I retired Steve Emig: The White Bear blog about a year ago, after it hit 100,000 page views. It's now at about 124,000, just going on momentum.
This "new" blog has wandered around the themes of creativity, new media marketing, writing and such. I'm going to start writing more about blogging itself, who could use blogs, and why they help for certain things. I've tried about 50 or more blog ideas in 12 years, and my blogs have scored over 380,000 total page views, so I have a reasonably good idea what I'm doing in the blogosphere. So I'm going to focus more on sharing what I've learned about blogs and blogging, and other random creative stuff, going forward. 5,000 page views is a cool benchmark to hit on a new blog. So I'm stoked, even though it was a month or so ago, and I wasn't paying that much attention at the time.
This is my dad, with my niece Katherine and my nephew Ethan, in January 2006. I visited them in North Carolina, seeing my niece for the second time, and my 3-year-old nephew for the first time. It was cool being an uncle, and having Ethan keep asking me, "Uncle Steve, let's watch Dorwuh (his pronunciation of Dora the Explorer then). I watched about 20 episodes of Dora that week, and went home saying "Oh maaan!" when people cut me off in my taxi back home in Huntington Beach.
When this photo above was taken, Katherine was 5, and Ethan was 3. At the same time, Google was 7 1/2, Amazon was 11, Facebook was almost 2, Space X was almost 4, Tesla (the car company) was 2 1/2. You Tube was almost 1, Shopify was just starting, and Twitter would be founded two months later. Uber, Lyft, Snapchat, Pinterest, and iPhones didn't exist yet. Think about how big those companies are today, and how much they have changed how we live our daily lives. The Generation Z kids, like Katherine and Ethan, grew up with these businesses.
Now, in April of 2021, my niece Katherine is graduating from college, and Ethan is graduating from high school. Another young woman I met on the bus two days ago is in her first year of college. These "kids" Generation Z, the post Millennial crowd, are hitting adulthood, and they're hitting the adult world at a REALLY crazy time in history.
I saw this young woman sitting in the back of the bus with a copy of Robert Kiyosaki's book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad, and asked her what she thought about the book. I read the book around the time the photo above was shot, I think, and have read most of Kiyosaki's books since. The young woman, Diana, turned out to be super intelligent, and it was a really cool conversation. I was wondering what a person her age, and about my niece and nephew's age, thought of Kiyosaki's ideas on money, work and investing. She told me she was in college, on an academic scholarship, and had a 4.0+ scholarship in high school. But she was also the daughter of a hard working single mom, and grew up where money was really tight. She had some really good thinking on money for an 18-19 year old. When buying clothes, or most other things, she said she'd think, "How many hours work will this shirt cost me? Is it really worth trading that much of my time?" That's a great way to think for a person her age. She really impressed me, being book smart, but realizing that money was a whole different type of learning, so she picked up Robert Kiyosaki's book, to learn more on that front on her own, as well as her college studies.
Diana also talked about the notion of working to make a living, something nearly all of us have to do, yet thinking about what she was passionate about in life, and the struggle between doing what makes you happy in life, as well as doing what's needed to make a living. That's something we all have to struggle with our whole lives. Overall, it was cool to see a young woman motivated in learning both her official education in college, but also about money and finances, on her own. The world needs a lot more people like Diana coming up. Talking to her gave me more hope for Generation Z.
As a Big Picture thinker, who has written a lot about the long term trends happening right now, I'm looking at the 2020's as probably the craziest decade anyone alive will see. I've gone into more detail on these ideas in my online book, Welcome to Dystopia, The Future is Now.One one hand, I think we are in the late stages of the collapse of the Industrial Age, and the rise of the incoming Information Age. There are several ultra-long term trends, all combining, and I see the 2020's as a decade of massive change. Old systems are breaking down as new, tech-enabled systems are being built up, and changing how we live, day to day. So these older Gen Z people, like Katherine, Ethan, Diana, and their friends, are beginning their adult lives in the midst of great change. I told Diana, "The world today isn't normal, it's really crazy. It's will be crazy for a while, but what gets created in this decade will shape everyone's future for a long time to come."
One big trend I'm watching, is the way new technology is replacing human jobs. An Oxford University study in 2013, estimated the 47% of U.S. jobs could be lost to new technologies by 2035. That's around 75-80 million jobs disappearing, in a 25 year period. My personal thoughts are that the future will hold a lot less high paying "traditional" jobs, and a lot of people, of all ages, will have to either have side gigs, micro businesses (one person businesses), or small businesses to survive. I think Gen Z will, just by necessity, have to be one of the most entrepreneurial generations in 150 years or so. Ethan has been making some money streaming content about video games, so he's already doing that to some extent.
As old people argue about ideas from 30 or 40 years ago, I think Millennials and Gen Z are, and will continue to, build a new world right under our noses. It's a big job, but I'm beginning to have more faith in these "kids" hitting adulthood now. The world needs all kinds of improvement, pick a theme that's important to you, and starting making the world better. Us old geezers need all the help we can get. ; )
My favorite bands are mostly punk bands, the music I listen to most often, are bands like Social Distortion, The Descendents, and Face to Face, and several others. But when I'm in a creative mood, actually working on creative projects, I listen to this entire concert of the Lilith Fair in 1997. I've watched and listened to this dozens and dozens of times. This is one of the best documentaries on creativity I know.
"Writing's so bizarre. I think that's why it's so fulfilling. It's like you're... you're making something out of nothing."
To be able to reach into the void, to literally stretch your soul out into that other dimension, and bring out something new, something you think the world needs, to breathe life into it, and set that creative piece on its journey into the physical world, that is the work of an artist. And that work requires every bit as much dedication as that of a doctor, or a soldier, to do it well, and do it consistently. An artist, a poet of life, may not fight battles with guns, but we are always fighting battles.
While in North Carolina, three years ago, living in a tent in the woods, and drawing my Sharpie art day after day, fighting the darkness of the deep shadows of the worst aspects of Old Southern Culture, it seemed like I was planting flowers in Hell. I wondered if it was all worthwhile many times, like when I was hunkered down, under a tarp, inside my tent, as a Carolina thunderstorm raged around me, thinking about drawing at the library the next day. One day I realized, if you plant enough flowers in Hell, it doesn't feel like Hell anymore. That is our work as artists.
To keep trying, keep creating, to build our technical skills, and learn our own creative process, to bring new things, new creative works, new ideas, into the world. That is our job. If you dedicate yourself to that over the long term, you eventually build up the drive to keep going no matter what forces of the evil parts of the everyday human world throw at you, or our own fears and personal demons we may be wrestling with.
That is our job. We light matches in the darkness and create new lights to share and pass around and light new paths. To do that, we must be sensitive to the creative sparks and the nuances, but also build a toughness to break past the doubters and haters. At this point, if you put me in front of a firing squad, condemned to die a moment later by the executioners' guns, I'd write a haiku on the spot and recite it, as my last work in this world.
You pull the trigger
Sending lead death to end me
A poem comes, I win
Sometimes it takes that level of dogged dedication to be an artist. History would forget the names of the firing squad members, and the leader who told them to shoot. But that poem, that haiku would be written down and remembered, I guarantee it.
Yes, sometimes it takes that level of dedication to your creative work to be an artist. Most of the time it does not, thankfully. But there is a dedication to being a poet, a painter, a sculptor, a songwriter, a musician, a dancer, a content creator, a director, a producer, an inventor, a graphic designer, whatever. You may not face the firing squad for your creative work, but you face days of creating crap, you face your insecurities, your personal bad habits, your doubts, your mom's doubts, your dad's doubts, everybody's doubts. You face moments, even days, where it doesn't seem to be working.
And then... that spark comes, from somewhere. That next right idea that you need to create. But the spark is the just that, the spark, it is not the poem, the song, the play, the finished work. Then comes the dedication that you've built over time, the work to take that creative spark and form it with your technical skills, into the piece of art to share with others.
Some pieces of art may be instant hits, going viral in your genre' to be admired and to inspire many people in a short amount of time. Other pieces may not receive much initial excitement at all. They may sit out there in the world, seemingly unnoticed, for months or years. But in that time, in their place, those pieces inspire one person here, and another there. And years later someone thanks you for creating that piece or work you'd long forgotten about. It did have a purpose, it was needed in the world at the time you created it. Maybe that "failure" ultimately inspired entire new people and new ideas while you went on, busy elsewhere. You never know.
There is a reason we are driven to create something. Sometimes it's just for our own survival. Sometimes we just need to get out of our everyday mindset and goof around, and make something to keep our own spirits up. Sometimes we create a gift for someone dear to us, to help them through a dark time. Sometimes we create a piece of art that speaks to many, many people. Sometimes we may create something that seems like no big deal at the time, but it sparks a whole new genre' of creativity in other people. Sometimes we may create a work that speaks to our times, and helps drive a major, needed, a change in society itself.
We never know, as artists what effect a certain piece will have. Our job is to actually live life, and to learn and grow as artists, to dedicate ourselves to doing the best work we can, as we journey through life. Our job is to learn our own creative process, to follow our our weird path, to build our technical skills, and to drop everything and create that next piece of work when the spark hits us.
The world of humans needs our work, even if it may not seem like it at the time. The world needs us, as artists, no many how many mean and seemingly evil people (most of whom are blocked artists themselves) may try to destroy us. The world needs new creative pieces of work, new ideas, of all kinds, constantly. The world needs you to create. Do your best to hold up your end of the bargain. Keep creating.
Become
You must risk
If you're to succeed
From when we grow
Sometimes we bleed
Each must climb
Over the fence
For the only cage
Is ignorance
Each Jedi Knight
And Shaolin monk
Evolved from
A lowly punk
Don't get caught
In the world's throws
We must become
Our own heroes
-The White Bear
(aka me, Steve Emig)
A couple of memes I made a while back, on the idea of creativity...
