(This post was written and published as an exercise during a meeting of IndieWeb Club Bangalore.)

For as long as I can remember, I’ve had this compulsion to make things. I start to get physically uncomfortable if I go too long without working on a creative project.

These days, making something means writing short fiction or blog posts. But at different times of my life it has meant different things: programming, producing music, cooking, or learning a musical instrument.

My need to always have a creative project simmering on the burner is so strong that, at times, it has had a negative effect on my mental and physical health. If I’m kept away from my creative tools for too long — because of travel, work obligations, illness, or technical failure — I become agitated and short-tempered. I start resenting myself and the people around me, holding tension in all the muscles in my body in a way that causes me actual physical pain.

Years ago, around the time the pandemic hit, I started therapy. One of the questions my therapist asked me in our early sessions was why I wanted so badly to work on creative projects even though they were actively causing me mental anguish. This was a time when I had not yet learned to have a healthy relationship with my work, so I would often hyperfocus on creative projects until I burned out or got too frustrated to finish them.

Nobody had asked me this question before. I had never even asked myself this question. I spent the next few months trying to come up with a satisfactory answer, some kind of mission statement, some guiding principle for the work I cared so much about.

But no matter how much I thought about it, no matter how many pages I filled in my journal, no matter how many friends I talked to, I could not find an answer that would satisfy me.

Was I writing to educate? To entertain? To comfort people? Was my creative work an act of service to humanity? Was I doing it because I wanted to be cool, to make money, to be famous? To get laid? No single answer seemed like it was a good enough reason to spend myself in the way I was doing.

And now, five years later, five years that have felt like several lifetimes, I believe that there is no good rational reason to make art. Rationalizing why it’s important for me to make art is like rationalizing why a flower is beautiful, or why a kitten is cute. They just … are???

I don’t doubt that somebody smarter, wiser, more articulate than me could explain these phenomena. Maybe that somebody will be myself, ten years from now.

But today, all I can say is: I make art because I’m compelled to make art. There is some inexplicable force inside my being that brings me to my desk, day after day, week after week, year after year, and drives me to tap out these words you’re reading right now.

And that’s okay! I’m made peace with the fact that my own motivations are a complete mystery to me. Not everything needs to have a clear scientific explanation backed by data and experimental evidence. So much of our human experience is about not knowing, never knowing, the full extent of who we are and what drives us. So much of our actions are guided by forces that seem almost supernatural.

Answering the question of why I want to make art is like answering the question of why I love.

I just do. And that’s all there is to it.

Every few years, I install Linux on my computer, use it for a few weeks, give up, and go crawling back to my Mac.

Also, every few years, I move all my writing, journaling, note-taking, and task management to fully analog systems powered by paper and pen. I use my analog systems for a few weeks, give up, and go crawling back to the digital apps I’ve been using for the last decade.

My urge to use Linux and my urge to eschew computers altogether both come from the same place: I believe the companies that make our computers and the accompanying software are unethical, exploitative, and harmful to society. Using their products makes me uncomfortable, as if I’m complicit in the harms they’re causing.

Running Linux on my computers is a way for me to opt out of giving money and lending legitimacy to these businesses. Switching to analog systems allows me to opt out of computing altogether.

Why am I in this state of tension with computer products when I use a multitude of non-computer products made by corporations that cause much more harm to people and nature?

I drive a Hyundai car, shop at Reliance stores, wear clothing made by Zara. Why am I not concerned about the poor behavior of these other organizations? It’s not like they’re any better than Google, Microsoft, or Apple.

Honestly, the reason is not entirely rational.

The connection I have with my computer when I’m programming in my IDE or writing in my favorite writing app is the same connection a musician might have with their favorite guitar, or a tennis player with their racquet. It’s something sublime, something spiritual. When I’m using my computer to create something, when I’m in that state of flow, I forget where my mind and body end and where the computer begins. A melding of human and machine takes place. It’s greater than the sum of its parts — the stuff of cyberpunk dreams.

It hurts me to know that the tools I share such a deep connection with are made by corporations that exploit workers in developing countries, greenwash their products while generating tons of electronic waste, fight against the rights of people to repair their possessions, engage in malicious compliance when governments try to regulate them, spy on their users, hold their users’ data hostage, and commit a long list of other crimes that would take too long to recount here.

To make matters worse, these corporations openly and gleefully disrespect art and the tools used to make it while indulging in vulgar displays of power over artists and their work.

I understand that my switching to Linux won’t really fix the basic problem that large corporations are bad for society. As long as I’m using a computer, I’m complicit to some degree in the harms caused by the technology industry. But I believe, maybe naively, that using libre software is at least a tiny bit better for the world compared to proprietary software.

And of course, if I can get away from using computers entirely for some or all of my work, I can opt out completely from the snakepit of deception and exploitation that is Silicon Valley, wash my hands of the whole bloody affair, and finally stop being complicit in destroying the planet and society.

But at least for now, my life does not permit me to walk away from the digital prison I’m trapped in. Maintaining a Linux system or using pen and paper to manage my life both require more spoons than I possess at the moment.

The tyranny of convenience has all of us in its grip, and I’m no exception. I understand that this is entirely my own failing.

We’ve structured our society so that the best products and services are made by the worst people in the world. Of course you can deliver packages earlier than everyone else if you overwork your employees. Of course you can sell the fastest computers at the cheapest prices if you keep moving your manufacturing operations to countries with the worst labor and environmental laws. Of course you can build the smartest AI models if you slurp up everybody else’s intellectual property without asking for consent first.

It makes little difference to how tech businesses operate when a smattering of concerned individuals opt out of using their products and services. Things will only change when democratically elected governments across the world step in with regulation, drag Big Tech through the courts, and fine them billions of dollars.

Things will only change when being an asshole stops being a competitive advantage.

Until that day arrives, I have to learn to live in a state of tension with my tools. I have to acknowledge and accept the fact that I use tools built by awful people to create beautiful things.

New domain, new blog, same old me.

After having owned ankursethi.com for two years, I’m finally migrating my online identity to this new domain — email addresses, website, everything.

And while I’m doing that, why not start afresh with the writing on my blog, too? My old blog at ankursethi.in has served as a container for all my online writing for sixteen years, but sometimes you just want to start from scratch, you know? Turn to a new page and try again.

So this is me turning to a new page.

Because cool URI’s don’t change, I’ve set up my old domain to redirect to archive.ankursethi.com. All the posts and pages from my previous blog will continue to be accessible at that URL, and any existing bookmarks or feeds will automatically redirect.

Before writing this post, I spent literal weeks trying to figure out what exactly I wanted to do with this new website. Some days I thought wanted to write deeply researched long-form essays, other days I wanted to run a link blog, and on yet other days I wanted to create a public Zettelkasten for myself.

I even spent one whole week coming up with a list of personally siginificant questions to help guide my blogging, inspired by Tracy Durnell’s list of Big Questions.

But here’s the thing: whenever I tried writing something that had a central thesis to address, some claim to defend, or some argument to lay out, I lost interest in writing.

In other words, I just didn’t enjoy myself when I tried to write blog posts that were about something.

I’ve had a similar experience while writing fiction. Last year I drew up a detailed outline for a novel, spending several months researching and contemplating, only to lose interest in writing the moment I typed up the first line of the first scene. In my head, the story was already written. It was done. There was nothing for me to do anymore. I immediately wanted to move on to the next thing.

My recent experience writing poetry is instructive in a different way. I’m (very loosely) doing GloPoWriMo 2025 with some friends. The poems I’m most proud of, and the ones I’ve enjoyed writing the most, are the ones that have come to me naturally, intuitively, unplanned, unstructured. The poems I’ve written late at night in a state of exhaustion and sleep deprivation, or the ones I’ve raced to finish in under twenty minutes with my writing group, or the ones where I’ve simply transcribed the images unfolding in my mind’s eye without censorship or editing — those have inevitably been the best of the lot.

It appears that the best way for me to write anything at all is to start pulling at whatever mental thread is poking out of the tangled mess in my mind and see where it leads me. So I’m going to ball up all the plans I made for this blog and toss them out the window. The plan is to write without a plan, without a purpose, allowing my mind to meander and posting the result with minimal editing.

My writing here probably won’t be pretty, but I can live with that. I’d rather have fun.

Joy. I suppose that’s what it really comes down to. I want to find joy in the act of writing, whether it’s fiction, poetry, or these blog posts. The goal isn’t efficiency or beauty or clarity or even coherence. The goal is to follow the fun. To figure out how to make writing a joyful pursuit, rather than some kind of war I’m waging against my own creative limits.

Anyway, hello! Please keep reading. It only gets worse from here.