This is the last post on bloodycomplaining.com. It’s had a good run, and my intent was sound – to complete and entire year of daily complaints, without repetition or hesitation – but I failed at the start of the seventh month.

Seven months of complaints isn’t bad going. Seven months in which I cast my baleful eye at the sky, flipped open the iPad, cracked my fingers and considered who or what was on the shitlist for the day. At the start, it wasn’t hard. Complaints, moans and whines rolled out of me as easily as they did when confronted with friends at parties.

But seven months down the line,it became a chore. I’d leave the site for days at a time, and then hurriedly backfill to cover my absence. The last gap was a month, and every day my Omnifocus reminder would stare out at me from the little icon on my iPad,and I’d consider it then shudder and do something else.

Yesterday I deleted that task, and decided to stop with the charade. I have been unable to complain for quite some time now, and I’ve become increasingly aware of what I sound like when I do complain. It’s not entertaining, or attractive, or even remotely interesting anymore.

My friends followed my daily posts on Facebook, and then one by one the fans stopped commenting. Then one day I let the barrier between what was intensely personal and what was ripe for consumption publicly slip, and it took several deleted comments and posts and a bit of tidying up to rectify, during which I felt like a fool.

When one gets to the point that a hobby becomes a chore, and careful consideration has to be applied to whatever I write, then in turn the site became a task rather than fun. I write a lot for work. I don’t want to consider the need to do more work when I get home.

This site became work, and the fun stopped. It’s a hobby that turned into an experiment and now the experiment is over.