It only gets worse from here

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.