How Many Blog Posts Will You Ever Write?

March 10, 2025

You can get philosophical about anything if you try hard enough.

I was thinking about the code I added to my site the other day. I have some concerns about it’s performance. It’s going to get slower and slower as I add more posts. I did a little estimating to see how bad it would get. It should be fine.

But the interesting turn, is the realization that this is the same question as: how many blog posts will I ever make, over my entire life? Some quick eyeballing of what I’ve done so far suggests five posts a month as a rough average. That seems reasonable to me: it’s slightly more than one post a week. Then let’s say I live and write for seventy more years¹. So that’s 5 * 12 * 70 = 4,200 posts. Now this part is more specific to me, but my posts so far have averaged about 250 words long. So the total word count is 4200 * 250 = 1,050,000.

I find myself a little unsettled by how easy that calculation was. A little poking at my calculator and there is all the writing I’ll ever do here. It’s not a limit, exactly. If I were determined to do this every day I could blow past that. But it would take specific effort, and the Final number would not be all that much higher.

It also makes me wonder a little what the internet will look like 70 years from now. The internet did not exist at all 70 years ago, and took a long time to reach it’s current form. So I don’t feel like I can assume it will be at all recognizable in 2095. I don’t have any insights or ideas on what it might be today, but speculating about that is more fun than confronting my mortality, so… let’s write some sci-fi.

What stubborn and anxious things our minds are. I’ve led myself right to a conclusion of “You only have so much time to say so many words: make them count.” But I shy and squirm away from it. I want to think and talk about something else.

When I was a little kid, I was a very bad patient at the dentist. I would squeeze my lips shut with my fingers to deny them access. I’m reminded of that as I sit here and write. This is different of course. As far as anyone knows, death is not as salutary as a visit to the dentist. But the stubborn denial isn’t any more productive.

There’s another trick I’m playing on you and myself. Even if I make a call here for stoicism, and acceptance of the fact of death, I’m still avoiding the truth. Which is not dreadful or terrifying, but simply boring. It probably won’t be death that stops me from working on this blog, but life. There are a specific set of life circumstances that afford me the time and thought to write here and share it like this. Those are subject to change. The most probable scenario is that I will simply get bored and or busy. That this will slip down my list of priorities and become simply a thing that I did, once, for a time.

So what’s the conclusion of this post? Maybe it’s just that there always is a conclusion, of some kind. What’s certain is that you can’t stay still.