Trying
While running through my timeline yesterday I came across a toot from Hynek that linked to a video on YouTube by Nathan Zed and it stopped my in my tracks. Stop what you're doing right now and watch it. Then come back. I can wait.
Did you watch it? Good.
Let's get started.
The link between minimalism and boring is a connection that I hadn't made before, but Nathan Zed is right. The minimalism that we're seeing now is boring.
- Movies all look the same
- TV shows all look the same
- Mainstream Podcasts all sound the same
- Content all looks/sounds the same
And maybe that's the thing. We went from "making stuff" to "producing content1"
So everyone is "making content" and doing it while trying to look effortless and that really does suck. Caring about what you're doing is what makes me want to care about what you're doing. I don't care if you fail, I care that you tried!
People are content creators and that means that they're trying to make a living off of the content that they have created, but that just drives into some super conservative (little c) tendencies that are driven I think by capitalism and the need to make money off of our art ... I mean content. Which in turn makes everything look the fucking same. Sound the fucking same. Be the fucking same.
Last year Jeff Triplett posted # Please publish and share more and at the time I couldn't really put my finger on why this resonated with me so much, but I think now I can.
Writing for the sake of writing is important. Taking photos or creating other art is important for its own sake, not for the sake of creating content to feed into the machine of capitalism. My blog is for me. If others get something out of it, that's great. But it was only when I realized that that I started to write more ... because I didn't care if others liked it or not. If they got something out of it or not. Because I was writing for me. I was "creating content" for me.
Dance like no one's watching, sing like no one's listening, write like no one's reading.
Enjoy the stuff you do. That's kind of the point of doing the thing. It's not to put "content" into the machine
- I really hate that fucking word "content" in this context ↩︎