Will writing this blog make me happier? Or will I become sucked into the social media vortex?

My intention for starting Seeking Simcha is to chart my exploration of Jewish happiness. But obviously that’s something I can do offline. By putting the blog posts online and sharing them via social media, I am hoping to help others. Although this is still very much a brand new effort, I’m not succeeding so far. This blog has one follower, none of my six blog posts have received even a single comment and I have a whopping 23 Twitter followers.

Why does that bother me? One reason is because I genuinely would like to help other people on a similar path. Making other Jews happier would give me great simcha (Jewish joy), and would constitute a good deed. But if I’m being honest, part of my discomfort with my early lack of success stems from an unhealthy sense of self-esteem. I see my lowly statistics and I immediately begin thinking, “I’m not a good writer!” and “I don’t know how to effectively use social media.” And then that quickly becomes, “People don’t like me. I have no real purpose in life.”

I think the Jewish approach to this problem is to constantly engage in cheshbon hanefesh. This is “an accounting of the soul” where we sit down and really analyze our behavior, and perhaps more importantly, the motivation behind our behavior. In my case, I must ensure that I always remember that the real reason to write Seeking Simcha is to help others and myself, and not to achieve popularity or notoriety (I need a little bit of popularity to help others, but even if I only help 10 other people…).

I also have to keep faith in the process. Jewish law commands us to pray three times every day. We don’t pray for a month and then say, “We’ve mastered prayer, now what?” Ritually observant Jews pray three times a day so that we’ll constantly be in touch with HaShem, but also because by doing it faithfully every day, our ability to pray and connect will grow and mature. We’ll improve. The same is true of learning Torah and many other aspects of Judaism.

Why am I expecting to have thousands of followers in the first month? If I did achieve success that quickly and easily, without persistence and hard work, it probably wouldn’t be very meaningful for me.

I need to divorce myself from the results and start loving the process. Maybe Seeking Simcha will be a wild success. Or maybe no set of eyes beyond my own will ever read another word that I write here. Either way, all I can do is work hard and try my best – the results are not really up to me. As Rabbi Shalom Arush writes in The Garden of Emuna:

Once we develop a deep sense of emuna (faith) that HaShem, by way of Divine Providence, does everything for our ultimate benefit to guide us on the path of our needed soul corrections, then the puzzle pieces of life suddenly come together in a picture of striking clarity.

Unfortunately, I haven’t obtained that level of emuna yet. But I’m working on it. And in the meantime, I’ll keep working on this blog…