Some of you may not want your bow tie maker to have an opinion on things and I do understand that. There is an old Johnny Carson quip that “why is it that everyone that should be running the country is cutting hair and driving taxis”. It still brings a smile to my face.
That being said I would like you to think, that since our bow tie customers are usually of above average if not exceptional intelligence, that you wouldn’t want your bow tie maker to be a moron, and since you trust me with what you wrap around your necks, perhaps you will trust that my opinions are to be taken seriously but also with a pinch of salt since my circumspect diminishes with every year and I feel like I am passing my years in a sleepy village and perhaps I am being put out to pasture slowly through comfort and complacency.
I am edging towards 50 years of age now; to be honest I never thought I would make it past my late twenties. I feel that the first half of my life I was trying to kill myself with excess and the second half is trying to stay alive.
With every passing year I seem to add a new medication to my regime and when I question it, my physicians tell me that the alternative, in which I don't take the new medication, is far worse for my overall health. My GP, God bless him, also seems to take forever to issue me my medicines, always spilling me over into a longer session that costs me double. He loves to also send me on the Sydney merry-go-round of specialists which leads me in one revolution back to him for another elongated consultation to discuss all the key findings from my expeditions to other waiting rooms. All of this adds to the cost of living – which I can’t then seem to on-send to you guys since many of you are tightening your belts and the liberalness by which you used to approach your shopping baskets is now marred by frugality and consideration. Don’t worry, I am doing the very same thing.
All of this leads me to one troubling concern which is that as I edge towards 50, I am becoming acutely aware through ageing of how distant I now feel towards popular culture and the decay of the constructs, beliefs and characters that once shaped my world.
To begin with I would say that the Paris opening ceremony was a good indication of where I figure we are at today. It seemed a little slip slop slap, a little circus like, not so Olympics. I don’t mind breaks from tradition but to bear witness to a near naked smurf looking character that is trying to be somewhat sexual to the camera – I did feel like we were drifting a little too far from the shoreline.
In the Renaissance great art was made in Florence by gay men who lived in times of relative strict Christian doctrine of the day. They had to keep their sexual preferences to themselves for the most part, but somehow this constraint lead to so much beautiful and exceptional art. Today, it is a complete free for all of exhibitionists and individualists who look completely narcissistic and in my opinion, despite lifting off the shackles of the individual and their preferences, the art is vulgar and really not that interesting. There is something to be said of that. When constrained by societal values and those of the church the art will live forever. What we have today reminds me of Warhol’s claim that in the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.
And that brings me to reels. And I say reels because it really for me is not social media in its entirety – there are some wonderful people out there posting truly great content – but these reels are like crack cocaine, they keep you flicking all night on content that, whilst appearing relevant and meaningful, in the end keeps you in some zone of constant engagement, usually making you feel inadequate or ill informed or like you really haven’t achieved enough with your day. Between different opinions on war, politics, religion, fashion, finance, music and art, I just feel overwhelmed by it all. In fact in a moment the other day I simply deleted Instagram. Where once you could only post pictured, now it was just never ending video content.
Influencers and podcasters have become so ubiquitous, along with founders – and admittedly I find this all very hypocritical on my behalf since I do the very same myself to some extent – that I have come to disdain them so vehemently that I want to start attacking them in their comments but I see that so many others have gotten there first, with similar sentiment.
Of the podcasters and their interviewees that annoy me the most are the ones that are highly financially successful and motivated, or at least they purport to be, and have set up some grossly oversized phallic microphone and have their stupid ear phones on and in between a tapestry of current observations and new information that has come to hand, weave stories about famous people they met along the way and stories of how they succeeded themselves. Stories that suggest that they got up earlier than you, went to be later, had a stronger belief in themselves and so on.
Of course, you might think I have sour grapes. But no, not really. I just recognise what reminds me of another type of grape, the Australian wine grape. During the late 80’s when tax concessions were offered to those that planted grapes everyone joined in to get the concessions, then the prices went up for grape and it was happy days. The only problem was that eventually the market was flooded with them, the prices came tumbling down and the last I heard of a vineyard my family was invested in during that period, the vines had been pulled out and Black Angus grazed on the grasses now.
My friends, I feel we are heading towards a glut of content. I can’t even believe that the servers can house all this deluge, mostly just rubbish stuff. People spend their lives now doing ASMR videos, touching and sniffing and peeling and turning their products. Men zip their trousers in front of you and snap their shoes on and spritz their perfumes. Women go through their makeup routines ad nauseum.
It is not the world I had hoped for in the age of the internet.
When I first got on the internet, we used a modem that made that quirky sound, you remember right, and then you launched onto the web via a bulletin board. I still can remember our computer guy Alfred did it. At first, I did what any kid would do, I looked for porn. At the time it was just images, but it was so exciting for a 14-year-old. It was like the wild west. Alta Vista was the search I used to use. And it was egalitarian. It was exciting. It seemed limitless. I can remember when I first looked up Rolex, it was just a place holder from memory, and I thought - how do these people not know about what's going on.
Now every website is expected to have models rotating in 3d. You are expected to have shot a campaign every other week and to be flooding your website with new items on the hour.
I am not complaining about choice. I am not complaining about good websites either. It’s just that it has changed. It demands much more of owners and their teams.
We tried to scale the business this past year on an e-commerce platform of which I sat in on Zoom meetings to discuss SEO, Google Ads, Meta Ads, Pinterest, Linked In, YouTube and Instagram. By the end I was exhausted and worn out. I realised that these days the small operators that used to bring great products, that shone a light on niche items you couldn’t find anywhere else, those guys had been crowded out. It was the era of paid search and tech overlords that were gouging into your margin because they had effectively stolen your data or bought it over the last twenty years.
And all of that, or a bullet point form of it, spilled out as a monologue at a lunch with two advertising executives this week. They were in their fifties; they bore witness to the same changes I had but they were building teams and dynamically shifting with the changes. I felt a little pedestrian. And when they offered advice, I shook my head, because I had run out of energy, time and resources. Small artisans like me and my seamstresses were becoming a relic of the internet, a small reference in the annals of the time when in this egalitarian world pre the evolution of paid search and profiling, small voices could be amplified globally by way of this new way to reach new markets.
I would like to write more, to discuss the the convergence of reality tv and real life as we approach the elections. I would love to give you my two cents worth on the Middle East too, but alas, I have run out of time and I don't wish to make enemies with any of my customers. Opinions are like arseholes, everyone has one.
I leave you with this – I don’t know how your world has been affected by these changes – but does some of what I say resonate with you? Has the revolution been usurped by the same forces that were stifling us before hand? Are you happy with where the world is at?
Much love and talk next week.