The number of articles on Solaria Chip has indubitably grown, but recently Carli and I were assessing the quality of the posts as well as the quality of our lives by taking on this self-imposed responsibility of writing every day. Like any shiny new toy, we were eager to play every day and exercise our skills and even face some of our fears with this project.

For me, I was able to whittle down some of my perfectionist tendencies while still honing the most effective methods for writing. For every topic, I took it as an opportunity to grow my knowledge through research and also reflect on my own personal opinions if I felt it was appropriate or somehow added to the conservation.

Yet despite the lax nature of this project, I was starting to feel burned out from how many choices I faced from utter creative freedom and unattended direction from each blog post. We told ourselves we could write about anything. On days I couldn’t commit as much effort, I could simply just share a few facts I found interesting or post something on the personal side. Often I wasn’t content with that, so I prepared some backup posts on serious topics. In that manner, I wrestled in my head with this idea that what I put out into the world needed to have profound and unique meaning, and in a way I started to apply that to other areas of my life that never needed this sort of administration. The books I read lately were being influenced by scrutinization of whether it was interesting or citable enough for a post, and I also began to see that my casual conversations were being assessed that way. I noticed I wasn’t watching cartoons as much–my favorite type of show–like I used to because there was a nagging sense that it wasn’t fulfilling or adding anything to my life (Update: Here’s what my break/binge led up to). They were just supposed to be fun, and like this blog, the original intent was to be an enjoyable activity.

The more research I did on the topics I chose to write about, I felt more and more jaded with the world as it easily presented the ugliness, negativity, and rancor that was out there. But I know the world can be beautiful, and apart from the apparent exhaustion I was experiencing, I needed to take a step back and just enjoy and take it in without the need for jotting each detail I felt or jogging my brain for similes and metaphors. The moment is mine. I realize I needed to balance that in order to produce intentional content without sacrificing the life I have.

Carli and I are both incredibly hard workers that push ourselves to the limit. Send it, dude, we always say. We both hate taking rest days and we easily stretch ourselves thin with several hobbies and responsibilities we take on for ourselves and others.

The survivability of any species on Earth is determined by its adaptability to any and all conditions. Carli realized quickly that her upcoming conferences would take precedence, and for me, it meant reassessing my strategy to combat my emotional fickleness after I fell into another rut. Weighing our commitment will be another experiment we take on with the blog, and we still look forward to all the days we get to share something with purpose to our lives and to anyone still reading.

For now, we will scale back our frequency until we determine an effective cadence for Solaria Chip. Stay tuned at least every week! Before I wrote this announcement, I was in the middle of researching the concept of quitting. Look for the post soon, since I think it would pair well with this personal anecdote of NOT quitting quite nicely.