It’s a strange thought when you sit with it for a minute and let your mind delve into it, that nothing around you is really “new”.
Every object you can see, your phone, your desk, the road outside, even the food you eat, all comes from the same limited set of elements that have always been here. We haven’t invented new matter. We’ve just got very good at rearranging what already exists.
Steel isn’t new. It’s iron, carbon, heat, and process.
Plastic isn’t new. It’s oil, broken down and rebuilt.
Glass is just sand that’s been pushed to its limits.
Even the complicated stuff, electronics, medicines, fuels, it all traces back to the same building blocks. And when you think about it, we’ve just become really good at using these elements.
I've never too sure whether this concept is reassuring or a worry!
All the progress, all the industries, all the things we take pride in as “made by us”, are really just clever transformations. We take what the planet gives us, and we reshape it into something useful, or sometimes something pointless. But as we use all this stuff, does it mean that at sometime we might run out fo something vital!
It does make you look at waste differently as well.
If everything we use is part of a closed system, then nothing really disappears. It just changes form and ends up somewhere else. Landfill isn’t “away”. It’s just a different version of the same materials, sitting in a different place.
For years, almost 35 years, every time I sat down to write, I wasn't alone. The room was crowded with invisible people: the boss who was vertually dictating what I should write, the client who might get offended with the wrong word or phrase, the prospect I didn't want to scare off, and the Google (and all the social platforms) algorithm that demanded its pound of flesh in optimised keywords and the right hashtags.
I spent more time thinking about the consequences of virtually every single word and sentence than the point of writing it sometimes. Everything had to be sanitised, perfectly structured, and professional to a fault. It was usually writing by committee, even when the committee was just in my head.
Fuck that.
One of the biggest realisations in moving to this "Anti-Social" setup is how much energy I was wasting on people who don't actually exist. This isn't a marketing asset anymore. It’s not a lead-generation tool. It’s just a digital garden. It's me saying what I want to say, in the way I want to say it.
Stripping away the structured copy, certain posts or content having to be a particular length, the SEO, the Meta tags, thinking about imagery and the copywriters templates has given me something I’d forgotten I needed: the freedom to just write what I want. If a post is too short, fine. If it’s too blunt, even better. If it upsets someone who was looking for a "polished brand experience," they’re in the wrong place anyway.
From here on out, the only "audience" I’m writing for is myself. If you find something here that resonates, great, pull up a chair. But I’m done performing for the algorithm. I’m just going to say it as it is and let the chips fall where they may.
It’s liberating to finally stop caring.