We start today with a

blank page which is pretty normal, but today I have no idea what I’m going to talk about. I thought about going through some of my music and explaining how I wrote certain songs, but I didn’t find it that exciting. If anyone ever cares to the point that they want to ask me about these things, then maybe it will be worth doing. Since only a very small amount of people (at the moment) are interested enough to actually check out anything I do, it’s gonna have to wait. After a while it becomes fairly apparent that no matter what you do, unless the people who decide what everyone should listen to, watch and generally consume, also decide that your creative output can be turned into cash, you will stay in obscurity for ever. I’m perhaps oversimplifying it here, but if you challenge any of those theories, you may just disappear. Just a casual stroll through Youtube can be very disheartening. You’ll see music videos that have millions of views, yet you’ve never heard of these people. You’ll listen and you’ll scratch your head as to why anyone would like it in the first place.

This is because most of the popular stuff on Youtube is the result of some kind of marketing. I have a relative who appeared in a couple of TV shows, the kind which involve a bunch of ordinary people undertaking tasks in order to “win” a contest. My relative didn’t win anything in the end, yet he has close to 50k Instagram followers, and I guess he is an official “influencer” now. He’s a good kid, I don’t begrudge him any of it, and he did have to work at it to get to where he is. That’s the power of TV, still.

By contrast, a brilliant, yet decidedly not mainstream comedian like Phil Hendrie, with a very long career in radio, has 8k Instagram followers. I think I have five, maybe. I’m not complaining at all, I just find it curious how social media works now. If you’re not a part of it in a significant way, you don’t exist. It’s weird, and I wonder how long it can last. I wonder how long any of this stuff can last actually. Once people wake up to how they are manipulated by these thing (if they ever do), social media as it is now controlled by the few people who own it, might disappear itself. Like Myspace of old, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, X, plus whatever else there is now, will go the way of the Dodo. They’re not democracies, yet they have immense power over society. That’s not good for anyone other than those who control it.

The whole paradigm is unsustainable. Humanity must evolve from being driven by outside influences involving fear, envy, greed and other things that the mentally ill who are in positions of power, imagine what’s good for everyone. I don’t know exactly how this can be achieved though. I have a few ideas. Maybe I’ll share them one day. I’m not going to write too much, it’s too nice a day. This is probably gonna be the last warm week until next Spring. I just chopped down two trees. Now I have to clear up all the mess I made.