Before your next Blog Post, Instagram Drop, Youtube Recording or Snap, remember you’re going to die sometime.
You’re writing future memories
I’m not a pessimist, I just want to remind you that what you’re saying today is immortalised on the giant repository that we call the Internet. It’s automatically crawled, archived, cached and remembered by minds both human and machine, as memories.
Speaking literally, you’re making a memory for someone other soul somewhere else, now and in the future. You’re going to affect someone sooner or later.
So, what do you want to be remembered as?
I mean, seriously, what?
Do you want virality? The viral scourge that is GoodyFeed, is going to be remembered as “That crap site in the 2010s”. Whether it’s GoodyFeed, or TodayUpFeed, or All Singapore Stuff, if you’re thinking of reading, writing or otherwise contributing to this style of content, ask yourself if you want to be remembered as “that person who did forgettable work”.
That’s what it is: Forgettable Work. It’s a flash in a pan. Here today, gone tomorrow. You’re not adding value. You’re creating drivel for false virality. Things that don’t make anyone’s lives better.
Your Content can be a public good, and good to the public.
You can choose to create content that’s for others. Sort of like this, this, this:
Or even this:
Our job, isn’t to make money off our sites as quickly as possible. Sure, we want to do that eventually. But content creators like you and me cannot go on creating for creation’s sakes. Our real job, and obligation, is to encourage discovery and incite joy in our audiences. Make them laugh, make them cry, make them think, then make them act.
At the end of the day, we’re all going to die. I just hope we don’t die knowing that our most popular piece was “53 pieces of toast that look just like Jesus”.
