Validation and Vanity
Jen at Et Tu has just written a timely post on the dangers of looking for validation in the comments on your blog posts. I link to it because it speaks to some things I’ve been thinking about, and indirectly to one of the reasons why I’ve not been posting much recently: intellectual vanity.
As I noted a while back, I’m currently fascinated by the Dominicans, the “Order of Preachers”. One of the Dominican mottos is to contemplate, and then share the fruits of your contemplation. I’ve been doing a lot of contemplating over the last year, and there are many things I’ve thought might be worthy of sharing. I’ve posted a few of them. But every time I do that, I start waiting and hoping that someone will notice how brilliant I am—that I’ll get buckets of links, and tons of positive comments, and that generally I’ll be regarded as the neatest thing since sliced bread. And while not every such link gets noticed, I’ve gotten just enough encouragement to keep looking for it.
And that means that my goal hasn’t been to teach, or to help others, or to give glory to God, but rather to accumulate glory for myself—which, as I realized some months ago, is intellectual vanity. Consequently, I more or less put myself on a blogging diet whilst pondering this. And I’ve come to a number of conclusions. First is that I need to spend more time with real flesh-and-blood people and less time with pixels (i.e., with people at our parish, with friends, and with family). Second is that blogging about the things I’m thinking about is OK, but I need to watch my attitude.
So, if you liked this post, feel free not to tell me. 