“I settled into the idea of I wrote them because I wanted to, not because I needed anyone else’s validation.”

I’m only about 70% of the way to your level of wisdom on this, Krikket 😉

I mostly write for myself. Sometimes it is cathartic, often it helps me organize my own messy thoughts, but mostly it simply feels some variation of ‘good’. But about a third of my thinking about blogging gets occupied by the idea of making my ideas ‘public’, which I am sad to say includes a desire for a bit of validation.

This leads me to look at reader stats, and invest time in figuring out things I can do to make my content more ‘visible’ to the world at large. I search for keywords from my blogs on Google periodically, and sometimes this leads me to make some changes. It isn’t the majority of what motivates me but it is a part of it, for good or bad.