Nostalgia Is One Hell Of A Drug
Picking up on my last blog post, nostalgia is really the prevailing mood of our zeitgeist.
Endless superhero movies, hard and soft reboots of your favorite shooters, the endless cries to go culturally, politically, and economically go back to past decades shows our collective lack of faith in the future.
It's weird to have this feeling permeating the various mediums of the content we all consume. Once every while you'll get something fresh like The Incredibles 2 or Joker, but those novel things are few and far between.
Nostalgia dominates our current thinking right now. This leaves an opening for people like myself who realize this to really strive to bring something new to the table.
Here's what I know I can create that will be novel for people to consume:
Writing: With my Forbes content, I give people insights into the latest new companies that spring up. I can do a deep dive and really understand the technology and business plan that the founders I profile come up with, and relay that information to a lay public. I'm tapping into a source of creativity on the part of these founders with their new ventures. Maybe that will be the inspiration for the rest of us to try and make an impact through entrepreneurship as well.
Filming: This is going to sound crazy, but I believe we live in a truly unique time in American and world history. I think vlogging allows someone to obviously document their experiences, but the next step would be to bring a historical context in a funny, but insightful manner to a new audience. That audience can then consider their place in the world and how they relate to others, and be driven to make new meaning of their lives.
Exercising: I have a personal goal of being able to maximize my strength while minimizing my weight gain. Similar to an airplane, you want to maximize your strength to weight ratio of the materials you use to build the primary and secondary structure. I'm doing the same thing with my body. It would be cool to be able to lift 3 or 4x my bodyweight through various compound exercises.
These are just some thoughts about how I view the purpose of what I create - to break the status quo of nostalgia and get myself and others excited about our ability to shape the future again.