End of Year Scoreboard and an Appropriate level of shame (less than James Boswell)

Actually I’m down a bit on 2014.

According to the WordPress stats page – I have fewer views in 2015 than in 2014 – though I had more visitors in 2015 than in 2014.  In short – more people saw my blogs this year – but they saw fewer of them.  Had I secured fewer views and visitors in 2015, then I might have got all depressed and resolved to jack things in.

Conclusion?  2014 may have had a stronger narrative element which encouraged more people to hop from one blog to another.

It’s been nearly three years since two completely different people with very little in common independently and unbeknownst to one another advised me to start blogging.

And now blogging is what I do instead of gaming.   And my stats page is what I have instead of High Scores.

If I thought I could manage it, I should of course eschew both blogging and gaming in favour of Serious Scholarship.  But that would be a lot of eschewing.  Don’t eschew more than you can do – is my motto.

I’m quite good at resolving, especially at New Year.  New Year Resolution season brings out the James Boswell in me.  Boswell frequently wrote “I resolve” in his journal, and his resolutions usually consisted of variants of “I resolve to be a slightly less embarrassing, libidinous, and drunken mess of a human being in future.”  Boswell’s problem, of course, was that he had guilt but no shame.  He acknowledges this at one point, noticing this faculty of “shame” that others seemed to possess which served as a useful inhibitor – a way of preventing people from being complete arses before they even went out of an evening, instead of having to bitterly “resolve” things penitently the ensuing morning.

Now I’ve got shame aplenty.  A degree of shamelessness is needed to get stuff done.  With the passing of the years, it’s increasingly the stuff you didn’t do you regret, not the stuff you did do (unless you’re James Boswell, in which case it’s definitely the stuff you did do).

So, somewhere in between the shameful querulous timidity that gets nothing done and the shamelessness of James Boswell is the right degree of shame.  And in 2016, I resolve to find that right level.

And live in it.