Welcome to post number 499 – whatever I write and post after this post will be number 500. 500 posts and I still struggle to write everyday. 500 posts, and I don’t think I’ve gotten all that much better at being succinct or interesting or disciplined in my writing. 500 posts and I still can’t shake the bugaboo of audience and purpose. I routinely ask myself what the hell I’m doing with all of this. On the flip side of the self-criticism (instead of a shit sandwich, this is more of an open-faced shit sandwich) I wouldn’t have guessed that I’d stick with this as long as I have (I suppose there’s always time to quit). I also think my use of language has gone from ehh to slightly better than ehh. It’s the little accomplishments that mean the most….
Sometime late last week, I was grappling with purpose and thinking (again) about sending some poems out for publication. I often ask myself why that has any importance to me. Is my ego so fragile that I need that outside validation? I googled “writers famous after death” Not because I think I’ll be one of them, but because I was curious about those writers who toiled away in obscurity – perhaps not thinking about the why. It’s an impressive list that includes Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, and Franz Kafka.
A few days later I read about Thomas Chatterton, an English prodigy poet who published his first poems at age 11 and committed suicide at age 17. I was reading about him in Harper’s as part of an essay on names and naming (by Thomas Chatterton Williams). As I read, I began to wonder if a prodigy poet could exist today? I suppose Amanda Gorman’s recent success is close.
In the same issue of Harper’s is a great, if not mildly depressing, journey into the lives of influencers – TikTok stars who essentially strive for fame and personal brand recognition. The author spends a week or so living in a TikTok house out in L.A. He tells the age old story of kids dropping out and heading west to make it big, but instead of becoming movie stars, they aim to be the next Kardashian. They post videos of dance moves and things from their daily lives. These are today’s “creators” and with tens of thousands of likes and millions of followers (the biggest TikTok star has over 100 million followers), it’s hard to imagine standing out in so much noise.
I haven’t followed the TikTok craze… I accept that I’m old and out of touch. Perhaps I like poetry and blues music because they’re art forms in which age doesn’t seem to matter much. I have seen countless pics and videos of young people mugging in front of the camera. As I watch, it’s easy to dismiss what seems to be a “look at me” generation. It’s easy to scoff at their self-obsession. Just the other night Trevor Noah did a piece on how photo filters are making young people unhappy with their natural looks – in this, we seem to be moving away from reality… everything is staged and made for consumption. It’s easy to feel like it’s all so vapid and self-indulgent… and then I think about how in the past year-and-a-half, I’ve written 500 blog posts – most of them vapid and self-indulgent. Aside from the fame and not being paid to do any of this, how is this all that different?
Perhaps what I found so unsettling about this new fame is, in some ways, it’s not all that different from the old fame. As the author points out, we’re all slaves to market forces of some kind, slaves to chasing after our own brass rings, slaves to creating our own legacies in whatever form they may take. We’re all looking for attention in an attention economy. We’re all looking for “equipment for living.” On our deepest levels, we desire to be seen. Some of us only wish to be seen by a select few while other want to be seen by millions… but the desire is real, and for young Thomas Chatterton, perhaps crushing.
Almost 500 posts in to this, and I still get very bogged down in these ideas of how to live life. I still struggle to tie together these threads that feel like they should (or could) be tied together. I don’t know how to write about the similarities between a TikTok influencer, a seasoned artist, a poetic prodigy, or some blogger who writes to an audience of a half-dozen or dozen readers… other than to suggest that in the grand scheme of things, we’re probably all toiling in vain. I wish I could have done better justice to the mixed feelings of wonder and disappointment I’ve had since reading these articles and thinking about my own writing. Worlds that seem radically far apart and yet somehow connected by vanity, ego, and the need for an audience outside of the self.