This one is going to be a bit of a tightrope walk between listing the most obvious stuff ever everyone does, and just sounding like self-obsessed navelgazing. It's a bit of a continuation to my how and why I blog, focusing more about the actual guts of the posts.
Sometimes I get asked how I can think of so many things to write about and then actually write them. I'd say three things are most important, and they kind of feed into each other: something I see described as "rich inner life", exposure, and flow.
"Rich inner life" seems to float around a lot, but the definition isn't always that clear and it seems a little pretentious. It's something I chose to journal about a while ago. What does it mean to me? How is it reached and maintained? Why would you want this? What's the opposite?
To summarize that image: For me, it's having a stable sense of self and a measured, curious and nuanced relationship with my feelings, morals and values, as well as turning inward for guidance and validation. It's actively living my life (acting instead of just reacting or being on autopilot), being self-aware and questioning myself, having internal discussions.
With a rich inner life, you're able to sit in silence with yourself and still feel "entertained" because you have a great thought processes or imagination and usually something interesting to ponder. But that also needs you to not immediately be dismissive of your thoughts and feelings and not suppressing them when they aren't what you want, but instead using the opportunity to find out more about yourself. If you're always dismissing yourself as being too stupid or not interesting enough, your thoughts are going to reflect that; your headspace might be empty while the cursor blinks.
Leaning more into the exposure part that also feeds back into the rich inner life, it's immersing myself in other blog posts, reacting to them, reading papers and books, watching long video essays, then sitting with myself doing nothing and just letting my mind wander, digesting it all. How do they apply to my life or current events or culture? How can everything I took in be connected to each other?
Reading or seeing things I disagree with and exploring why I feel that way. Doing other things to train the little pathways and knowledge connecting it all or ways to find out something new to research, like crosswords. Having people challenge me or spin stuff further in my emails with others. Going out and living a life worth talking about - not necessarily what I'm doing during the day, but what I observe in others while out.
Then of course, trying to identify patterns in that very life or in others. Asking myself: Why do I (or they) do that? Where did the motivation for that come from? It's reacting to strong emotions, both negative and positive, and digging deeper. It's listening to what makes me feel passionate and what I wanna break out into a huge monologue about, and starting to write it out. It's preparing internally for discussions that might never come, gathering arguments for my view. It's putting myself in the shoes of others, trying to explain their behavior, and imagining what I'd say to them. It's looking at the world at large and wondering what would have to change for my ideal version. Going off on "what if"s, trying to find out if a silly thesis could be justifiable.
Actually writing the blog posts kinda meets the classic criteria for a flow state. I am ultra focused, immersed, relaxed. My skill level and challenge of the task are balanced and it's something I care about. It's not a lame topic, too hard or exhausting to talk about and it's within the realm of what I can do (in terms of length, ability to explain, etc.). There's something of a routine or repetition as well, becoming second nature to me. Here's a good article about flow that I enjoyed reading, by the way.
The reason why they actually make it to the public is the willingness to share and show up and not keep it to myself. I touched on that a little in 'why do i stay online?'.