What to Learn from the Social Media Wars?
Our careers are getting fragile. We need a new strategy.
Our careers are becoming more fragile by the day.
We would have hardly been excited for five minutes at a new career prospect when we see the news of that thing dying or being replaced by x and y already.
It has happened to me with writing, blogging, screenwriting, proofreading, editing, composing music, etc.
Writing is dead! Blogging is dead! Blogs are dead! Journalists are dead! AI proofreads better than you! Screenwriters are not needed anymore! This bot makes music better than you! Copywriters are dead! Videos are obsolete(okay, I haven’t heard that yet, but who knows!) Hollywood writers are starving! Actors are being replaced! This AI influencer is making headlines in Japan, x CEO replaced their worker, 50 jobs that won’t exist by 2024, etc. etc.
I am scared of dreaming now.
Are dreams dead?
Death is a part of life, I understand. But focusing on your professional life is what makes your real life possible. And with all but talks of death about a thing, I don’t know how to focus on that thing.
It’s not just about the type of thing we make.
Now, even the platforms where we share our stuff are vulnerable.
We all know how it is with Medium. The way they have handled my views and reach in the last two months, I won’t be surprised if it shuts down this evening.
We all know the Twitter saga.
So what do we do? Where do we go?
I think I have a solution. For that, we need to go to an old Buddha teaching.
Talking about gurus, ideas, and enlightenment, he said thus:
Treat every guru and idea like a boat that takes you across the river. Ditch that boat when you reach the other end and move forward. Don’t attach yourself to the boat. Just because it has helped you doesn’t mean you need to carry its burden.
THE LESSON:
In the context of creative workers, content and media platforms have to be approached as boats, not goals. Our goals can be knowledge, communication, entertainment, money, whatever. We approach a content type or platform on a day-to-day basis. As a boat.
We use a content type or a social media platform to get from A to B today. When we reach B, we ditch them and go to a different content type and media. We won’t depend on or attach ourselves to the form. We don’t need to carry their burden! We exploit them!
This is how it should work for writers:
Today I write on Substack and share on Tumblr. I back up my writing. Tomorrow, if writing itself is dead or Substack/Tumblr collapses, I convert my writing into video or audio or whatever is there.
And so on…
My goal as a writer is knowledge and communication. It is not ‘to write’. Writing is a form of communication. It is not the goal. It is a means, not an end.
And if tomorrow they come to take my knowledge and communication too, I will escape to a higher goal:
Wisdom and Dreams, maybe. And find ways to live through them.
This way, I (a human) evolve faster than the platforms (tech).
Just as it should be…