It hit him like a “bug on a moving car’s windshield.” Fast, hard and splat. The idea was a bit of a mess, but it was also the burst of energy that he needed to power through that particularly monotonous stretch of highway. As usual, the Spotify playlist wasn’t cutting it. How many effing times can you hear “Pump It Up” by Elvis Costello before it has absolutely zero impact? This thought in his head was completely different. It was fucking obvious now. More ideas kept flowing. Each idea building on the last one. Pretty soon he had convinced himself that “Everything is Going to be OK,” just like that weird billboard said. That ridiculous billboard was everywhere. Who was paying for it? What was the point? He wondered to himself.
But that is a question for another day, maybe, if he remembered or even cared anymore. From now on, it was all going to be about the story. The story was the point, and the story was the way to make the point. It was not all the other so-called best practices to “find an audience,” “post content” and then sell shit all the way until you reach your 7-figure passive income. That fucking dream. That fucking unrealistic dream. He didn’t even care about the revenue. It was the message. The message is what mattered to him. He would have liked the money, but that was totally secondary. Stop fucking blogging, stop making bad YouTube videos, stop tweeting. Stop it! Just stop it right now, to paraphrase the old business guru, James Berwick. that he worked with back in the nineties until that all disappeared one day, but that is a story for another day.
It was going to be better than OK, he told himself. It was nearly perfect, if only he could do the one thing that he had never been able to do — actually finish something. Starting things was never his problem, it was finishing things.
But he had convinced himself that this idea was so good that it was going to be easy to finish. He had the outline in his head, and he had the motivation. He jumped ahead in his mind to the book tours, the interviews, the podcasts, the conferences, the sequels and he even imagined the inevitable big fucking crash at the end where it all comes apart. The bullshit exposed. Yeah, it was utter bullshit, based on utter bullshit, but it was his bullshit and he believed it. Bullshit was exactly the point. Everything in one way or another is bullshit. Finally, the shit of the past three or so years made some sense to him. All of the contradictory and largely unjustified emotions that passed through his head. The boredom, the depression, the frustration and most of all, the “what the fuck is the point of it all” feeling that was squelching whatever little ambition he had left.
Calling it ambition was an overstatement. He had no inner ambition. The only thing he ever tried to do was to keep the so-called peace and try to keep people happy. Keeping other people happy (as if that is even possible) hardly classifies as an ambition. Ego may be the enemy, but without some sense of self, you might as well be a freaking bowl big Jell-O.
This was different, at least he thought to himself. It was meta, but it was his kind of meta.
This was the answer. It was the answer to everything. It was also the answer to nothing. And in his cynical little head that was exactly the point. You don’t need the answer. You just need a really good question. don’t need to come up with an answer because “more likely than not” it is going to be completely wrong. It is more important to frame question well than to answer it.