SLOW THE DECAY IN OUR CREATIVE WORK

Nothing lasts forever.

Exhibit A: In the 1970s and early 1980s, my musician parents would play at clubs and resorts in the Poconos several nights a week, making good money playing country rock and blues.

On a recent drive through the area, I saw nothing but decay—most everything from that era boarded up, overgrown, and falling apart.

What happened? That shit is just gone.

Exhibit B: You get linked from a big social media account, and some of their followers will click and see your amazing work.

“If you’re wondering about the ever-increasing clamor to leave social media, my newsletter got linked to on X by an account with 247,000 followers,” said  Raziq Rauf in a recent note. It got one click.

What happened? Everyone is posting and screaming for attention, so 1) many people have tuned out, and 2) the social media platforms limit who sees your stuff. Hence, one click.

Exhibit C: Write for a notable outlet. From there, you include that in your “clips” and use that as leverage to write for bigger outlets and build a career.

“So, MTVNews.com no longer exists,” wrote Patrick Hosken on X (here), “eight years of my life are gone without a trace.”

Exhibit C.1: Over 25 years of clips from The Daily Show are wiped out, too.

What happened? This happened with AOL Music’s Spinner.com years ago, too. Once part of the #1 music site in the U.S. back in 2008, it’s all gone. Years of archives weren’t profitable (probably), so they just hit delete and some exec gets a big bonus at the end of the year.

A common theme among all three exhibits is someone else is in control.

It’s not personal, it’s business. Their business.

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So what’s our business? How do we work around the inevitable decay in our own creative persuits?

• Are we waiting on a new platform like Cara? If so, can we collect emails on this new platform so we can export them and move on if / when it shuts down or goes sideways?
• What if we start buckling down on our local communities? Are we strengthening our online community with occasional Zoom calls and/or virtual co-work sessions? Phone calls? Can we do this sustainably?
• Are we raising prices? Are we cutting corners or investing in ourselves?
• Does our work require constantly checking our email inboxes? Does that give us life? How could we do this differently? How do we manage the expectations of our availability?
• What if we took all the time we spent making “content” for social media platforms and used it to experiment creatively? “Freed from expectations, what might we make and find?”

I don’t hold the answers. No one does. There is no map.

“If someone needs to understand the way things are, don’t give them a map,” says Seth Godin, “they don’t need directions, they need to see the big picture.”

It’s time we all become enthralled by the big picture, not the analytics.

Let’s stop looking at our stats and fucking email someone.

You know it takes just one email to tank shit, right?

If we get that email from work about being laid off, or we get dumped… one email and boom, our whole life is upended. I got an email recently from my bank and that shit was bummer town.

But it just takes one email to make us jump out of our seats and celebrate.

What if we emailed someone a compliment about their work? Pitched an idea about a project to someone?

We don’t have to wait for these opportunities; we can kick the door down and start making it happen today.

Let’s use our time calmly for a change, without monitoring our output. Making our best work probably doesn’t include punching a time clock.

Get in touch (and keep in touch) with the creative universe right in front of you (and not the open rate metrics from the last 30 days).

Doing all this helps ensure the strength of our creative communities, to withstand the inevitable collapse of the tech bro creator economy complex.

I don’t have the answers to stop the decay, but I bet talking about this stuff freely with other creative folks will help us discover the bigger picture.

Thanks for reading.