicating ideas that you otherwise might loosely understand

The Feynman Technique is a pretty famous learning technique. There’s also the trick for asking questions on forums, which is that you ask a question, and then give a bad answer for it on the forum. Other people are more likely to correct a bad answer than be the first to give an answer, ⁠05 i really wanted to find a source, but couldn't find it sorry :( i definitely saw this from somewhere on reddit LMAO not me exposing myself so in the same way, if you write a blog on some concept, you could also get good clarifications on the ideas because you’ve put your understanding out there for other people to correct.

4) Blogging helps you meet people you resonate with! 

There’s a quote that I think is really funny, but is also really true: “everything is a dating app if you try hard enough.” Of course, I’m not saying that you should write a blog so that you can pull. You can do that if you want I guess? But the more generalisable observation is that if you think about dating apps as a way to just meet people you might like, blogs are a way for you to meet people you resonate with. You get to showcase your thoughts, and people who resonate with your thoughts might reach out, in which case new friendships and relationships (;D) just may as well bloom! Henrik Karlsson, an essayist who writes a lot about meta-blogging, has a great post about this.

5) Pleasant surprises 

Something similar but not quite identical to the previous idea is that you can get pleasant surprises. These can include interesting people, but also the occasionally cute fan-mail and old friend who texts you about a blog you write. I remember everyone who has reached out to me about my blogs before — whether emails, comments, in-person or otherwise — and I am always grateful to each and every one of you <3 

6) Fame, income, career… a book deal… eternal legacy blah blah blah 

Alright, we all can dream. But this is a possibility, no matter how slim! 

2) Why you might not want to blog

1) Too much effort 

Sure. Writing takes time; if you’re going to write something that the public might see, it’s probably worth a look-over and proof-reading before you put it out. That takes time and effort, and when you have school/work/other life stuff, it makes sense to deprioritize blogs. But I do think it’s worth it to do hard things, and things expand to fill the time you give it. I’ve been doing some private daily writing with a few friends, and it’s been great for helping me write without burning myself out again. 

2) Loss of privacy 

This is a fair concern. Scrapers can take your content and let people use this against you; you should probably also not share all of your thoughts online for both professional reasons and otherwise. I also worried a lot about scrapers taking my content; at some point, I think I just realized that I was probably losing way more data than a few blogs, so on net the benefits are probably more worth it. 

3) AI slop 

This was a surprisingly big reason that contributed to my inactivity. I felt a little tired of all the AI slop that I was reading everywhere. What do you mean I can’t use my elegant em-dash without being taken for ChatGPT anymore? Is there any point in writing work you want to be seen if it’s just going to be drowned out by people literally churning AI slop out by the day? It’s pretty upsetting. Until I thought about some pieces I used to like a lot, and then realised that they were also slop in a different way. There’s already plenty of bad writing out there; you can’t escape it. Also, this is hopefully liberating in the sense that you can sleep soundly knowing that even if your writing is shit, there’s probably worse shit out there that people are somehow reading and praising anyway. 

4) Over-narrativization 

I talked to Kayode D. ‘27 about this a lot; a pit people who write too much can fall into is “too much writing, not enough living.” Spending too much time in your head does things to you. Sometimes you should focus on living life in the present rather than trying to document everything, and sometimes you should not live life just to fulfill a specific narrative. Andrew, a good friend of mine and one of the best writers I (personally) know, has some good notes about this. 

3) How do you blog?

If you think maybe the benefits are worth the potential costs, here are a couple of ways to get started with blogging. 

If you don’t know what to write about, there’s a lot of blog prompts out there. Streams of consciousness are okay; just feel free to record whatever you were thinking about. If there’s any concepts that you want to understand better, you can also spend time writing about that. 

If you feel insecure about your ideas, you can also just treat blogging as a way for friends to keep in touch with you. Back when I kept a private blog, my friends would respond and comment and it was a really lovely way to keep in touch. Once you get over the activation energy of your first blog, the other blogs may be easier than you think. 

4) Where do you blog?

• Old people use wordpress and wix (but only if you’re really feeling cursed). 
• Substack is the hip new platform that everyone seems to be on, and it’s easy to make a domain and get started. I hosted a private blog on substack in the past; they make it pretty easy to control most things about your blog
• If you’re feeling more independent and high-tech, you can also host your own mailing list / website for your blog. There are a lot of website templates out there that you can pull from github; I’ve had no personal experience with this, but there’s a lot of information out there anyway. 
• And finally, we should maybe acknowledge the elephant in the room…

5) 🫵 YOU could write for MIT admissions! 🫵

Blogging for MIT admissions has been one of the best things I’ve done in college. The benefits are numerous: 

• You get to hang out in the admissions office. It is a beautiful space with large windows that let in a lot of sun, and a beaver plushie that I have fallen asleep on at least three times. Did I mention the snack palace? 
• You get to hang out in the admissions office with the bloggers. Every two weeks, you get paid to yap with these very very cool people and just catch up with each other’s lives. I think the admission bloggers have this really wonderful diverse set of backgrounds and experiences, and it’s always super interesting to hang out with fellow bloggers! I could say a lot about every single blogger and their quirks. It’s like we’re almost friends, which is pretty cool. 
  • no comments about the parasocial relationships that I have from sniping everyone though…
• You get to hang out in the admissions office with the bloggers, and the people who work here, I guess. They’re kinda cool and I’m not even being paid to say this. ⁠06 like, it is literally illegal for me to be on the summer payroll due to restrictions They need to stop being so interesting, kind, and fun to hang out with so that I stop getting derailed for like an hour ⁠07 looking at *you*, jeremy every time I pull up to the admissions office. 
• The platform is based. ⁠08 i mean the metaphorical one. i hate wordpress so, so much I don’t know about you but I spent a year obsessively reading the Admission Blogs because I thought the bloggers were super cool and it was fun to get a window into their life, even if I wasn’t going to get into MIT let alone the blogs. Little did I know…
• The above point also means that you occasionally get cool fanmail and really sweet comments! It’s super lovely and I’m so honoured that people actually Perceive Me when this happens. 
• Also free art of a likeness of yourself is pretty cool.

our slack is pretty fire. kayode did it better than any of us

this has gotta be an OSHA violation or something

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With that said, you should not apply to blog with admissions if…

• You don’t go to MIT. Sorry, in that case you’re just not eligible. 

Otherwise, why not? Use the application as an excuse to write some stuff down and recognise how rich and interesting your life is. 

• And here, I really want to be clear that “thinking you’re not good enough” is NOT a good reason for not applying. Your life is worth thinking about, and regardless of whether you get in as a blogger, you will be able to take away writings & reflections that you wouldn’t have done! 

Anyway, I had a lot of fun writing this. I might start writing again when I have time, but in the meantime this blog has persuaded me that I should start genuinely writing again. I think I’m literally just pent up with not journalling OR blogging OR essaying for the past couple months, because I’ve been busy writing briefs and long ass slack messages or whatever. 

If you’ve made it to the end of this, congrats! Thanks for reading — I am always grateful for the infinite series of coincidences that lead my words to other people. I hope to come across yours one day :) 

And perhaps, just perhaps… I’ll see you in The Office ⁠09 the hit 2025 comedy set MIT Admissions Office, not to be confused with the hit 2005 sitcom The Office one day! 

Additional notes: 

I wrote this, and then while proofreading, realised that in fact Vincent H. ‘23 wrote about like exactly this on his blog a couple weeks ago. And that I had read it. Whatever ideas overlap here is possibly a convergence but more likely reframed from his piece; you should read his piece too! https://mindslice.substack.com/p/what-is-the-point-of-blogging 

Henrik Karlsson has some great advice here: https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/start-a-blog 

There’s a lot of blogging advice out there. This is an opinion piece, so please feel free to get other opinions on blogging (although you will be biased towards people who decided to write in the first place, so try and just talk to your friends too).