PSA: Blogging Is On Its Way OUT

I have had it with elite "bloggers" and tech-ass CEOs condescending to the masses with their guides to "boosting blog traffic." Let's face it, people. SEO is out. Even search engines are out. Heck, nobody even uses the Internet anymore. We are living a lie: we need to admit that this way of communicating--blogging--is not viable anymore. I've been blogging since 1945--back when blogging was something you got paid to do--and let me tell you, this is a dying art. I don't mean that in the sense that it's something we should preserve, build an institute for, and cherish like it's the last surviving fertile pair of pandas.

I mean it in the sense that we need to take blogging off life-support and just let it die a natural death.

Let me explain. Like I said, I was one of the early bloggers. I wasn't among the first, but let's just say I was around when Eisenhower wrote the classic "14 Reasons Why an Interstate Highway System Would Fucking Rock" listicle. (I was the first to comment on that listicle, by the way.)

I saw the real estate content marketing boom and bust, and I watched thousands of desperate bloggers scrambling to reclaim all the subscribers they suddenly lost after people realized nobody actually cared about the "18 best ways to announce at your dinner party that you casually bought property in California."

I saw the Cold War blog fiasco, where one Soviet blogger nearly sparked World War III after "10 Bombs America has Already Dropped On Us."

You might just think that these decades of experience have put a massive chip on my shoulder, but all they have done is given me an undeniably well-rounded perspective on the inevitable un-trending of a trend we have in recent years tended to overextend.

Over the past 60-odd years, blogging has seen a slow but steady decline. In 1945, when I was starting out and blogging was hot, everybody and his mother had a blog. The President had a blog. The Army had a blog. Even your dog had a blog. Now, the President has some intern blogging for him. The Army has outsourced its blogging to underpaid wage-workers in China. For reasons largely left unexplained, nearly 80 percent of dogs have left the blogosphere.

No note. They just left.

Comparing the blogosphere of today to the blogosphere of 1945 is like holding up a rabbit turd to the ziggurats of Machu Picchu. Laughable. And you want to wash your hands after you do it.

I feel filthy.

Here are some startling statistics:

• Blogs on religion are down 45 percent from 1945.
• Blogs on politics are down 80 percent. 
• Blogs on cats--once a rare atrocity--have nearly tripled. This is a bad sign.
• Here's the zinger: the average annual income of professional bloggers has reached an all-time low. In 1945, you could make $80,000 per year by blogging about your political views and honest opinions. As much as it pains me to relate this fact, I will: bloggers today make an average of $300 per year.
• Possibly as a result of their diminished wages and desperate circumstances, the number of federal crimes committed in America by bloggers has increased tenfold.
• Homicides, specifically, have doubled.
• Possibly due to a drought of good ideas, copyright infringement has placed thousands of well-meaning bloggers in prison.

Blogging has become a playground for 14-year-old nutbags, bad writers, terrorists, and content marketers. Blogging used to be an honest profession. It really did. It brought home the bacon, it made you friends, it gave you self-esteem, and it helped people. It actually helped people. Not only that, but it was the way people left their permanent mark on the world. Nowadays people will read 600 words from some 14-year-old who calls himself a "content marketing prodigy" (but is actually a cat), impulsively add themselves to that imbecile cat's insipid following, scroll down to the next story, and run back to their narcissistic bastard lives feeling like they exercised their freedom of expression and--gulp!--learned something. Not so in 1945. Back then, good bloggers got plaques.

They got plaques, and some of the really good ones got medals.

Whole towns got together to throw parties for good blog posts.

It was a different world...I would go so far as to call it the Golden Age of Blogs.

It's been a long time since that world was a reality, and despite some tough years of denial in the 80s, I'm over it. My problem now is that most people haven't made this leap.

What You Should Do

Trust me. Blogging is one of the worst things you could do with your life. Save yourself some time and stop blogging. Maybe it was once a glamorous profession, but now it's the editorial equivalent of basket-weaving. And if you told anyone that you were a basket-weaver, you'd get a stern talking to--similar to this one--about how you need to move on and get a real job.