5 Things I "Hate" About Blogging

I’m constantly reading that “honest posts,” those where you write from a more personal level, are really what can draw people into your blog. Although I feel I have certainly done that on topics like this and this and that, I don’t do it ’round the clock for no other reason than I don’t lead nearly an exciting enough life (I’m partially kidding here). But here is one topic that’s on my mind a lot. What I don’t like about blogging.

-Feeling burnt out
I know I’m somewhat a contributor to this because in an average week, I post about four times, sometimes more. And when I post, they’re almost always long posts (i.e. I don’t write three sentence paragraphs and call it a post). I’ve talked with other bloggers who tell me they’re always amazed with how frequently I post, but I feel if I don’t post that often, the readers I do have will lose interest and forget about my blog. But sometimes it is hard to constantly come up with new things to write about, especially when you haven’t done any traveling in weeks or even months.

-Not traveling as often as I’d like
There are those bloggers who are either on extended trips or travel full-time. So needless to say they have incredible content to blog about all the time. With me, when I travel somewhere I have some pretty awesome blog fodder that, for my big trip of the year, will usually last a month.

-Jealousy
Directly tied to the previous reason, well, when I read some blogs I get majorly jealous. When I see individuals my age or even younger, already having done the Southeast Asia circuit (a dream trip of mine) or crossed off half a dozen countries in South America like it was a piece of cake, deep feelings of envy set in. The only thing that appeases these feelings are knowing that these individuals are not traveling around in a way I like or would do at all, as in they are adhering to possibly a $30 budget a day (often less), have the same three outfits to wear on their travels, and are frequently visited by the creepy crawler variety in their accommodations.

-Cliques
When you hear someone say that cliques are just a thing of middle school/high school, well, that individual is wrong.  Sadly, cliques will follow you no matter where you go in life, regardless of how old you are. I feel that in the blogging community, there are a lot of these. With me, I’m not a straight up travel blogger-while travel is my first and foremost area, I “fill in” with posts on cooking as well- so right off the bat there I don’t feel like I belong. I also think that since I don’t travel full-time I’m not one of the “cool kids.” This is just an observation of mine, but I’ve seen enough blogs where people seem to be cyber BFFs even though they have never met in life and may not either.

-My dislike of social media (at times)
This obviously can be tied with the feeling of being burnt out, but sometimes I am so sick of social media. Since I work full-time, the last thing I want to be doing in my free time is tweeting constantly, scrolling through tweets that seem interesting so that I can either retweet or favorite them. I like having a Facebook page for my blog but sometimes I just feel like I’m talking to an invisible audience there. In short, I guess I wish I could have more interaction with my readers, followers, people who like my blog’s page, because sometimes it seems like I’m just doing it for myself.

I’m sure I could rustle up some other reasons I get frustrated with blogging, but for now those are my main ones. But don’t worry, I’m not planning on giving up blogging. I just wanted to show through this post that sometimes blogging isn’t always fun and often it does feel like a job (on top of the full-time job I already have).