I shouldn’t do this

Yet here we are

It’s never been a worse time to write.

Well, writing is fine. Writing is good, actually. Writing is the best couple’s therapist. Writing is a (the worst?) form of doing, and doing is living.

There’s never been a worse time to publish. There’s only downsides: what will they think?! What happens when I inevitably change my mind? What if I say the wrong thing? So many wrong things to say.

I don’t know anything, so how could I publish anything? What have I done to deserve this megaphone? Imagine if that’s how the world worked. Imagine if you had to be qualified to do things. Imagine if the assessment of those qualifications was done equitably. Maybe that’s my cynicism talking (yet another reason why I shouldn’t do this)

The hubris of publishing has defined a generation. User-generated content. I am the user and this is the content. Content, like a grain of sand in a content beach. But look at this grain! It’s better than the rest. When was the last time you held a single grain of sand in your hand?

I once believed in publishing as a way to document in public. A world where the public record destroyed the facade of the moment. Because the moment wasn’t real. The moment was manufactured, consciously or unconsciously. The only thing “real” were the patterns that emerge over time in between moments.

But it wasn’t presented as publishing or documenting. They called it “sharing”. Cheeky.

As it turns out, words matter (another reason why I shouldn’t do this). So I “shared”. Everyone did. And the entire world became publishers. And the moment indeed didn’t matter. And the patterns indeed emerged. But it wasn’t as real as we hoped. It was just a bigger facade. A world-scale facade.

So we all stopped publishing. Or it took some other shape, who knows (I don’t). We now hide our publications, hoping only the right people see them. Because “saying the wrong thing” is now just having “ the wrong audience”

But, I insist in publishing.

If I think about it, I think it’s because I’m lonely, just like you. Someone smarter than me (that narrows it down) once said that the usage of a social media is directly correlated with a user’s loneliness. The lonelier we are the more we engage online. That isn’t news to anyone, but it’s true (is that enough to make something worth saying?) So I hope that publishing something, which is a way of manifesting my self, can help me connect with others who in turn publish something and expose themselves like me.

Another reason is because I think I’m better than you. Well, maybe not you but better than most. Ok fine, maybe not most but at least I’m better than some. So I’m hoping my audience is part of that cohort and looks up to me. I also like to be wrong. So I hope those who are better than me (you?) read this and prove me wrong.

Being wrong is great because it’s dissociating. I go about my silly little life assuming I have the most information available to me and have made the best choices I can. But then I’m proven wrong and it resets my thinking. Being wrong is more information, which means different decisions. It means I’m headed in the wrong direction and lights up a new direction. Who doesn’t like a good road trip?

My friends (jk, I don’t have any friends) make fun of me for being hyperbolic. My favorite movie is often the last movie I watched. I have an evolving roster of “bests”: movies, songs, friends, ideas. So this could very well be the best thing I’ve ever made, which is funny because if I’ve learned something in the last few years is that progress (and time) isn’t linear.

I’ve always been tempted to think about my life as a traditional narrative arc with a beginning, middle, and end. Ideally, each builds from the previous one, and the ending is the best part. But that’s just not what my life has been like. The past is often better than the present but somehow the future is better than the past. It’s messy.

I’m probably more lucid today than I’ll be in a couple years but I’m for sure dumber than I was a couple years ago, but smarter than I was before that. Sometimes I read something I published and am impressed by what I read (another reason why I shouldn’t do this), convinced I could never be that smart again. Don’t worry, I’m mostly embarrassed (I’m currently reconsidering the first paragraph. Is it too dramatic?)

Another reason I insist in publishing is because it’s my job. It’s one of the things that a bunch of strangers have agreed is “valuable” to other strangers. I’m using publishing generously now. I’m not a professional writer, but I get paid (more than I should) to publish ideas — that is, take a thought and express it in a way that others can understand. Sometimes those ideas take the shape of pictures, sometimes they’re tools, most of the time they’re shit.

That’s the beauty of ideas: they can be anything. And that’s the beauty of publishing; it can connect people to ideas.

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