What do blogs teach us? “It’s not all about you!”

Blogs do remind us that ours is not the only way of thinking, or even the best

It happens, usually in the wintertime, when we have our hoods up. We take the same route to work, we go to the same restaurants, we think the same repetitive thoughts day after day. And because of this routine, we start to think in a way that is dangerous and incorrect: We start to think that ours is more or less the only proper way to look at the world. (And we stop delineating the difference between “more” and “less.”)

We are so familiar with our point of view that the net effect isn’t arrogance, but boredom—boredom that might be cured by reading a great book, but boredom that’s so intense it sometimes prevents us from looking for a good book to read, or even reading one that’s within an arm’s length.

In the resulting cloud of desperation devoid of curiosity, sometimes all we can bring ourselves to do is search Google—looking for what? Looking for more of ourselves. We plumb Google for information about our favorite hobby, wanting more details about what we already know. We search to see if any of our own writing shows up on the Internet or if anyone else has been talking about us online. We search to see if our publisher comes up.