In this personal entry, I want to unburden myself about something I’ve been wrestling with lately: purpose. And how I plan to move forward with durmonski.com.
Recently, I’ve been feeling like I lost my path.
My site started as a rebellion against the relentless hype culture focused on endless growth and the so-called gurus that sell “expertise” that will supposedly make you millions in just a few minutes of work per day. Somewhere along the way, however, I lost my focus and began chasing new ideas. Partly because my curiosity drives me to experiment endlessly, and partly because the site hasn’t been growing as I wanted it.
Long story short, I tried a bunch of different ideas only to return and conclude what initially inspired me to start writing: “I want my personal website to be personal!”
The initial concept of this site was simple: share my thoughts about books, life, and further explore the vast array of ideas living rent-free in my brain space. But then, perhaps swayed by my sense of doubt and whisper that I’m ultimately unremarkable, I convinced myself that nobody cared about me as a person. Thus, I focused on covering topics only supported by facts, without much about me inside.
This led to a lot of rush to produce content for the sake of growth. Plus, a lot of experimentation related to the type of content I create and my membership offering. Yet, this overall experience gradually alienated me from my true interests.
In plain terms, I was doing what I was supposed to do with my website, rather than what I genuinely wanted to do.
Now, armed with renewed ambition and a dose of confidence, bolstered by the comments I regularly receive from readers – telling me how they resonate with my personal experiences (Thank you!). I decided to craft a purpose statement for myself.
I believe that putting it into words and sharing it publicly will help me stay true to my own interests, and remind me why I started in the first place.
Statement of Purpose
I feel increasingly certain that there is no better time to disengage from the mass-produced media and double-down on your weird interests.
I’m not sure how you feel about the state of the Internet nowadays, but the overall opinion is that it’s become a pile of garbage.1
Once upon a time, the Internet was a gateway to connect with people and peek into their fascinating projects – their struggles, their passions, their highs and lows.
Reading someone’s blog was an exciting experience where you’d be eager to engage in the comments and have a discussion about the topic at hand.
As one quote so perfectly sums it up: “Good blogs make you want to start your own blog.”
But not just blogs, the Internet itself used to be a lot more about user participation and creative exchange.
Now, the online world is jammed with celebrities, and wanna-be such, that are all selling their own version of overnight success, with hyped-up product names like: “Transform Your Life! Earn 10K with Just 10 Minutes of Work!”
But that’s only the tip of the digital iceberg…
Unavoidable ads trying to sell you stuff you don’t need. Endorsements of products whose very existence defies logic. Constant nagging that you are a step away from greatness only if you buy this “revolutionary” course. YouTube bros copying each other, creating the same type of thumbnails, and writing the same extreme titles to get your attention.
And this is just the beginning.
With the rise of AI tools, soon the online landscape will be simply a place where you browse through what the latest AI model spits out.
Since social media and more recently LLMs became mainstream, I feel a sense of alienation from the major publishers.
Personal sites are dying.
Writers who once poured their hearts into blog posts are now churning out TikTok shorts, YouTube videos, or writing on Substack – which is now becoming another social media app.
I suspect many of them are doing it for the big payday. No issues with that – we all need to eat, right? Actually, there are pretty smart people creating interesting videos and posts on the just-mentioned.
Yet, I do have problems with these mediums. On sites like YouTube, TikTok, and Substack, the overall goal is to enter and never exit. You are basically inside an endless, highly personalized feed, constantly incentivized to consume more. Their business model is to turn you into a passive consumer, endlessly scrolling until you’re out of money and out of energy.
I refuse to accept a world where personal websites become relics. These calm places stripped from the vanity metrics and focused on the reader, not on making some platform even more profitable.
I don’t want to accept a world where people without a social media account, people who don’t spread meaningless info created to adore the algorithm, can’t make it.
And most importantly, I don’t want to accept a world where the whole web is going to become a chat box or produced by a chat box – because that’s the direction we are heading.
Frankly, I’d rather hear from a real person, someone who’s actually put thought into their words, than something someone cobbled together in an hour by the latest AI tool.
With all that said, I want to remind myself why I am doing what I am doing on this site.
In particular, I want to flesh out these three:
- Who is this site for?
- What is my purpose?
- What am I planning to focus on?
Let’s start from the top:
1. Who Is This Site For?
It’s been 7 years since I launched this site, and in that time, I’ve gathered a fair share of feedback from people.
Based on this feedback, my content seems to serve these two segments that initially don’t seem to have a lot in common, but they do when you think about it:
- People who still can’t figure out what they want out of life.
- People who do know what they want, but need encouragement in times of difficulty.
What unites these two groups is a profound sense of being lost. A feeling that life is tainted by an overwhelming, almost malignant meaninglessness. They’re stuck in a swamp of apathy, groping for any glimmer of purpose, sadly not quite successful in the process.
My site is for people who feel a general resentment at the direction of the world. It’s for those tired of the YouTube influencers crying in front of the camera to get more views; The “smart” experts describing patience as the secret weapon to get successful only to sell you one more product; The TikTok “celebrities” doing silly things for the sole purpose of being picked up by the algorithm.
In short, my site is for people who are tired of shallowness and are looking for better ways to cultivate their own existence.
My site is for people who find it insane that so many folks are wasting their time on seductive platforms.
My site is for the rare breed of people who realize that living a good life is not about getting things, but pursuing a state of being.
My site is for people thirsty for a place on the Internet that feels less mall, more library, less networking event, more private conversation.
2. What Is My Purpose?
I sincerely believe that most people are poorly prepared to handle the perplexities of modern living.
When electronic media first emerged, we thought it was a gift from the heavens. A few years into being molded by the apps on our devices, and it’s obvious that we are both practically and intellectually inadequate to have stable relationships with our phones.
There are studies, articles, and personal memos shared in relation to how social media apps, modern entertainment (Netflix, porn, video games, etc.), and online shopping are corrupting our lives. Yet, we can’t seem to stop ourselves from using.
We read articles about the grotesque exhibition of our collective digital depravity, unable to believe that human beings could exhibit such propensities for unrepentant self-destruction. Yet, we plunge headfirst into the pit of digital intoxication.
We stumble upon studies about how our relationships are worsening due to our obsessive attachment to our phones, and we are puzzled by such strong yearning for technological dependence. Yet we continue to live in our own ruin, glued in front of the screen.
The world is moving fast, and since you don’t want to separate yourself from the herd, you follow along. But somewhere in the process, you might start to see the cracks in society.
You start to realize that what others are doing, is not particularly helpful for you.
You start to question the norms.
You start to disengage from the considered widely popular beliefs.
I want my site to serve as such a catalyst. A trigger that will wake you from your slumber.
In particular, my focus is towards these three directions:
#1: In a World Where Everyone Is Trying To Rush You, I Want To Slow You Down
Like. Follow. Subscribe. Smash that thumbs up button. Check my other video. Get this product. Then this. Watch this show. Scroll through a slew of short clips. Agree with a comment. Disagree with another. Share your opinion. Update the strangers online about your latest gig.
Afraid that our lives are too conventional, we spice things up by diving into the digital abyss. This gives us a sense of relief from the mundane everydayness. Thankfully, there’s an endless buffet of distractions online.
But the more time we spend polishing our online personas, the more our offline identities sink into irrelevance.
Online, everything is happening so fast: short text, short clips, the promise that it takes a short period of time to achieve a new level of greatness. The moment we stop, we feel frozen in place.
Offline, our world is nothing but a dull, uninspired block of meh. And so, we return, immersing ourselves once again into the endless well of entertainment.
Individually, the content that is posted online, even the shallow one, is harmless. Yet the algorithm doesn’t intend to show you just one video, post, or product. When you enter the void, it’s hard to escape. Like a digital whirlwind, your favorite app – whether that’s TikTok, Netflix, YouTube, or all of them together – feeds your obsessions, showing you hypnotic content again and again, rushing you to act on impulse.
Maybe you didn’t think you wanted to book a trip to Dubai when you sat on your couch to relax today. But 15 TikTok videos and 17 Instagram posts later, you very much want to go there, eager to replicate the posts like the one you just saw.
The entire online ecosystem is engineered to provoke immediate action. To stimulate our primal impulses to abandon reason. The result? Depression and an acute surge of existential void when you peel yourself away from your phone.
My intention here is to slow you down. To open your eyes to the possibility of a life unburdened by an incessant hunger for constant consumption.
#2: In a World Where People Are Trying To Make You Care About Fleeting Topics, I Want To Make You Care About Everlasting Ideas
The endless scroll has transformed the internet into a minefield of dopamine traps. Every second online, you wage war against your primal urge to mindlessly consume. The impulses that push you towards submerging into a stream of shallow content that is stripped out of any form of complexity with the intention to be swallowed in a single, mind-numbing glance.
Yes, the digital frontier is now preoccupied with a type of content that doesn’t ignite thinking. It’s just cotton candy clogging our minds with malignant junk.
Topics or ideas that will demand from us to exercise our minds or build us up as people capable of critical thinking are somewhere in the back. Abandoned.
Why is that?
There are three chief culprits.
First, time for content production.
The speed at which things can now be created is astonishing. Social media allows you to craft a post of some sort in a matter of minutes, sometimes even seconds.
The result?
Millions of trivial publications that might not be worth checking, yet somehow, they all manage to ambush us because of this…
Second, the decline of intellectualism.
We may be savvy enough to navigate the Internet, but we are not emotionally strong enough to use it for the right reasons – i.e., to further improve our mental capabilities.
A recently published study found that American IQs are dropping for the first time in ages.2
Why?
Well, there are different theories, but the majority of the scientists agree that it’s due to a lack of exposure to challenges. With the easy access to distractions and amusement, our higher thinking atrophies.
In a way, not exercising your ability to think has become a habit.
It goes something like this: You are at work and you are facing a challenge. You need to solve problem X. But instead of thinking about how to solve it, you go online and search for the solution. Repeat this cycle a couple of times, and guess what happens? You always skip the thinking part and jump straight into the searching part. The end result is that you get really good at searching for solutions but really bad at thinking about solving problems on your own.
And it’s going to get even worse with AI.
Before AI, you had to slog through different websites – dodge obnoxious ads, filter the irrelevant info, etc. – just to piece together a solution.
Now, you get an answer with a single chat session.
And the education system is not helping. Not only students are using AI for their essays, but teachers as well to grade them.3, 4
But there is more!
As mentioned, there are three main culprits. The third is the following:
Short-termism.
Short-termism is our excessive focus on short-term results at the expense of long-term interests.
That’s the reason YouTube clips talking about how everyone can make $1,000 a day using AI are getting millions of views. Simply put, blurred by the intoxicating allure of instant riches, millions of people don’t ever stop to consider this: “If this was so easy, why aren’t we all millionaires?”
I refuse to encourage such types of malice thinking.
People don’t step back and exercise their ability to think because they keep consuming small, bite-sized pieces of content to satiate their hunger for validation.
My intention is to provide long-form reading on subjects that will remain relevant a century from now. Thought-provoking pieces designed to encourage deep reflection and sharpen your mind, instead of turning it into a redundant piece of mush.
#3: In a World Where Everyone Is Immersed In Impatiently Acquiring More, I Want To Focus You On The Few Things That Matter
When I was in my early twenties, my father handed me a book he’d borrowed from his boss. The book was The Little Red Book of Selling by Jeffrey Gitomer. As the title suggests, it’s a book about selling.
Somehow, my father figured that I’m interested in the topic. I was. In fact, I still am.
I barely remember much from the book, except for one quote that’s haunted me ever since:
“People don’t like to be sold – but they love to buy.” Jeffrey Gitomer
At the time, I didn’t get it. I was still young and naive.
But now I do, and oh boy, do we love to buy.
The premise of Gitomer’s observation is that people don’t want to converse with a manipulative salesperson who is trying to close the deal at lightning speed. People want to buy. But sometimes they need guidance in the process. And if you are a salesperson, you shouldn’t focus so much on selling your product. Instead, you need to understand the need of the person to buy, and support them in the process.
Why am I telling you this?
Because it’s even truer now than when I first read it back in the distant 2009.
We’re all addicted to buying. Thanks to the evolution of the modern economy for the past decade, it’s not only easier to obtain more goods. But we are also constantly encouraged to buy even more things.
For example, you buy the latest, coolest laptop available on the market. Good for you. But what happens a couple of months later? There is now an even flashier machine, rendering your prized gadget obsolete – like a piece of junk that even the bargain bin would spurn.
The reality is that no one is as impressed about your stuff as you are. Yet we chase the fleeting thrill unlocked from purchasing something. Clicking buy. Waiting for the product to be delivered. Unboxing it. This cycle is a powerful emotional experience. And we are hopelessly hooked.
It doesn’t even matter whether you are getting a luxury handbag or $10 keychain from Alibaba. As long as you have something to unwrap, you feel like your life has meaning.
However, we don’t crave only physical goods. We hunger for acquiring more information, too.
Just like low-quality products make us go “whoa” due to the dynamics related to the shopping experience, low-quality information ignites the brain’s dopamine-producing reward system, too.5
Basically, we are not always picky about what we consume, the point is to keep consuming. Keep hoarding more – regardless of what it is or how meaningful it is.
On the surface, it looks like we are progressing, but it’s more that we are drowning in a scattered mosaic of trivial facts and goods.
We typically understand that we have a problem when it’s too late: when our homes are clutter with boxes we can’t even navigate around; when we get persistent calls from the bank for overdue payments; or when our cognition is clouded by a vortex of clips we binge while on the toilet.
A significant part of my mission as a writer is to dismantle this ingrained culture of wanting for the sake of wanting.
Yes, there are thousands of items available for purchase. Thousands of new posts have probably been published just as you read this. But do they really matter?
I’ve come to the conclusion that our compulsive consumption stems largely from a lack of purpose. A failure to understand what we truly want for our lives.
We think we know what we want, but we actually have no idea. We simply mimic the wants of other people, never questioning what is the thing we, ourselves, want.
What I’m Planning to Focus On?
I’m narrowing down the endless buffet of topics to serve up personal-style essays, backed with a healthy dose of my own experiences and the ideas I collect from the books I read.
I plan to lay bare more of my personal life – my thoughts, my struggles, my pleasures, and all the messy backstage moments that rarely make it to the front.
In other words, I want to introduce more of my true self directly into the text.
Not that I wasn’t already doing this, or at least partly, but now I want this to become the main course rather than a side dish.
All of this is going to be served in a calm, non-destructive way. A site that is aimed to heal, not to hook.
This will also involve making some re-arrangements in terms of menu items and offerings – make things more organized.
To elaborate even further…
I believe it’s underappreciated how ideas are delivered.
Even if what you are saying is important, if the screen mercilessly whisks you away to the next topic before you can even process what you’ve just read, it’s as if your hard-earned insight evaporated into nothingness.
Personally, I think that how your work is presented plays a critical part in how valuable it will be for the reader.
It’s one thing to extract insights from a book, where you have the luxury of pausing and analyzing the ideas; it’s quite another to learn something from a barrage of social media posts designed to distract and hijack your attention.
My site will remain more like a calm reading experience and less like a mind-numbing gadget that prevents critical thought.
Some Closing Thoughts
I find myself regularly reflecting over the state of the internet – watching, half in amusement and half in horror, as the online world morphs into something almost unrecognizable.
This makes me wonder: Will personal sites even exist in a few years?
Sure, yes. But an existing website is one thing, a visited website is quite another.
The masses have flocked to social media. Which is the word I use as an umbrella term for all of these: TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter (X), YouTube, Substack – and all the other niche platforms that keep our attention hostage.
And if this isn’t enough, AI chats are designed to make you not want to visit a website at all.
Soon, the habits of people will degenerate even further. Making our attention spans even worse and reducing our desire to read words on a page to something barely worth a second glance.
Now, you might be asking: “Why keep this site running at all, then? If you love sharing ideas, why not start a YouTube channel or a Substack, like the cool kids?”
This deserves a longer treatment, which I might consider eventually, but the short answer is based on these three factors:
- I’m a stubborn guy.
- I don’t like the manipulative tendencies of social media websites.
- I recognize the irreplaceable value of genuine self-expression.
While the majority of the people are forcing you to like, subscribe, and watch the next video – barely giving you time to digest the current one. I want to focus your thinking on one topic at a time.
I want my writing to serve as a literal kick in the butt.
We are each a bundle of competing motivations – we want to be informed, and praised, and understood, and supported, but at the same time we want to have fun and take the path of least resistance.
Social media is perfect for giving you all of the above, which results in you not doing anything to change your circumstances. You think you are making progress, while in reality you are just pressing buttons and being molded by the whims of the platform.
I want my site to be more like a Trojan horse that creeps into your consciousness and makes you realize that you can do a lot better than what you are currently doing. Force you to take that first bold step, then help you keep marching in the right direction.
The cardinal reason to keep doing what I’m doing is to help people see how much is possible. How much you can achieve if you give adequate shape to your true desires.
That’s it. Talk soon!
Escape Triviality. Lean Towards Creativity
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Footnotes:
- Allyn, B. and Levitt, M. Everyday users are complaining that the internet is more chaotic than ever, NPR. Available at: https://www.npr.org/2024/01/17/1225253754/everyday-users-are-complaining-that-the-internet-is-more-chaotic-than-ever
- Dworak, E.M., Revelle, W. and Condon, D.M. Looking for Flynn effects in a recent online U.S. adult sample: Examining shifts within the sapa project, Intelligence, 98, p. 101734. doi:10.1016/j.intell.2023.101734
- Students are using AI already. here’s what they think adults should know (no date) Harvard Graduate School of Education. Available at: https://www.gse.harvard.edu/ideas/usable-knowledge/24/09/students-are-using-ai-already-heres-what-they-think-adults-should-know
- Kelly, S.M. Teachers are using AI to grade essays. students are using AI to write them | CNN business, CNN. Available at: https://edition.cnn.com/2024/04/06/tech/teachers-grading-ai/index.html
- Counts, L. How information is like snacks, money, and drugs-to your brain – haas news: Berkeley Haas, Haas News | Berkeley Haas. Available at: https://newsroom.haas.berkeley.edu/how-information-is-like-snacks-money-and-drugs-to-your-brain/
