Things you do as an adult.
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(A Series)
Apart from moving houses mid-pandemic, and finishing a space/ website, i also started with a Podcast with friends last year. So on a side remark, visit “The hothouse voices”, where Richard Fields and i remark on a range of topics. Casual, non casual, and the stuff of adults.
This week, it is about the posturing of inclusion in adults.
Posturing might be a strong word, maybe just a postulating. Yeah, that’s a better word.
While i know that this (& Life, in general), is a culturally interim plan, and i also know that “being an adult” is not a real life plan, but more an aphorism, of pointing out the obvious and — the globally inevitable instance of growing up. It was actually a real delight for me to find out, in the end, that i wasn’t actually the stray, or in a pack of dogs, the runt.
Being as ordinary as a child, was akin to painfully summoning (and more painfully, working out) the difficult. And being an adult, was being and having, and becoming the shiny. It was wondrous, and the Adult Table was all i ever dreamed of ever earning a chair to, at the very least.
Kindred spiriting, was a supreme academic numbskullery, to actually try to adapt to people’s whims like that. And i am always in the space of catching myself apologising for it, when it is actually in the level up to being a real person, to acknowledge who you are, what you are capable of, and to whom you are obliged to in life.
(The podcasts, are testaments to our style that of a runaway-gape in wide awake withers of being you.)
But kindred professionalism is a very different matter, it is in subculture terms, actually a higher form of collaboration. Sometimes, i feel like being in an open platform space for our thoughts, especially after being “metred” to process via stripe a latch to our words being valuated via readership and money. And most often, we are paid by commission via editorial publications, and officially held opinions. Kind of like having movie or tv celebrities have their own youtube accounts. (Weird, but extremely fulfilling.) We are now bereft with adjusting to the mad business of “being more than ourselves”.
So, working out the current options, it may need a suss or two, on why and where we draw the line to “growing up”:
I could: leave the platform and move my words back to syndicated publications.
(Check).
Or I could: make my way to actually publishing my own book, where the readership is metred as and when it is read, when you buy the copy of the book.
Which option is more adult? The first one, has a profit for snoots, and the second, more of a blockbuster risk. So, as an exercise to developing a more passive, uncomplicated, straight up as-if-i-were-single income, or livelihood, i wonder what would be the more sensible now (albeit “popular”) choice?
Call it old school, if you will, but this is as close to a simple transactional word-mongering as you can get. Is it the debacle to wooing the industry, that presents a greater barrier to being “More” or just a deficiency of the finding committees such as an industry extent, or the editors, in this case?
Having actually worked in editorial, advertorial producing, advertising creation – (also called copywriting in the time before strategists), as well as serialising methodologies to all the “chaos dumbing” (a musical term for acoustically muting the reverb in the strings of the piano).
Medium, as well as other publishing platforms had been, to a lot of pre-social network netizens actually a clear authentic voice, where we can mete out the digests from the blogs, from the clearly for show. Maybe i digress because this is an easy, convenient way to deposit thoughts. (Mostly because yahoo 360 etc., did not employ Markdown…) So the actual importance of having an unbroken, very efficient, cms (content management system), is too precious for words.
So, Thank you Jack. (the creative director that made it happen…)
A big, giant beanstalk thanks to you, from me (as an inclusion-practising, consciously adulting, non-cheapskate, socially aware grown-up), for all that leads to this, from old millenia to the new, in a global Twitter, for Medium, and for places we can now connect to our authentic selves in. Before the whole anarchy of memberships, being a publisher, and the machinations of a digital publishing-ship Madness. That divides us into sad little silos, all over again. And the fighting becomes an endless battle of “power stations, and no one is manning the ecosystems that maintain infrastructures..”
And before i dive into all that, i would stop myself (the official Adult) here. Now.
