My Motivation

This is a fairly personal blog post that explores death and grief. Fair warning, it’s a positive message but if you’re not feeling up to these themes, spare yourself the read 🙂

Last year I discovered that for me, peace of mind came in the form of creating. Writing, recording, streaming, editing, anything that results in a digestible form of entertainment or otherwise narrative content gives me a feeling of satisfaction unmatched by all else. So far, I’m yet to accrue much of an outside audience, but that’s almost become secondary to the point by now. Personal project or global phenomenon, what matters is that my ideas, thoughts and feelings exist outside my own mind, and are available in other mediums for anyone to access.

If I’m being honest, this may well be what the other side of an existential crisis looks like. For some time I believed in an afterlife “out of necessity”, but I eventually found myself dedicating too much thought to the matter and discovered a fear of oblivion. Even when I grew to accept it by talking myself into the school of thought that there’s no point fearing something you won’t exist to experience, I’d still grown far too accustomed to the idea of my own mortality. Rarely a day goes by when I don’t consider death, the passage of time or the concept of age and decay, and that’s probably not healthy.

Regarding my creative resurgence, what changed me for the most part… and I hope anyone involved doesn’t mind me discussing this, but after my Nan’s funeral last year I heard lots of things about her earlier life that I never knew, and it inspired me. When I was sixteen I wanted to leave my mark on the world by saving it, and when I grew out of that fantasy I sort of… lost my spark. And while there’s certain aspirations I’ve still not quite recovered, people I’ve lost in life – my Mum, my Nan – have inspired me to make a mark on the world however I can, even if it’s just a small, personal one for those around me.

So I make dumb videos, but they’re about my week, and I know that in a few decades they’ll be worth more to me than they are now, and hopefully they’ll mean something to others. I tweet incessantly, knowing that every throwaway thought is archived – ten years’ worth, so far. But I write, I edit and I create nearly every day now, whittling away at the version of me that will remain when I’ve passed, hopefully a day very far from this one. For myself, for others, in memory of those I’ve lost and in defiance of the force of entropy.

There. That sounded impressive, didn’t it? Ooh, I’m quite pleased.