Of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing can ever be made

In the good old days of GWMD, the blog -- for awards purposes and so forth -- could be easily classified into one of the well-known and widely-understood categories which cohesively carve up the Blogosphere. GWMD was an acceptable fit for the "Travel Blog" designation, but better yet, it truly fit(s) the equally popular "Expat Blog" category, where an author typically recounts humorous, strange, or just plain different experiences of everyday life while living abroad. Abroad, in this context, meaning a foreign land with respect to -- crucially -- the expat blog's readers, but of course its author too. It is interesting to inspect some of the meta statistics of these two semantically similar blogging categories. A much-loved travel blog might continue to add enthusiastic subscribers for years as the PPQ (posts per quarter) stat stays high or even increases over a relatively long period of time resulting in a growing set of returning and engaged readers. A highly successful travel blogger might continue traveling and writing about it for years -- decades even -- recounting the cultures, cuisine, and experiences that he or she encounters in all the corners of the world without ever running out of material. The expat blogger, on the other hand, while often able to examine a culture at a higher resolution and recount a deeper understanding and contrast of the experience to his or her readers' everyday experiences of learned norms in their shared culture, has to contend with the well-known phenomenon of the expat blog natural expiration date.

After some finite amount of time living "abroad", a slow but sure process takes place where at some amorphous point that can normally only be identified in hindsight, the author -- though still living away from their onetime home -- is no longer living abroad in a metaphysical sense because his or her normal has adapted to the normal of the adopted country. It may have been strange and amusing for the author to observe and then share stories of colleagues drinking litre-sized beers at lunchtime five years ago, but not when it's become something completely natural that no longer lights up the "out of the ordinary" regions of the amygdala. Even if the expat bloggers' audience (if he indeed has one remaining) would continue to find the slight cultural incongruities worthy of analysis and/or witty remark-worthy, the expat blogger himself no longer has the capability to even notice what might be considered idiosyncrasies of his adopted culture to his original audience because he has adapted to them and the brain no longer has the ability to notice how these might appear to be interesting and/or different to what his viewpoint once was, so many years ago.

But no matter how long one remains abroad, and no matter the level of indoctrination that an expat blog author is bombarded with day-in and day-out as he or she navigates the trials and tribulations of everyday life, there will always continue to be some subset of cultural affectations that continue to grate the baseline senses and that never reduce to a new-found normal. The membership of this particular subset also displays well-understood evolution dynamics of its own. In particular, the cardinality of the subset almost always follows an exponential decay expressed by the well-known differential equation:

Solving the above equation leads to a number of different approaches for measuring and understanding rates of decay and for the phenomenon of the size of cultural affectations that the ego-individual (i.e. the blog author or more generally "person abroad") him/herself sees as never being able to fully identify with, the quantity of the half-life of the cardinality of this set is often most useful for understanding the phenomenon in question. The half-life, of course, is the amount of time required for a population to reduce to half of its current size. And studies (currently in peer review) suggest that the half-life of the number of cultural idiosyncrasies that a person believes he or she will never see as normal is in the range of one year. So, if one could enumerate all of the things that just seem totally right out there in terms of how a culture operates and how the people behave and that one could never envision ever seeing as normal or -- God forbid -- adopting him/herself, and that number was 500 things, after about a year the typical person would only find about 250 of them still belonging to that group (or new ones might have been added and others taken off but the aggregate total still on average comes in at around that number) and another year later only about 125 would remain. Some of the common examples that are faster than others to fall out of the group include eating chocolate for breakfast (France), bathroom taps that don't mix the hot and cold water (UK), or driving 180 km/h on the highway (Germany) [NOTE: the eagle-eyed reader will observe that in the true formulation of cultural normalization I wouldn't have been able to come up with "real" examples because they would have been so deeply internalized that I wouldn't know whether or not they were things that seemed weird at some point or not].

All of the above is to say that the lifespan of your average expat blog is (1) dependent on the initial conditions of the ODE (namely the number of things that seem weird or interesting -- at the very least different -- about a culture to you to begin with: makes sense); and (2) finite as basically its reason for being becomes exponentially less every year (the solution to the equation is  where lambda is the exponential decay constant [bigger means faster vanishing], N_o is the initial quantity [500 in the above example], and t is of course the time). These are the unfortunate realities of science and the Blogosphere. 

However, this does not necessarily imply that GWMD is dead (even though it may well be). There are ways out of the expat blog material Big Crunch. The most obvious might be the popular "expansion into other blog categories" (e.g. Mommy Blogs, Cooking Blogs, Lifestyle Blogs, etc.). This is a page right out of the MBA handbook where the key term is diversification. If you want to maintain the kind of growth that drives stock market indexes, you need to diversify your product portfolio (at some point everyone will have an iPhone and only so many people will buy multiple); the same thing applies to blogging. If you're not exclusively an expat blog, then -- while there are category-specific issues for other types of blogs which include (but are definitely not limited to) the demographics of the standard reader, the growth possibility of the themes typically covered by that category, and the acceptance of the hard-core readers to intersecting blog styles (if you're a serious cycling blog, for example, your readers probably won't stand for an in-depth segment on classic 16th century furniture) -- you have a lot of room to expand into new territory and prolong the blog's life. There is also moving. If you've used up all of the material (in your eyes) for the expat blog with respect to one country/culture, just insert yourself into a new one! The equation's variables reset, you get to keep writing about the types of things that you and your readers are used to, and you've given yourself another few years (or more) of keeping the blog and its associated advertising revenue (ha) alive and strong [it should be noted, however, that previous studies suggest that both the exponential decay constant and the initial quantity of "totally crazy things that you could never imagine seeing as normal" change in a way that is not conducive to making the "just move" strategy a perfect solution. The exponential decay constant tends to increase (the half life lowers) and the initial number tends to be smaller. However, this seems to only hold true in the short term and perhaps if you're moving all the time for many years you're able to avoid the trap altogether because you both never really get all that used to a culture and because you're familiar(-ish) with so many different ones, you're better able to contrast them and bring something to the table from another angle which still fits the expat blogging universe].

We are not moving for now, so instead we will try to branch out. Come back soon for important insights into raising children on a fully vegan/raw diet!