One of those words that just makes me cringe lately is the word ‘content’. As in, ‘you need to produce more content’. There’s nothing wrong with the word as is, but I hate the fact that it’s just become like the currency of choice for the ‘attention’ economy. I could spend 5 hours writing a post and y’all will never see it because of something that is pretty much completely out of my control. I could spend 15 seconds on a post and everyone will see it. What gives? I gotta say…coming up with ‘content’ is almost a full time job - it entails walking through your day just trying to find shit that people will find interesting…because if you’re not interesting no one will care, and even if you are interesting, you better post at the right time or post with the right words or else no one will even see it.
Yesterday I decided to take a short break - I took my kids on a little walk down by the lake…and as we’re rounding a corner, I see an attractive young lady in all white posted up at a very picturesque spot…once we got a little closer, I realized she was completely lost in her phone and I just remember ‘jeez, all white in the woods? I’d be filthy after about 6 minutes.’ As we got a bit closer, my kids started asking her a bunch of questions, and once I took the whole situation in, I noticed she had cameras pointed at her on two tripods, a fake stove, a fake cast iron, some fake marshmallows and a really cool looking fleece blanket that was expertly placed on a log. She was staging her own ‘content’ opportunity. And there’s nothing wrong with it, it just kind of jarred me. I took a walk in the woods to get away from thinking about it nonstop, and someone else went to the woods for the opposite reason.
I dunno, she was nice enough and we chatted about the seagulls and the fish, but it really highlighted the absurdity of the task at hand… I want to talk about shoes, I want to talk about what I’m interested in, I want to talk about the stuff that I think will help people understand how this stuff works. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, but’s…jeez…do you ever marvel at how crazy this whole thing is?