So What Are You Really Making Music For?

I've repeated many times over the years that I hate advertising myself. There is something about it that just makes me curl up into a ball inside and squirm. I have become a naturally private person. I value being left alone and anonymity. I want to be left to my own devices because my chief ability, I think, is having ideas. Left alone I can have these ideas and try and make something of them without interference from other concerns. My idea of hell is to be famous. I literally cannot think of anything worse. I would go crazy very quickly if I was constantly getting requests or comments about not just the things I do but me myself as well. But you're probably wondering what the problem is as you sit there reading this. Surely, you're thinking, there is no danger of me becoming famous anyway? You're right to think this because there isn't. And even if there was I'd probably stamp on it as soon as I noticed it anyway. I've done the fame/money equation in my head a few times and I think the money would not be worth the fame.

My name is Andrew and I make electronic music. I put this music online and, to some, this suggests that I want attention, for it if not for myself. Up until now I would have reluctantly agreed with you. As a girlfriend of mine once remarked, "Why are you putting it online if you don't want people to like it?" This may seem a reasonable question to you and you may think she had a point. I am a fairly prodigious producer of music. Over 3,000 tracks in hundreds of albums in 8 years is my guesstimate for my latest spurt of activity. Pretty much all of that has been online at one time or another. Most of it now isn't save for my latest new album, not yet one week old, and two albums of "greatest hits" that I have let stand on my Bandcamp account as examples of pieces of music I am most proud of. But I find myself asking again why it is there at all.

I had a thought the other day which was pre-meditated by the fact that my new album, U8, received zero attention in the first two or three days it was online. I don't garner much attention really but zero attention is just as rare. I can usually expect a few plays and maybe five downloads for anything I do. If the stars align maybe an album will hit ten or even twenty downloads. The things that get more are rare exceptions. But there are exceptions. I have one album this year with ninety five downloads. It occurred to me in the moment I recognized my latest work had produced no attention that, actually, I was now free, free of having to make music that somebody else, somebody out there, might like. I started to ask myself, yet again, why I'm making this music and if making this music for reasons other than to count my plays and downloads was enough. I had an allied thought too. I considered that if I liked music by some third party then I wouldn't care who else liked it or how popular it was. In that case it would be wholly good enough that I liked it. So why couldn't this be good enough or sufficient with my own music too?

OK, I admit that everyone wants to be popular. Everyone wants to feel loved, liked and appreciated. Why does social media have like and favorite buttons if not to garner cheap appreciation for things you post? But what does it say about the person who finds self-worth in such things? I'd like to believe very much that I'm not so easily pleased. So, to get back to my conundrum, I ask myself again why it can't be good enough that I like my music. I think that now, having had the insight of no plays or downloads, it can be. I'm fairly realistic about my own music, I think. Its not all at the same level and the way I work means that its only in retrospect that I can sift and filter the better from the worse, the stuff that grows from the things that fade. All my music passes a basic "instinct" test I give it before I put anything online and that test is to ask if I'd want to be associated with it. But, over time, I can figure out the really good bits from the rest. My album A Maze of Electronic Sounds is seventy bits of music over eight years that is "better" than the rest. Time has helped me make that decision and I think every track of that album is fantastic. The album currently has twenty one downloads. But I don't care. I play tracks from it every day and it eases my path through this vale of tears called life. Job done.

Of course, there's more to it than that, especially if I want to be seen as some kind of artist and appreciated not simply for "product" but for having a set of skills or abilities or insights. Does the idea of this tickle my vanity? Yes, of course. This plays into ideas of identity and self-worth again. I am a human being. I have a human psychology. People want to feel appreciated and appreciated for definite reasons. My self-image is of an artistic creator. Now its extremely rare that anyone will comment on my music. This is partly my fault in that I've deliberately put it somewhere people cannot comment as they listen. Someone who wanted to comment to me about my music would have to go to the lengths of deliberately going to my social media and expressly addressing a comment to me. It seems that for almost everyone this is a step too far. I've had bad commenting experiences in the past. I made the mistake of putting work some years ago on You Tube and let's just say that You Tube has no filter when it comes to commenters. Some very hurtful things were said which, being the person I am, it was hard to get past. When thinking about comments its strange that we always imagine only good ones. But some are more than ready to give you both barrels without thoughts of consequences. 

The thing is that we usually take what we do very seriously and we imagine that others will too. But to others what we do might be a joke. Are we ready to hear that? What we do is for us often a very personal matter. In my case this is very true. My musical work is basically a narrative about my life experience in sound. It is "honest not good" as I have phrased it on my Bandcamp biography. To criticize it is basically to criticize my experience and say there is something wrong with it. So, for me at least, there are stakes involved here. I imagine this is true for other musicians, painters, poets and all types of artistic people too. But this only makes me go back and ask myself the "What I am doing this for?" question all over again. It makes me ask what role "the general public" have in this scenario. Do I need other people to value my experience of life expressed in sound? No, I don't. My experience is what it is whether you like or agree with it or not. And all genuine experience is valid as well. So I don't need anyone to say that what I did has any validity. The fact I did it is all the validity it will ever need.

So I find myself thinking that I need to start seeing my own music like someone else's. If I like it that's good enough. No one else's validation is needed. Its perfectly fine for it to be my secret if that's what it is to be. It can be like that record you hear which no one else has and it feels a little special to you because of that. If the music has its effect on me then its work is done. As I write I'm listening to my track "Sad Song" from the album Lousy Marketing Strategy. This track always gets under my skin. Not only is it one that I actually play keyboards on (rare), but it expresses perfectly my own sense of melancholy that I carry with me everywhere. Yet, at the end of this track, a dance breaks out. It, thus, tells me a little story about myself. No one else has this relationship with this piece of music for no one else realizes or experiences this. It occurs to me now so strongly that this is enough. It doesn't need to be appreciated by others or seen for what it is by someone else. Every time I hear this track it tells me this story of myself again. That is its work and it does it well. 

And yet, even after all this realization, I still feel pangs of vanity. "This is all true but, still, if a few people liked it and told you how great it was that would be OK, no?" I suppose it would. But its neither necessary nor sufficient. If I made music just so someone else would tell me they liked it (assuming I could even do such a thing) then I would feel so hollow and fraudulent thereafter. I'm only making music at all to give expression to my experience of life. It absolutely must be true to that or the process of making and listening would be a destructive one for me personally. I suppose this leaves the question hanging in the air of its worth to other people. Apparently, that worth is not much. I cannot say I have any fan, not one that I'm overtly aware of anyway. Clearly some few people are in that five people who seem to download most things I do. Thank you if that's you. Its just that I think I need to make sense of my music without factoring in outside influences. To be prey to "likes and faves" is to be a cork in an ocean I do not control. I'd rather make sense of what I'm doing in a more stable atmosphere if that's at all possible. The world is fluctuating enough already as it is. Indeed, as Nietzsche knows well, all things are flux. (Nietzsche himself, I'm reminded, was not popular in his own lifetime. His books sold only a few hundred copies each. He would be amazed at what a philosophical superstar he has become. And probably also appalled.)

I don't know what this means for the future or whether I will just stop putting music online. I've been less than motivated recently. However, the Bandcamp counters don't lie: I know how many plays I get and how many of those are barely 30 seconds of my track that might be fifteen minutes long! Do I really need the distraction of that in my life like some silent, anonymous critique of my art's worth? Is it true that it would be better not to know? Of course, there may be those reading this who are thinking "No, don't take your music away, blah, blah, blah....". But you already know my reply to this: if you value it then why isn't it being listened to and downloaded? Now I'm coming across like some bitter and disappointed fellow who is sad because no one likes his music. But, truly, I'm not sad at all. Quite the opposite. I know my music's worth to me. I know how hearing it back tells me things about myself, how it helps me explain my experience of the world and that is a huge help to me. The rest of you listeners out there don't even enter into this equation. Other listeners are, as it were, a side issue.

As I finish writing this blog it occurs to me that there was one comment a couple of years back that really did touch me. It was by someone who has now sadly died and he was a musician himself. A couple of years ago in 2014 I made a track called "Lament for Existenz". It was as emotional and melancholic as you might imagine from that title. This other musician, a young man half my age, went out of his way to tell me that this track really touched him. It meant a lot to me that he did that because, knowing a little about him, I knew that he had health issues of his own and so knew something of the personal struggles that life can bring. So I felt, upon hearing his comment, that, somehow, my track had managed to communicate to a like mind. I've always remembered that I treasured this about the track whenever I hear it again. I suppose I hope that this is what my music can do for others as well. But I'm not doing it for that reason. It was touching to know that I had created something that someone else could feel though. Because most of all I think I'd like to believe that what I'm communicating in my music is something real. Because if its real then who cares what anyone else thinks?

Stranger Things

This is a blog about the recent Netflix show, Stranger Things. If you have no interest in this subject then this blog might not be for you. The blog will contain spoilers so if you still want to see the show in a virgin state without any fore-knowledge of what will happen then you should read no further. 

Stranger Things is an 8 part Netflix TV show set in 1983 in Hawkins, Indiana. It is deliberately, knowingly and consciously made so as to reflect numerous cultural references to this time and is set up by some as "Spielberg TV". This label will give viewers a clue as what to expect if they've seen anything from Close Encounters to Poltergeist to E.T: The Extraterrestrial. The show is Sci-Fi with tinges of horror although I must admit I was never once scared and I am something of a softy when it comes to watching horror. The acting cast is largely unknowns (to me at least) but Winona Ryder takes a leading part, another link to strange 80s Sci-Fi-Horror since she was in Beetlejuice. The other actor I recognized was Matthew Modine, who plays a shady government character carrying out experiments of dubious legality.

The plot, in general terms, is about a boy who goes missing near a secret government facility where dark and dangerous experiments are carried out. His young friends, strongly reminiscent of The Goonies for you 80s buffs, resolve to find him as does his mother (Winona Ryder), his brother and the town Chief of Police, Jim Hopper. The Chief's name, I think, cannot have been chosen at random. "Jim Hopper" was an unseen character in the 1987 film, Predator, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. In Predator this character had been butchered and killed by the titular character before Schwarzenegger and his men are sent in to rescue the people Hopper had been sent to save. There are further Predator references. When it is determined that a creature is coming into our world from another dimension to hunt it is referred to in the script as a "predator". And then there is the fact that the show is set in Hawkins. Hawkins was the name of the first of Schwarzenegger's men killed in the film Predator. Whether these references are real or imagined though is largely irrelevant. (Chief Hopper reminds me of Chief Brody from Jaws.) The show is a deliberate mish-mash of references, real and imagined, and sets out to be so. If you're aware of 80s films, TV and comics you'll have lots to chew on. There are numerous scenes which, if not a homage to other things, are blatantly ripped off from them. This extends from the lift in the government facility being like the one Sigourney Weaver gets into in Aliens to multiple references to the film Poltergeist to Modine being a latter day Smoking Man from The X-Files. These are not all 80s references of course. But that doesn't matter either. Stranger Things wallows in the cross referencing. Its Tumblr TV for the fan fiction generation.

At the heart of the dark, government facility that is the geographical center of the show is the character 011 (Eleven, El). She is a 12 year old girl stolen from her mother who has various mental enhancements such as telekinesis (moving things by power of thought alone). Due to her abilities, which are deliberately sought after and trained by Modine's character, she can pass from our dimension to another one termed in the show "The Upside Down". This is a shadow world, a dark version of our own (seemingly modeled somewhat after Aliens, specifically the Xenomorph cocooning). It is from this dimension that the show's monsters come. It does not necessarily seem that the monsters want anything. They are shown to have no plan or motive but they are shown to enter our world, for example, to find food. It seems they may also be drawn by blood. What interaction there is or has been between the two worlds of the show is not directly probed except to say that Eleven was responsible for tearing a portal between them in the basement of the government facility when she was made to enter the other dimension and became so frightened that her powers literally ripped a hole in the fabric of the universe. The government spooks have seemingly since been probing this dimension with the coercement of Eleven until, that is, she escapes where she runs into the young friends of our missing boy which is where the show starts. 

I have to admit that I find the basic plot interesting. The first thing to note about the show is that I watched all 8 episodes in one go and never really got the feeling that I wanted to stop. I'm at a stage in life now where I no longer feel the need to like things because its expected or because "everyone else does". I think my years have earned me the right just to be brutally honest about if I like something or not and in the last few years I've been more than willing to stop watching things I thought were crap. I have no one to offend or to be offended by anymore now so I can just be honest. And, honestly, the show held my interest. Yes, at first I didn't like it. There are characters more prominent in the early episodes I was wholly unsympathetic to and I wanted them to be got rid of but by the middle episodes the story picked up, some characters faded into the background and others had more prominence. Always central, as one story strand, were the kids which I referred to as The Goonies throughout. Its a shame, then, that for me this group was one of the worst parts of the show. The Goonies is a film I'm aware of but have never watched through completely and this for the reason that a Spielbergian tale of kids getting into adventures is something that I just don't want to watch. If you watch Stranger Things you have to be prepared for one story strand being exactly this. Personally, I find stuff like that schmaltzy and hokey. It wasn't dialed up to 11 here (see what I did there?) but it was not the strongest aspect of the show for me.

One aspect of the show that has garnered numerous comments as I scan my Twitter timeline is the music. However, here, once more, I find myself of a dissenting view. The score and theme tune are electronic (read: synthesizers) and I am followed on Twitter by numerous synth nerds, a category of which I also count myself a member. And yet I wonder what, in this case, I was listening to instead of the synth wonder score these others seem to have been hearing. Among the many 80s references of the show are the films of John Carpenter, especially The Thing, and it occurs to me that the score is intending to be a Carpenter homage. In this case, however, I simply think it fails to do it. I hovered between the view that the score simply didn't fit the show or was simply unremarkable. It certainly wasn't Carpenteresque enough not least due to the seeming lack of Moog bass. I'm afraid it takes more than a few lush analog synth chords and an arpeggio on top to impress me. If you want to hear a genuinely good score to a Sci-Fi project then go and watch Under The Skin (another film referenced here when Eleven visits The Upside Down). The score to that by Mica Levi is outstanding. The score to Stranger Things is not.

So what do I make of the show? Basically, I liked it. It grew on me and the fact I could watch the whole thing in one sitting helped. The first couple of episodes were not endearing to me. If I'd had to wait a week to watch the next I may have ducked out and not bothered. But since today we can download or stream whole seasons in one go there was an immediate chance for the show to improve itself. And it did. By episodes four and five I felt the show was certainly interesting enough to find out what happened in the end. I found the ending weak. Of course, the boy will be found. But some other choices I felt were cop outs or just plain wrong. One character, a teenage girl, goes through the whole teenage love thing in one story strand and the writers made a choice which I frankly flat out disagreed with at the end and this grated. But I think the writers earned the right to tell their own story so if it grated or not its no deal breaker. I did not feel that the dialogue was always the best even if the story outline in general was good and engaging. Those pesky kids, The Goonies, were always on hand but I didn't like their performances except for that of Millie Bobby Brown as Eleven. The rest of the performances were good enough without being stand out.

Something should be said about the format as a whole. I admit that I find it a bit annoying that a show sets out to reference lots of other things as a part of its DNA as this show did. But, overall, I feel they handled it pretty well. There were few blatant rip-offs and many subtle reminders. I found myself saying "I've seen this before" numerous times. One of the most obvious was Eleven touching the TV and changing shows which was very reminiscent of Carol-Ann from Poltergeist doing the same. "They're here!" Most of all I think that even though they set out to be in many ways a glorified fan fiction of cultural references they have managed to make their own show and create new characters that others can now make fictions of. The world they have created is as credible as any of the other fictional worlds they relied upon to help tell their tale. Apparently there is to be a season two and I'm at least intrigued enough to give it a go if not commit to the whole thing based on what they've done with season one. Personally, I'd like more about The Upside Down and Eleven's powers and less pesky kids and romance story lines. But that's just me.

Lousy Marketing Strategy

"The devil makes work for idle hands" is a well known English saying. The idea behind it is that bored people will sometimes do dumb things just because they are bored. In my normal experience of life I have a lot of time to get bored and sometimes I do and then crazy ideas come into my head. Most, of course, simply fly away again to the nether world from which they sprung. But some get to work in my active mind and try and flesh themselves out into things I might actually do. Today's blog is about one of of these things that made it.

I often muse about my music and its reception. I imagine I am not unusual in this respect, one of the now probably several millions of people in the richer nations of the world who make music and put it online for others to hear. I also imagine that probably well over 90% of these people get virtually no listeners or downloads just like me. Last year I had 907 downloads of my albums and 2405 listens to my tracks (of which only 344 were listens to a whole track). Its not a lot. So an idea came into my head from whichever dark pits these things ascend: what if you put the exact same music up that virtually no one listens to but pretend that its by someone else? Maybe someone much more attractive than a middle-aged Englishman with a penchant for being philosophical and random? So I did.

Now I wonder what you are expecting me to tell you happened? It went like this. I created a fake Facebook page for someone who doesn't exist. The person was a 25 year old female electronic musician from Berlin. She had pictures of herself (which I borrowed from online and altered so they couldn't be found in a Google search) and her studio equipment (but not together) and very soon after the creation of the page she had music online to download for free. (I did not want to cheat anyone out of any money. No harm, no foul.) She joined some Facebook music groups and took part in discussions. She posted her music into the many music groups on Facebook. The response was, perhaps, as you might expect. This fictional artist got 2400 plays in 10 days, the same amount it took me one year to get. The 200 free downloads you get on Bandcamp were exhausted in the same time. The music I had used as "her's" wasn't even the music I considered my best. It was merely some secondary tracks all from this year which when they were on my account garnered next to no attention at all. These same tracks are now amongst my top listened to and downloaded tracks. But not because of them or because of me. Because the person they were thought to come from was a good looking young woman with a bubbly personality.

What should I make of this? The electronic music world is overwhelmingly full of the same kind of person: males. Many of these males just want to chat about their gear all day. To pose as a female is immediately to stand out and I admit I did this on purpose. I wanted to be a magnet that the unwary or unsuspecting would not be able to resist. In fact, I could be considerably richer now because several potential purchasers contacted the Facebook account I set up to offer my fake artist money. Some wanted to send me money direct, others wanted me to offer my album on "pay what you want" terms. Others wanted to do collaborations. A couple wanted me to make videos with them or go for photo shoots to help my profile. I refused all offers. The account attracted hundreds of friend requests most of which I turned down. I added some just to aid plausibility. The thought strikes me that I could have carried this on for months if not years and made money from it. But that wasn't my intention. I just wanted, in a curious and non-malicious way, to find out how popular my music would be if people didn't think it was me that was doing it. The answer, you might think, would be damaging to my self-esteem. When its by me its not very popular. When its by a young woman it is much more so. But its the same music!

Maybe you are shouting at the screen now. So far, so obvious. Young women are more popular than middle-aged guys. What's the drama? Well "the drama" is that I am a middle-aged guy and the only way that is going to change is that I will soon enough become an old guy. I have learnt that people do not appreciate my music based on what it is but they base it on all kinds of other stuff like who made it, what they look like and, as I discovered in the many discussions I had, what they use. This basically means that whatever music I make I start off with a huge handicap. Something I am and cannot change is holding back the potential of what I do: being me. How should I react to that?

This all ties in to ideas about status, and particularly my status, in life. I sometimes make music and I sometimes write blogs and that is really all I do. You're probably wondering how I stay alive but that's a secret I don't want to share. That's because its a sad tale and not a bad tale, by the way. People are allowed their secrets. Anyway. I make music and write blogs. I consider myself an electronic musician and if someone asks me what I do, and they virtually never do because I don't know anyone or go anywhere, then that is what I say I do. This doesn't mean I am a professional. A professional to me is someone who does a certain task for money or to support themselves. Additionally, it may mean they adhere to a set of standards that people who do that task to support themselves may hold in common. But I don't make a cent from my music because I choose to give it away. Partly, I think, this is a defense mechanism. If I charged money it would probably be very negatively received if no one wanted to pay. By making it free I save myself that heartache. Partly, though, its also ideological. I give my music away and therefore I owe no one anything. You haven't paid for it and so you have no call to demand anything from me in return. Commerce, wherever it takes place, sets up obligations and I want none involved in my music making.

Commerce, however, is often a guiding standard of our world. If I tell someone I'm a musician and they say "Where can I buy your music?" and I tell them they can't because I give it away for free they look at me funny. What kind of professional makes no money from his or her profession? The suggestion is then that I am a fraud. To be a professional is to make money from what you do. So I am not a professional because I earn no money from my music. I'm also not one, incidentally, because I go my own way regarding the standards I use to make it as well. I get very annoyed when people write things telling me where a professional would place their speakers or how they would go about recording something or what the "proper" way to achieve some musical task is. I think you can do things how the hell you like. In music you decide what the goals are and how to get there. But if only it was the music that were important. When people hear sound coming into their ears they may know nothing about its origins. All there is in that moment is sound. I wish it remained that way. This, for me, is a precious, sacred moment. But it doesn't stay that way. The innocence of Eden is shattered by the thirst for the Tree of Knowledge. Instead people might judge how professional I am and that might reflect on my music. Maybe they were hoping it came from someone more good looking or with a better set of synths. It wouldn't matter to these people that I am as serious about the music I have made as any artist (who makes money from music) they could name. It wouldn't in that moment be just about the music anymore. Superfluous stuff poisons the well.

Of course, there's no way to change any of this. People want to know stuff. Even if it would be better all round if they didn't. I could go back to pretending to be 25 year old woman of course. These seem to be continuously popular. I've learnt that pretense and deception can work. I don't doubt I could charm money into my life through a succession of fictional characters. And its not as if I don't need this money. Others would tell you that I certainly do. And that's probably one reason why I never ask for it. I'm very contrarian. But it has to be said that in this case I have a very lousy marketing strategy for the main thing I do. This is because I don't think that I am actually worth paying if I'm honest. It was very easy to pretend to be the other person. In fact, it was freedom from being me. You could pay her because she is giving you your money's worth. But me? You must be joking. But its the same music!

The woman is gone now. The four accounts she was associated with are deleted. She no longer exists. But the music does. Its my music. And its on my Bandcamp. It will not garner any of the attention it did whilst there was a pretty face and a nice chest to stick on the front of it. Instead, I've very deliberately put my own face on it. Gargoyle-like, it stares out at anyone dumb enough to stray there, a warning that nothing here is very attractive. The music was made by someone who is seriously interested in music though and always wants to learn and progress in using sounds to express things and just to bring some interest to the world. Is this enough? Probably not. I'm just using music to knit the days together really until they run out.

That will probably have to be enough.

PS This album is now no longer available. It lived on my Bandcamp for a few months garnering much less interest than it had when a pretty young woman was the figurehead for it and even though, in theory, I have a network of potentially around a thousand people I could advertise it to on Twitter who have chosen to follow me. Having read my thoughts above you may draw your own conclusions as to why and extrapolate accordingly.

Some Thoughts About Electronic Oddities

Its now just over a month since the first season of my ELECTRONIC ODDITIES PODCAST finished. You may or may not be overly familiar with the series and if you want or need a refresher you can find all thirteen shows in the series right HERE! 

The Electronic Oddities Podcast served a number of different functions for me. It was primarily a show I did to showcase new and differing kinds of electronic music. It served this purpose very well and encompassed a number of "old faves" of mine, and others, as well as music I and probably very few others had ever heard before. I wanted it to be a mix in every possible sense, of unknown and known, of music you might like and music I hoped you wouldn't. This later point gives away its educational purpose too. I was, in the thirteen shows, also trying to get some points across. In my head I hope that some listeners heard something they might not have liked before but now find that their horizons have shifted slightly. Certainly before this year I never would have included any noise music in such a show. And yet, in this series, noise tracks pop up here and there and show eleven is only use of noise. I approached the series seriously, trying to do a good job of it. Of course, you could point to lots of tracks and electronic music styles I probably missed out. But I was trying to do a good job.

I'm not usually one for feedback. I'm not on Facebook spam posting my works looking for hundreds of "You are great" type comments in reply. I treasure privacy and, to some extent, anonymity. This sets up a conflict when I make something or want to publicize something because I have to do something that, in some respects, my better nature is rebelling against. I would really rather let things speak for themselves if I can. This is hard though today because most people take the packaging for the product and have the attention span of a gnat. On Bandcamp I can see in the stats how people have barely given a track 30 seconds of their time and decided its not for them. This is a pitifully small span of time in which to make your impression. In a similar way, I didn't really want to put track listings on my podcasts on Mixcloud where Electronic Oddities is based but a couple of people semi-complained that they wanted to know what the tracks were and so I deferred. That bothered me because if people think they know then they will base judgments on that. But I didn't want them to "know". I wanted them to experience. The latter, I think, is the much more valuable thing in the end. "Knowing" is a closed thing whereas "experiencing" implies opening yourself up.

I noticed some interesting things about the podcast as I went through the thirteen weeks. Besides the surge of interest that came with the first show of a new thing, the most popular show has been the fifth one which was a modular synth special. This was probably the best advertised show, since there are numerous Facebook groups dedicated to modular synthesis in which to post the show's existence. So this perhaps explains this show's popularity. I was a little surprised, and a bit upset, that show nine, which was dedicated mostly to classic 80s dance music by people like Juan Atkins, Kevin Saunderson and Man Parrish, was the least popular. So-called "EDM" seems so all-consuming nowadays but without such artists, and the technology they harnessed to make it, there would be no EDM. This show was a history lesson and a reminder to remember where this music came from but it seems to have gone largely unheeded. My final show was music specially commissioned for the podcast and I'm glad that got a decent hearing. There are numerous talented people out there who make electronic music and its good, from time to time, to spread the word about some of them so we can share the encouragement of appreciation around. I was happy to put the time in to do my bit for that. Overall, pretty much every podcast of the thirteen made a mark in the Mixcloud charts. A number hit top ten in their genres. Some made top five.

All this tells me I was doing something that at least a few people might want to listen to. There were a number of thankful comments left too which were, of course, unrequested but welcome nevertheless. The problem comes when I ask myself what to do now. I have a fixation about not repeating myself so instinctively I fight against the notion of "Electronic Oddities Season 2". I could probably do that and hopefully maintain the standard I reached in season 1 but I would be asking myself why I was doing it the whole time. So the best scenario would be if I could carry on doing a similar thing but not the same thing. My aims in my next season of podcasts would be to continue playing an almost random mixture of electronic music, new and old, that might strike the prospective listener as interesting and engaging. I want to provide a podcast that people want to listen to and come to trust as worth listening to. I don't know if I did that first time round because there are some questions you shouldn't ask in case you don't like the answer. But I know a few people who said they looked forward to it. So maybe I did. I would probably want to broaden the scope of the show slightly so I have creative freedom to have themed shows or one-off specials. So I'm thinking something like "The Doktor Existenz Radio Show" at the moment. But it will still be everything Electronic Oddities is. And hopefully a bit more. 

Such a show will, of course, stand and fall by the music played and by word of mouth. I set myself fairly low targets in terms of listenership. For reference, my least listened to show in season one of Electronic Oddities was over the threshold I set for it being worthwhile. Whilst I might argue I'm doing this for myself, and that's true to some extent, in the end you don't publish podcasts unless there are listeners. I wasn't sure when I initially set out, earlier in the summer, that I would even finish series one. But now here I am musing on series 2. And I have some ideas for this. There are songs I want to play, themes I want to explore and new music I want to find. I just want to make a varied and interesting electronic music product for people who can appreciate the same thing. Hopefully, some of you reading this will join me for the ride for 13 weeks from September 2nd.

Life, Existence And Being A Ghost

"Wir sind geboren um zu leben, nicht um zu funktionieren."

"Das Leben ist zu kurz um es mit Warten auf das Wochenende zu verbringen. Jeder Tag kann schön und der Letzte sein."

"I feel so non-existent.... I feel like I'm dead and a ghost."

What I've quoted above is three quotes from my Twitter timeline. They are all, in their own ways, related thoughts but, more importantly for this blog, related to thoughts and ideas I regularly have or think about. The first two, written in German, suggest that life is to be "lived" and not merely to be functional. The similar English thought is to differentiate existence from living. The first is simply being but the second is thought of as more. And as better. The second German quote above says that life is too short to wait for the weekend. Every day can be good and could also be your last. So its recommended that you enjoy and get the most out of every day by implication. And as for the third quote above... Well that interests me the most and it has since I first read it. For what exactly does it mean? Even the person who said it does not seem to know. But it seems negatively related to my first two quotes.

As far as the first two ideas go my instinct is to critique and reject them. "This day could be your last," its said, as if that were some kind of motivation to do something good, worthy or fulfilling. But if I knew that this day was my last I wouldn't do anything. And knowing it was would be the major motivator in that fact. The fact I'd have one day left would guarantee I did absolutely nothing on that day. Because being brutally honest with you I'd be damn happy that it was. You see I see life differently from very many other people and often I imagine that these people don't think very deeply. I may be right or wrong about that, of course. I think they just swallow ideas such as that "life is for living not existing" without really thinking about them or doing the hard work of asking what they mean and if it is experientially true. This, I take it, is the most important truth of all, the truth that you feel.

And so I ask myself why the fact this might be my last day should matter at all. It would matter to me merely, and with relief, because it would mean for me that the burden of this fleshly existence is finally being removed from me. Yes, that's genuinely how I feel overall about life and one can only be honest for there is no wrong answer here - just your answer. When people say to me that life is for living and not existing or, in German, um zu leben, nicht um zu funktionieren, I sort of think I know what they mean but I don't really. Perhaps I've only ever existed and never lived. And, if that were true, how could I be expected to know the difference anyway? The difference here is one of experience not book knowledge. Its not a matter of facts but of having lived. And, whatever you might say, its somewhat arrogant to imagine that everyone's experience about life, or thoughts upon it, are the same as yours. But, and this should function as a warning here, its also dangerous to think that you are the only person feeling like you do or that no one ever has before. We all walk individual paths. We must for we are individuals. But we are the same species and can share and have things in common and we need to remember that. "You are not alone" is both true and not true at the same time.

So you can take it that I'm not buying any feel good horse bollocks about "life is for living" without a heavy dose of experience-funded cynicism. Life, in many respects for me, is for getting through and I have earned the right to think that having struggled through forty seven and half years of bullshit to get to today. That individual struggle earns me the right to talk about life as I have lived it and experienced it. Some of this may be relevant to you and some may not. But, I repeat, there's no wrong answers here anyway. So be bold enough to think what you really want to think and say what you really feel. 

As I've said before, I have come around to the view that life is less about external circumstances, which is the obsession of the masses, and more about internal ones, which seems to me to be either ignored completely by people or brushed over with lip service. Without going into details its fair to say that as the world sees, a world all about possessions and status, that I'm pretty much as far down the pile as you could get. I am in many respects a hermit. I don't fit in and rather than struggling to do so I choose to accept my fate and not do so. I don't own very much. The money I have is inconsequential. I have no friends and the vast majority of people I speak to in a day are online. If I couldn't get online I might go for days without talking to anyone at all. And yet, in a way, none of this really bothers me very much because, as I say, life for me is not about externals. Its about internals and these internals are things I've struggled with too ever since I was really even an adult.

I have not known a lot of peace in my life and this is because I've had to deal with internal trauma for a lot of it. Perhaps now you understand why superficial, external things mean so little to me? Its because what good is stuff or status when you are fighting against your own mind and feelings? They are no use and of no help. Your own mind is literally something you cannot escape and to fight against yourself is probably the hardest battle of all. There is a history of mental health issues in my family. My mother and her twin sister suffered from various maladies and to a certain extent still do to this day. This has for them been a lifelong battle throughout adulthood. Every day for them can be full of surprises and not the nice kind. Imagine waking up and immediately you feel afraid. They don't have to because it has happened to them. Its happened to me many times too. Both of them suffer from a fear of traveling and my mother recently took a short break away with a friend. She was as white as a sheet waiting for her friend's car to arrive. For some people simple things are major hurdles.

But unless you know someone like this I imagine that it would never even occur to you. We all have a tendency to think that everyone else thinks like us and I've written about this before. The truth is that some people do and some people don't. We are all a strange mixture of shared thoughts, feelings and emotions. We each have our areas of experience and areas of lack of experience. I remember once having a panic attack in the street near where I was living. My first impulse was to speak to someone and I saw a neighbour from across the street who I had seen many times before. I still remember the look of complete fear on her face and I can only imagine that I must have looked like some crazed axe murderer walking towards her from that look on her face! I just wanted human contact as a means to get control over how I was feeling but for her it seemed to look like something terrible. 

We hear a lot today about people with mental health problems but it is not usually in a positive connection. Maybe its because someone has been killed or there was "a crazy person" on the bus or in the shop or in the street. Very few of these people are in any way dangerous and, of those that are, most are more likely to be dangerous to themselves much more than anyone else. But, for those who don't understand about the many forms of mental health issues that abound today, it can all just seem dangerous and threatening - as the unknown usually feels to most of us. It is striking that it is in the most developed nations of the earth that mental health is the biggest issue, as if modern society had created its own casualties. And I must be honest in saying that I think it does. I'm probably one of them for I find a so-called modern way of living to be utterly crazy and contrary to more natural means almost to the point of total frustration sometimes. This is not just as a matter of its physical circumstances but also in relation to its guiding philosophies. How can it be promoting of good mental health, for example, that we are all in theory competing with each other for wealth and prosperity? It seems to me that if you wanted to make some people sick that's the first thing you would do.

"Life is to be lived not just experienced" we are told though by the prophets of superficiality. I'm not sure they would say that if their "experience" was as dark as it is for some people. Life, for them, might be more something to be escaped. "Living", whatever positive spin that is being given, seems more like a fabled Never Never Land, a thing which some people say they have but which, for those with dark personal experiences, seems false and unreal. And, indeed, if "living" is merely about having stuff and earning money to buy the stuff and maybe having a status which gets you the money to buy the stuff then isn't it false and unreal? I would argue that the real riches such people have are never waking up soaked in sweat or never being worried about feeling deathly afraid as they board a train or carrying a feeling of dread just about the fact that you are you and being you is like an uncomfortable coat that you can never take off. For some people being who you are does not come easily.

And this is the sense I get from the quote "I feel so non-existent.... I feel like I'm dead and a ghost." For what must it mean to feel like you don't exist? It implies an absence of feeling, an inability to inhabit or enjoy things, as if everything is only observed but without being able to take part. It doesn't sound very pleasant to me but it does sound very genuine and I value that fact for I value those who speak truthfully and not in the words of conventions or cliches. But from my own experience I think it must also be somewhat contradictory for the more I have felt an outsider to my own species the more personally aware I've become just how much that makes me one of them. This entire blog started with a search to discover humanity and what "being human" is all about. Eighteen months later its still on-going but its only a sub-section of my so far forty seven and a half year investigation. I have been exploring it in words, thoughts and music. Sometimes I feel like I touch something meaningful and at others it feels like none of it matters anyway because "all things must pass". 

The recently deceased Italian genius, Umberto Eco, wrote in his book, Foucault's Pendulum, that life was a meaningless enigma made worse by us because we had a desperate craving to infuse it with meaning and have it all add up to something. The plot twist was that it does not. We are just left with the feeling and idea that it must. I very much go along with this thought and my life seems to be a sort of validation of this idea up to this point. This is one reason I've felt the need to cast off very many human conventions which, ultimately, buy into the idea that things MUST mean something, something overarching and over all. But the truth is they mustn't and that they can mean whatever we want them to mean. And that can include nothing at all. But, be warned, what you think and feel must have consequences for you if you do it genuinely and authentically. Life is not a game and you cannot fool yourself. That is to say you can fool yourself but it leads nowhere good.

For me, life is about being at peace with myself. I've said this before. If you are at peace with yourself I think this means you are stronger, more able to deal with things in general and more able to set things in context. I think its partly a spiritual thing, whatever that means, and partly philosophical. I have found that in life I've had to do a lot of reading and much thinking to achieve this peace. It is not won cheaply and it is not bound to happen. You have to work for it and earn it. But I genuinely believe its the greatest prize a human being can have. But then maybe that's because I have to fight for it every day. I do not know what it would be like to not struggle in my existence. I've hardly lived a day where I didn't. But, in a way, I'm not remotely sorry about that because when I look out and see people living what I regard as empty, pointless lives acquiring stuff I feel glad that my struggle grounds me. Existence itself is not a small topic but at least I'm connected to that in my existential struggles as maybe you are in yours. It is good to step back and situate yourself in some greater context. If life is for living and living is a daily argument over who has what then I find that nihilistic beyond imagining. Life may not be merely functioning but living isn't mere selfish acquisition either. It must be about sharing, understanding, situating yourself in something more than yourself. It must be about everything of which a human being is capable and can experience. 

If you would like a musical commentary on all of this it can be found on my Bandcamp where the best of my last 8 years of music is now available, a musical commentary and testimony on my thoughts about life. Its at elektronischeexistenz.bandcamp.com 

The Shit Sandwich Conundrum

Perhaps a strange title to today's blog but all, I'm sure, will become clear soon. "The Shit Sandwich Conundrum" is the name I give to a scenario when you have two choices and both of them are unpalatably bad. Its like having the choice of a shit sandwich to eat or a shit sandwich to eat. Whichever you choose both are shit sandwiches. "Why is this relevant to anything?" I hear you cry. Well that's what I have to explain now.

My primary motivation for this blog is political and this is because it seems to me that there have been a number of scenarios recently where the shit sandwich conundrum applied. Our American friends have a choice between a moronic, self-aggrandizing fool and a corrupt, corporate liar which is all very "shit sandwich". Here in the UK recently we had the choice of the corrupt EU or the boorish "Little Englander" mentality. The latter won. But, of course, it doesn't matter who wins in the "shit sandwich" scenario because, either way, you're going to be chowing down on shit.

What are we to do in such a scenario? It seems that a lot of people think we should accept our fate and start munching. I notice that yesterday comedian Sarah Silverman, formerly a supporter of Bernie Sanders as the Democratic nominee for President of the USA, now thinks that those who cling to their beliefs that Bernie was the man for the job are, and I quote, "ridiculous" to argue that it should be "Bernie or bust". Their refusal, like her, to give up on Bernie and, instead, fall in behind Hillary Clinton, one of the afore-mentioned shit sandwiches, provokes ire and insults from Ms Silverman. It seems that she thinks that even though some Democrats may have been demonizing Mrs Clinton for a year and saying all the bad things they could think about her now, somehow, they should just forget about all that as if it had never happened. Ms Silverman prioritizes expediency over principle. No doubt, if asked, she would argue that the Clinton shit sandwich is slightly more palatable than the Donald shit sandwich. But its all shit Sarah!

Of course, for the shit sandwich conundrum to be a genuine and real problem, which I think it is, then the stakes have to be real. With my American example I think that's very much the case and I, an outsider to that spectacle and merely watching the depressing show, cannot see a single redeeming factor about either candidate. In a similar way, there wasn't much redeeming about either choice in the Brexit debate. Its not as if the EU is some repository of goodness or that British politicians are any better or worse than European ones. Either side, from my perspective, was equally as shit. And the idea of slightly less shitty shit is a thoroughly shit argument. If that's what you find yourself reduced to then you surely must realize that something greater is wrong. And that is that politics itself is shit from top to bottom. Even in the rather parochial confines of the debate surrounding the leadership of the British Labour Party, a party currently riven with splits and arguments, the choice is between a lifelong left wing oddball, Jeremy Corbyn, (who is the Bernie Sanders figure here) and a man who barely seems to be from the Labour Party at all, Owen Smith (the Hillary Clinton). The former has spent his life disobeying his party and espousing left wing causes whilst the latter has suddenly found lots of reasons why he supports Labour causes yet mysteriously never seemed to before. The first has popular support from the party's members but would probably never win a General Election, the latter is all spin and PR and enrages many party members because he is so obviously a fake. So that's a double dose of shit all round.

I find myself asking how things come to this and I think the answer is that politics has become disengaged from what it ideally is and from what it actually should be. "Politics" comes from Greek and is, in so many words, "the business of the city". The Polis was the Greek city and so politics is how you run such places. It is, ideally, something that each citizen, the people who live in cities, is involved with. Except in our modern societies it isn't. So many of us have abdicated responsibility for this to so-called professional politicians. These professionals, however, are widely open and exposed to corruption and so the people charged with the business of the city become people channelled into serving other interests. British members of parliament yearly claim all kinds of ridiculous expenses as a privilege of their supposed service which, in the past, has been channelled into providing comfortable horse stables for a member's horses, moats for expensive houses or payment for the employment of family members. Some British parliamentarians also feel the need to claim money for taxi journeys of 100 yards or a pair of socks. On the other hand, Government contracts are awarded by politicians to companies who then, mysteriously, become the employers of the same people when they leave office. I'm only scratching the surface here.

My fundamental point here, and it depresses me that it might come as a shock to some people, is that real politics is about me and you, adults with the right to vote. But its not just about voting. In fact, that's almost the least important thing here. Its mostly about taking an active role in society and recognizing that its actually your responsibility as a citizen that is important here. I always say to myself whenever any unpopular policy is passed that if 10 million people stood in front of the building concerned and refused to move until the policy was changed then it would change immediately. Because people DO count and they DO matter but when we get apathetic and just let it pass because we have life to live or things to do or its not worth the hassle well that just let's whoever is responsible off the hook. And that's mostly what happens in our societies. We let those responsible off the hook. We imagine that there are "other people" whose job it is to run the place. We let slide the notion that, as citizens, its our responsibility to hold every politician and political decision to account. Gandhi did not let this responsibility slide. His movement of peaceful protest, in effect just sitting in the street until the change came, freed India from the British Empire. 

Gandhi's example is quite startling. His example is that any change worth making will take an effort. Nothing comes easily. Gandhi's campaign did take years to achieve its end. But, of course, you can sit back and do nothing. Well I don't know about you but I'm finding it increasingly difficult to choose between this shit or that shit. I don't personally want to have to chow down on either. And in the current situation with the professionalized political class that we have this is all we will ever get offered for you can bet that the other interests in society will keep wanting to push their stooges forward. Of course, there are men and women of conviction and principle in politics. But they are few and far between. My point, however, is that real politics is not about people who call themselves politicians. Its about citizens and being an active one rather than a passive one. Because, it seems to me, if you're happy to zone out and let everyone else get on with it well then what motivation have those that do got to take any care or concern over your needs?

Now in the Star Trek universe there is a famous scenario called the Kobayashi Maru. It is a test designed to test all prospective Starfleet Academy cadets in that fictional world and the point of the test is that it is a no-win scenario. Whatever is done during the test destruction (for some) is sure to follow. I mention this scenario here because it seems to me to have some similarities with the shit sandwich conundrum. In my conundrum we all have to eat shit. In Star Trek someone is going to die. The Star Trek scenario tests character and I think that the shit sandwich conundrum does too. This is not necessarily because I think that in real world human politics everyone is going to die (or eat shit) anyway. To be honest, if we think that then why bother? No, to act politically at all is to believe that things can change, can be different and can be ordered better. That's what Gandhi thought, its what Nelson Mandela thought and its even what the original founders of the USA thought. The shit sandwich scenario tests character because it addresses each citizen individually and asks them if they are going to take responsibility for their habitat, their city, their world. If no, then oh well. You handed over your future. If yes, you still may fail but at least you have a stake and you make yourself heard and, thus, noticed.

My ultimate point here is that real politics bypasses politicians. Real politics isn't professional. Its people, just people. Its people coming together with a common mind about things beneficial to them all. Maybe its a bit hippy or sappy. Maybe you find it all just a bit emotional of me. But its true. Politics is just the expressed will of the people, of any people who deign to take part. There are many who will laugh and smile if you choose not too. It makes their agenda that much easier to bring into effect. So next time you blame a politician for something ask yourself what you did to effect change politically recently. Because it all really starts and stops with the person in the mirror.

Who Are You?

Last night I tweeted a blog of mine from a year ago that was built around a question uttered by the character Deckard in the film Blade Runner. Deckard inquires of his host, Eldon Tyrell, about his employee Rachael, "How can it not know what it is?" In the story Rachael is a replicant, a manufactured being, an artificial human. In the blog I turned this seemingly reasonable question into a matter of personal identity and tried to show that, actually, knowing who or what you are is, in fact, extremely rare amongst living creatures, if not impossible. So the more reasonable question is actually how could one know what one is?

Its this identity question that I want to keep in focus in today's blog. I want each of you reading to ask yourself the question who and what you are... and to answer with some measure of responsibility and honesty. Its very easy to lie to yourself about this question and I'm personally in no doubt that this is the thing we probably lie to ourselves the most about. I want to focus on this today because this week I had cause to have to describe myself to someone I'd never met before and it pulled me up short to actually stand back from all the narratives I'm daily inhabiting and take a look at myself. 

It occurred to me that who I am doesn't actually fit in very well with many prevailing narratives in the world at large. I would, for example, make a terrible employee and could not present the blank, robotic, corporate face to an employer that I assume many of them want. I openly despise corporations, their ethics and even their very existence. And I'm not overly conscientious in hiding the fact I feel this way. In a world in which we are told HR departments now routinely trawl social media for information on their prospective employees I would not survive very long. 

But there are other things besides this. I'm not a family man, something that some would find suspicious. In current society some would also look down on middle aged, single men with suspicion. Indeed, only this week former Conservative Party leadership candidate, Andrea Leadsom, our new Environment Minister in the UK, someone who is in favour of fox hunting and doesn't believe in man-made climate change, seemed to suggest that men seeking to work with children could be pedophiles. As a person who myself started a youth club for children aged 7-11 some years ago, a club which is still running now over 20 years later, this made me feel under suspicion. I was already well aware that some find it easy to be suspicious about so-called "loners" but when such thoughts can be uttered openly it makes you just want to hide yourself away. Which, of course, wouldn't help either. The loner, the person who doesn't join in, the antisocial person, is someone distrusted too. The free spirit can equally be typecast as the contrarian or troublemaker.

What this reveals is that "who you are" or "who people see you to be" is not something benign. It has consequences. This is not just true in regard to how you see yourself which, psychologically speaking, is a vital component of your own physical and psychological health. Socially speaking, this matters too. It could very well frame what people these days refer to as your "life chances". We do not live in a world where points of view don't matter. Everything is interconnected as I've repeated many times in many of my blogs. What people see when they look at you does matter because, dependent on how they view it, it will frame their response to you and which pigeon hole they stick you in. This is what concerned me this week when I was asked by someone to describe myself. It suddenly occurred to me that if I was nail-bitingly honest in terms of how I see myself then, I assumed, it might not come across so well to someone who doesn't have my context of myself to see it in.

Let me be clear that this is not because I see myself as some sort of bad or disreputable person. I have done my share of bad things but, by my age, I'd imagine most people have a list of things about them that they'd rather not share. No, it was more the case that who I see myself to be now has diverted from "mainstream" ideas and has gone down a more personal and individual path. Diverting in this way does not come without cost because the more individual you become the less you fit in elsewhere. My life has been one where I've either let myself be blown by the winds of circumstance in what I'm sure some might see as a careless way or in which I have made idiosyncratic choices for my own personal reasons. I haven't had other people to worry about in doing this as I've largely been single. So I don't fit the model of many people who have family and build lives tailored to communal needs. It follows that my goals and motives are often entirely different to those of many others or from what might be expected.

If you've read many of my blogs I would hope that this might have come through. I am often an anti-conventional person in a very conventional world. This week I was forced to look at myself in the mirror and ask myself what that means. I think the answer is in many respects negative. It seemed to suggest to me that only those who conform can get on in the world. But, of course, it all depends here what terms you want to use to describe "getting on" or "achievement" or "progress" in this life. I'm not motivated by having stuff or a particular job title or various social statuses at all. My aims in life, such as they are, are more personal and, dare I suggest it, more philosophical or even spiritual. The most important thing in life, I think, is peace of mind. In the old "quality versus quantity" debate about life, "Would you rather have a short life of quality or a long life of quantity?", I've always chosen the quality over the quantity. I've never seen value in life itself as just an amount of stuff. Not all lives are equal and not all lives are worth living. This is one reason why I'm not so hard on those who commit suicide or on those who end their life humanely when they pass a personal threshold for its enjoyment.

It all comes back to this question "Who am I?". I'm sure there are many people who look in the mirror and see someone they do not want to be. Maybe you reading this now are one of them. Its often a temptation to get lazy and fall back on some notion that things have just happened and you can do nothing about it now. But we all know that is not true. As someone influenced by existentialist thinking I would have to be the last person who said that we should not take responsibility for ourselves. That sensibility is largely about doing exactly this and I feel that urge and desire to do so. This is not the desire to fit in. Its the desire to be able to look in the mirror and say "Yes, I am taking responsibility for myself, for who I am, for how I act, for how I interact with others. I want to be someone who can stand and look at themselves without any shame." This is basically saying that I want to be the kind of person who can live life without any bad faith towards myself. This is what I call "peace of mind".

I have been in relationships in the past and this question of "peace of mind" was an active factor in the relationship. I have felt the need to change myself in order to fit into something else and this has caused me trouble and personal turmoil. But at the end of the day the only person you are always in the presence of is yourself and so doing what promoted this peace of mind has always won out. You simply cannot live life whilst you are fighting yourself or acting contrary to your own internal monologue. But this is not a question of always giving in. Showing good faith towards yourself and promoting your own peace of mind is often about having courage and disciplining yourself to do things you know you should do but, for some reason, don't want to. So I do not see what I'm speaking in favor of as "the easy way out". Far from it. It can often be the hard way. I am a person who has in the past suffered from severely disabling panic attacks and yet during the winter of 1997 I forced myself to take terrifying train journeys to university. That took courage and not a little amount of balls. I could easily have run away. But if I had I wouldn't have academic qualifications now. Both that struggle and the qualifications are now part of the narrative I tell myself about myself.

I see myself as standing within some narrative about human beings and how they should be. It is a deeply human narrative and about that mixture of things that I think make up being a human being. Much of my blog has been about these things in case you haven't read it or noticed as you read it. I invite you to read older blogs to read my thoughts on this. Now, of course, this, in itself, is quite a philosophical context. But, I wonder, how do you see yourself? What context do you set yourself in? What kind of person do you want to be? What would allow you to be at peace about yourself when you look in the mirror? What is the narrative you tell yourself about yourself?

I think its a question we all need to ask and we can only become better people by doing so. Just don't expect it to be easy.