My Top Ten Blog Posts Of 2022
I’m not one for packaging the year gone by, although it’s a truism that New Year’s Eve and Day is the second of two annual occasions I can count on to depress me (the other being my birthday, just two months prior), so I suppose there must be some form or fashion of packaging going on internally.
This year, I’ve decided that I’d look back just in the narrow context of picking my ten favorite blog posts from the year, one in which I wrote seventy-three.
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“The Burnout Discourse”—I write a lot about burnout, trying to navigate the popular discussion, the autistic discussion, and the need to stop talking about it only in terms of employment.
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“Stay Gold, Ponyboy”—At least once a year, I think, some columnist or pundit sets me off; this year it was Arthur C. Brooks in the pages of The Atlantic.
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“Intrinsic Field Subtractor”—I’ve talked a lot about a sort of societal background radiation of conformity, and this year through L. M. Sacasas’ use of Jacques Ellul’s “technique” I thought of it as an intrinsic field like that in Watchmen.
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“You Won’t Know It If You’re Doing It Right”—Also maybe once a year, I run into a number of articles that somehow congeal into a unified whole in my head; here an ongoing interest in the pandemic collides with an ongoing interest in narrative.
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“What’s Of Use”—Another post about burnout, and about society’s guiding star being utility; this is also where I discover “neurasthenia”, the original burnout.
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“Than To Fade Away”—This one is almost a Grand Unified Theory post, as several things I’ve written collude and collide with several things I’ve read to dig deeper the hole toward uncovering what is burnout, really.
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“The Content, Mine and Yours”—In which I take to task a couple of podcasters’ weird conception that there is a structural problem with the internet, rather than an organizational problem with how we use it.
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“Your Autistic Pandemic”—Something of a master list of all the things reported about people’s pandemic experiences that should give them some insight into the every day experience of the actually-autistic.
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“This Is A Song”—An ode to anthems, through one in particular.
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“On The Politics Of Centrifugal Depletion”—I return to L. M. Sacasas and Jacques Ellul and try to ward off the demon distraction of self-helpism in the quest to deal with neoliberal capitalism.
Interestingly, the first eight of these posts all were written in March; the final two are from May and December, respectively. I’m not interested in taking a moment to figure out what was happening in March that resulted in this sort of output. I do want to give an honorable mention to “Modeling Autistic Burnout Through Resources And Demands” (from April) mostly because the conceptual framework I’d come across and discuss there has been pretty critical to me, personally.
These posts don’t, per se, offer any real sense of what the year’s been like for me—it’s been anything from meh (my eternal default) to monstrous. As I’ve said more than once, it’s a bit wearying that of recent years the best for me ironically was 2020, the year the entire world stopped.
Nonetheless, this list at least serves as something of an I Was Here as well as something of an I Did This, as we grit our teeth and gird ourselves for doing it all again, again.