Why Do Anything?

Writing About Writing On Substack On Substack

Photo by Luis González

There were two motivating factors for launching this newsletter in January 2023.

First, I wanted a place to write broadly about music and music books (while promoting my own books and music). Second, I wanted to launch a print guitar pop fanzine of the same name. The fact that I found a community of similarly-minded readers and writers on Substack remains the thick layer of icing on top.

The Guitar Pop Journals were short lived, but myself and many talented contributors released four solid volumes. I officially ended the series after my family lost our home in the Eaton Fire. I’m proud of what we accomplished, but life is about choices and some passion projects simply require too much time, energy, and attention.

I’ll admit that Remember The Lightning has been on my mental chopping block a few times lately. I’ve also considered turning it into more of a publication consistently featuring a variety of voices instead of mostly mine, partially based on the response to the Is It Power Pop?! guest post series. (Why don’t I? Curating and editing other writers is a different challenge than writing and not nearly as fun in my experience.)

Lately I’ve been tempted to abandon the “guitar pop” niche and just write a wide-ranging personal blog that also talks about music (which I kinda do already?). It happened under extreme and unfortunate circumstances, but a few of my Eaton Fire posts are among the most read. And, truth be told, my fickle heart is more with collage than writing at the moment, though I recently attempted to marry the two.

A long way of saying that this newsletter—like any ongoing and evolving creative endeavor—requires constant re-evaluation and the periodic renewal of vows.

The raging cultural debate about the nature, value, and future of human creativity has accelerated these thoughts.

A couple weeks ago I was mindlessly scrolling Substack Notes, like one does, when I came across this post from Adam Kotsko:

“One thing the rise of AI has shown me is that there are a lot of people out there who have never given any serious thought to the question of why we do anything at all.”

That sentence really spoke to me, so I decided to take him up on the implied challenge as it relates to RTL. I also subscribed to Kotsko’s That Blog You Like Is Going to Come Back in Style, and shared that quote with friends in real-life conversations.

Dipping my toe into a few of his previous posts, I discovered this related observation about the dying arts of reading and writing:

The advent of smartphones and their uncontrolled release among young people destroyed the attention span of a generation and more or less guaranteed that almost no students would just pick up [reading and writing] skills on their own. Now the availability of AI ‘summaries’…seems to be on the verge of delivering a death blow. The experiment in mass literacy is in danger of being wound down in the space of a single decade.

Well said, but…yikes. I presume a lot of other people on Substack have also discovered wondrous universes, and continue to explore themselves, through reading and writing. It first happened for me was an impressionable teen and continues to be one of the main ways that I ponder and process my existence.

I read and write, therefore I am.

As the father of a young adult and teen, Kotsko’s observations fill me with dread about the future (a generational rite of passage into curmudgeonhood).

But as a writer they touch on some larger questions I wrestle with about the more immediate existential threat of rapidly advancing—and heavily marketed—tech.

The constant drumbeat of inevitability around AI is exhausting. It’s almost as if people who staked their careers, reputations, personal wealth, and entire economies on widespread adoption want us to forget we still have some agency in the matter. If the social media era taught me anything, it’s this: big tech corporations and their billionaire founders rarely (if ever) have society’s best interests at heart.

Time spent on Notes reminds me that I’m not totally alone in confronting all of this. My pal and occasional collaborator Jim Ruland recently sounded the alarm about a new CBS News/YouGov poll that finds 36% of Americans are reading fewer books:

“This is bad news. A society that reads is a society that reflects. A society that consumes is a society that reacts and then looks for something else to devour. We should want everyone to read more, not just the nerds. That includes politicians, policymakers, cops, etc.”

What are distracted Americans doing instead? Watching more movies and TV, and spending more time scrolling social media (like Notes)—especially people under 30.

Ruland believes, and I agree, that writers like him who “operate at the boundaries of pop culture” should be okay for the moment because they appeal to specific kinds of hardcore readers (niche down, people). But many authors—myself included—are having to ask some tough questions about whether or not to continue publishing at all.

Let the record show that it has been a few years since I published a book despite a few sitting on various hard drives, theoretically ready to go if I could just muster the will to re-enter the fray.

Maybe I already answered my own question on that front?

Those thoughts inevitably lead to the enormous question of why we bother to do anything creative at all.

If you ever wondered how long people have been grappling with all of this, Aristotle delivered this heavily quoted observation around 330 BCE:

“All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reason, passion, and desire.”

Still seems about right, especially if you bucket “fame,” “riches,” or even “respect” under “desire.” I started RTL in 2023 as a “passion” project (with a healthy dose of “desire”), but it sometimes feels more like a “compulsion” or “habit” three years later.

There are times when I’m certain I can’t keep going, but I somehow manage two or three newsletters a week, whether it’s an essay, interview, guest post, playlist, book excerpt, collage/music update, fiction, or some random idea that popped into my head. More often than not, I’m satisfied with the results—even if I struggle to hit ‘send.’

I’ve been chipping away at this post for the better part of a week, unsure whether or not to share it.

If you’re reading this…you’ll know what I decided. If you’re not reading this, I guess I’m journaling?

Four decades of writing, still full of doubt.

Why keep going?

Capitalism tells us that expediency and the end product are all that matter, but I disagree. Difficult as self-expression can be, and despite the non-stop chorus labeling me a dinosaur for attempting to keep AI out of my writing, I just can’t imagine surrendering my hard won critical thinking skills in the name of endless productivity.

As a reader, I want unique observations from a singular perspective and lived experience. Even the brainiest tome needs to have heart, which takes guts. That precarious balancing act is relatable precisely because it’s profoundly human.

And, yes, I want to feel writers struggling to articulate their worldviews. I want to be inspired—moved, shaken, awed, angered—by another person who chooses to spend their finite time on Earth being creative. The incredible ease of publishing these days has made many forget that the writer/reader relationship is a sacred form of human connection, not just an ignored newsletter in your inbox or an unread book on a shelf.

I loved Dave Eggers’ latest novel, Contrapposto. It’s the perfect narrative for this moment, a beautiful tale of two intertwining lives spent in the art world. I listened to Eggers on NPR’s Wildcard podcast and he shared some strong opinions about AI:

“I never saw this coming, that there would be an entire generation tempted, and too many of them acquiescing, to the silencing of their own voice in favor of a bland, unthinking machine to voice their souls.”

Amen. I would personally love for AI to cure cancer and end world hunger, but I don’t need “art” from a semi-sentient data set. Given the strain on natural resources and mounting negative environmental impacts of data centers, it seems like we should consider limiting the use to important issues facing mankind and not “write a personal blog post for me about how I went from zero to ten trillion subscribers.”

But that’s me. You do you.

Now watch me bring this back around to power pop.

Mike Baron (aka Bloody Red Baron) has been guest posting album reviews at RTL for a couple of years now. A few months ago, he sent me a blurb that I now include at the top of every installment in that ongoing series:

“Folks notice that I only give good reviews. All this music comes from the heart. That’s what power pop is. Nobody pays these guys. They’re lucky to book a gig at International Pop Overthrow. A handful of bands make a living at it but for all of them, it’s a labor of love. If I hear a record that doesn’t click for me, I don’t review it.”

To my ears, that rhymes with a more poetic sentiment Michael Chabon shared in “Tragic Magic,” the fantastic essay published (among other places) in Go All The Way: A Literary Appreciation of Power Pop, the 2019 collection I co-edited with Paul Myers:

“Power pop is a prayer offered by atheists to a god who exists but doesn’t hear.”

On some level we’re all screaming into the void, only now we’re being encouraged to paywall those barbaric yawps. When I still worked in corporate America, this was the main question I got whenever news leaked out that I also played music and wrote books on the side: “Do you make any money doing that?!”

The idea that I put monetizable time into expressing myself didn’t compute. Perhaps I was poisoned by all those Kurt Vonnegut books I devoured as a teen:

“Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what's inside you, to make your soul grow.”

That honestly still seems like pretty solid advice to me. In fact, it may be the most necessary and profound reminder we all need in this current cultural moment.

Soul? Self-expression? Community?

I’m starting to think that I treat Substack like some kind of self help app. I know that sounds ridiculous—I’ve erased and retyped that sentence several times now—but that’s where I keep landing with all of this navel gazing.

Some writers make a killing on this app, but from what I gather many were already famous or influential before they arrived. I’m also aware of a few others who built successful Substack businesses from scratch, which is really impressive. None of this is a knock on professional writers, a pursuit that takes real dedication and fortitude.

For the majority of us, though, Substack is more of a hobby than a lucrative career or even a justifiable side hustle. I suppose that’s mostly who I’m thinking about here, the other part-timers who—like me—earn most of their income elsewhere, but still keep publishing here. Gotta do something with that old journalism degree, right?!

(FWIW: I don’t paywall my content, so I’m no expert; the paid subscribers I do have support RTL voluntarily, like tipping a favorite barista or bartender. Their support is much appreciated, especially when I go off script with a screed like this. High five!)

Here’s the thing: Substack writers are free to leave any time; many have, some more performatively than others. Odds are I’ll leave one day too—like I fled Medium to come here, and Wordpress before that—but enough of my fellow mid-listers and engaged readers stick around to keep things interesting. I’m not bailing just yet.

So, I continue to assign myself homework and sometimes get frustrated when strangers who never asked for (oh, I don’t know…) a lengthy essay about whether or not Cheap Trick is power pop don’t heap praise on the brilliant observations, share them far and wide, subscribe in droves, or shower my genius with money.

Substack writers occasionally moan about the algorithm, discoverability challenges for long-form writing, lack of support for fiction writers, the pivot to video, the influx of social influencers and LinkedIn hucksters, and countless other very real concerns.

We complain about Notes on Notes. I’m writing about writing on Substack on Substack.

Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich!

It’s honestly a little insane when you stop to think about it.

Which is why it’s probably healthy to occasionally remind myself that all of this is voluntary and success (however we define it for ourselves) is never guaranteed.

I think it’s worth remembering that many of us are still here simply because we love reading and writing, and we value connecting with others who share those interests (even if we don’t get rich or famous in the process). At least I hope that’s the case, because I still believe those are worthwhile pursuits on their own merits.

So, to answer my own question, that’s the main reason why I keep doing it for now. Even when I’m occasionally totally over it.

How about you?

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