A Creatively Empty World

      This probably sounds insane, but I don’t think that our current world is all that creatively satisfying. Unless you’re in the top one percent of creatives, no one is going to hear you. 

     Our world demands success. The kind of success that would make Bill Gates blush. But being successful doesn’t equate being heard. A lot of successful people got to where they are by being able to effectively monetize those who could come up with the ideas, without coming up with anything of their own. Our world expects success to mean turning the world into a pretzel, ruining lives without ever getting your hands dirty in the process. It doesn’t think about people who want a world where they take as much as they give. To the people watching, the world is either a place where you give all you have or take all you can. 

      Looking at YouTube, I can’t help but think about everyone who wants a solidly small audience of people who all share their opinions and have things to add to the stupid conversations they want to have. People like me, in other words. Solidly unimportant individuals who want to be their own version of failure. I think about those who have singularly bad artistic visions who want to share their art anyway because it’s silly. And yes, in a lot of cases it runs the gamut of stupid at best and problematic at worst, but sometimes you find someone who’s come up with something incredible no one has thought to try. They wind up inspiring someone else who can build on that idea and make it into something not great, but a little better, and over time that idea becomes something that changes the world. I’m not sure if that’s worth the mountains of hate speech and misinformation that YouTube is responsible for, but I know that it is worth giving up a world where every book is expected to be the next Hunger Games. 

     To the people in charge of the platforms we post things on, I have something to say. Don’t build our world in terms of view count. If it isn’t financially feasible to build a version of Facebook where we can spend time with communities of people enough like us to be friendly but enough unlike us to spot our faults, than Facebook shouldn’t exist. This goes both ways, if we can’t be on social media without becoming worse versions of ourselves, than we probably shouldn’t be online. 

      I think it’s worth asking; what do the people in charge of our world want out of our future? I’m not the first to ask that question, nor will I be the last, because the best you can say about those in charge is that they have no plan other than to make money. Our world is full of people who, if they were in charge, would take it in a direction that would allow for a more creatively fulfilling existence for them, for better and for worse. The people we have in charge now don’t seem to care about creativity at all. They only care about reenforcing a narrative that was old when my mother was a child. I don’t think that we should expect our leaders to be the only ones in charge of writing our world’s story, and while I’m glad that they’re no longer the only one’s with the privilege, we’re dangerously close to losing the one good thing I think the future gave us. 

      I feel like we, the audience of the world, owe it to our creators to expect them to be a bit silly sometimes. To say things that don’t land, to do things that make no sense, to write stories only they thought would be interesting. What we should hold them accountable for isn’t disappointing us, it’s creating things that we know could make the world worse if people decide to build on those ideas, the way the Twilight series was indirectly responsible for the Fifty Shades of Grey series. I think we also owe it to our favorite authors to genuinely build off of their better ideas, through fanfiction and things like that, and to build our own stories and worlds based on what we like. I may be projecting, but I think that inside of every audience member is a writer of some sort, yearning to write their own story. I also think the best stories are the ones that no one is responsible for, because they’ve been retold so often no one even knows who created them in the first place. We owe it to our world to retain the right to say what’s on our minds and to expect someone who agrees with us to be able to hear it. We’ve reached the point where our society is now sound enough to protect us from the Infinite, I think we should be able to create a world where people can be as crazy as they want to be without worrying about destroying the world they were born in.