But once you are given a tool that operates effortlessly — but only in a certain way — every choice that deviates from the standard represents a major cost.

I recently blogged about my new music page and some really wonderful people stopped by to share their thoughts. It was really fun but it also made me wonder: Without that post, would anybody have ever found that page? Are blogs and social network streams the only tools we have left to discover content that isn’t selling something?

The freedom to put your thoughts out there without too many impediments is one of the greatest benefits of the digital age, but you don’t have to develop a monetization mindset around that freedom.

Today is always the best day to be more yourself. Use your humanity to connect with humans.

Love isn’t a fairy godmother.

It doesn’t swoop in to change what you want changed, but it helps you to be a little more patient and kind through the things you wish you could change.

Annie Mueller, The First Knot

The web is becoming a miserable experience because some salesbro who is trying to meet his KPIs is doing stuff to marginally increase the number of paying customers. (And you know, the hell with the rest of us!) The more each site tries to create its own little walled garden, the less valuable the open web becomes.

Elizabeth Lopatto, I don’t want to log in to your website

We will not succeed with panic, cynicism, or despair. The tools we need are optimism, imagination, creativity, criticism and compassion… Art is not a precious treasure in need of protection. Art is a fearsome wellspring of human power from which we will draw the weapons we need to storm the gates of the reality studio and secure the future.

Frank Lantz - Well, Here We Are

Though I liked summer light on you
If we ride a winter-long wind
Well, time’s not what I belong to
And I’m not the season I’m in

  • Robin Noel Pecknold

Our world is an ecosystem in which our only real chance at survival as a species is cooperation, community, and care, but it’s being lead by people who believe in an egosystem, run on competition, power, and self-interest.

The Authentic Creative Struggle

What makes a great song great is not its close resemblance to a recognizable work. Writing a good song is not mimicry, or replication, or pastiche, it is the opposite. It is an act of self-murder that destroys all one has strived to produce in the …

There’s really only one question that can be answered, Genry, and we already know the answer….The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.

“…frequently my sense of what’s urgent is really a matter of someone else’s priorities or anxieties… But that doesn’t follow. It’s not that other people’s priorities don’t count at all. It’s just that they needn’t obliterate all other considerations.”

Social media users documented in the moment, rather than retrospectively. What we have now is a cognitive state more akin to a coiled spring, where we consume “content” with the expectation of engagement rather than of participation.

Towards Disengagement

“Oh, sure, I have control over some things. That’s called responsibility. But trying to take responsibility for what isn’t mine, for what I can’t, or shouldn’t rightly, control, isn’t taking responsibility. It’s grasping for control. And it’s no good.”

Annie Mueller

No One Cares - “People care about how your output helps them. No one cares about much else.”

It’s a cynical take, and I know it isn’t healthy, but I’ve been feeling this a lot lately.

“I still trust comics, but the jokes, memes and comments of internet trolls are different. Trolls don’t seek to demonstrate and celebrate trust; they strive to destroy it. The troll does not want to use offense as a tool to get to shared humanity. There is no bravery.“

Penn Jillette

Earnest Creativity

“One of the biggest sins on the modern internet is trying too hard to be funny. It has caused the internet’s sense of humor to turn cruel in the last decade and our knee-jerk response to earnest humor to be negative. Putting oneself out there …

“We exist in a state of continuous and conscious attention triage, which can be exhausting, disorienting, and demoralizing.”

L.M. Sacasas

“If the pandemic has taught me anything, it’s that it probably isn’t going to teach me anything that I didn’t already know before the pandemic began.”

Austin Kleon