I aim to make my writing timeless as possible. Trouble is, writing truly is a product of the time in which it’s written. Even with careful, mindful editing and restructuring, truly timeless writing is very difficult to create. Many gems likely remain trapped within aborted first drafts of short stories and novels never meant to be. Even as they may be unearthed, they often become bogged down by “modern sensibilities” and lose their provenance and never reach their intended audience.

Too often I fail to take note of a passing thought due to thinking I’ve noted a similar thing before. After all, I hate writing in circles. Still, experience has taught me that it’s often better to restate things that still need to be said than to remain silent. Where the time suck happens is becoming over-investing in things that don’t actually matter, relentlessly pursued for lack of anything more readily obvious to tackle.

With each passing day, the gap between cyberspace and IRL grows significantly in ways we don’t recognize unless we step back and realize how disconnected most of us have become from reality. Of course, many of us let this disconnect happen on purpose. That doesn’t speak well of the state of real life, that which we should guard most preciously. Indeed, we often neglect our limited time in our flesh to accomplish something worthwhile. 

It’s bitter irony for me to live in an age where people can leave more of a lasting impact on our world than ever yet also find ourselves more guard-railed by media and oligarchical influences than ever. So-called influencers are only as powerful as their audiences allow them to be, the brands, and often corporate influences behind them, defining the direction these social media darlings take their content. Even the most “indie” influencers must make concessions to earn a living; even if they aren’t directly supporting corporations, they in fact often do indirectly so with the very content they create.

But content creators aren’t the problem. The trouble lies in the methods by which content is distributed are bottle-necked, completely intentionally. More independent, self-hosted platforms would help this issue. But that’s becoming harder to do by the day, thanks to the massive demand for content creation and, even more so, its consumption.

The online world used to be all about fellowship and sharing. To some great extent it still is, but a pervasive “race to the top” mentality, and an unfortunate tendency to step on a lot of fingers climbing the various ladders of online presence and influence are major problems. It’s especially troubling for those of us who just want to enjoy things. It’s terribly exhausting to always be in a marathon with those who are either simply impatient and selfish or desperate and wild due to real life circumstances…