Bleak.

Things are bleak.

and not the "self-aggrandizing, young heavy music artist catharsis of personal drama and relational woes" kind of bleak that has provided countless folks with valuable, but all said, considerably personal catharsis. Real bleak.
Between the environment, political systems, and worker rights collapsing in their own scales and the gnawing feeling that every moment feeding your love and art into the digital woodchipper is just a desperate dopamine hit to distract you from feeling like in 5 years there won't be a world to sell yourself within - it's hard to find a reason to do, well, anything.

Countless conversations have been spoken on a fear of wasted momentum and wasted energy. Of optimization lost and the constant struggle of ethical presentation in exploitative markets. Of the fear of missing out, and of never being missed at all.

Why create?
Why have we ever created?

Was the drive to create and tell a story always just a flowery wreath around a desperate side-hustle?

Were things always this bleak?

I remember touring 17 days across Western Canada in a shitty van with a bunch of shitty friends, performing shitty black metal in shitty venues for shitty pay.
[sub-optimal]
I remember spending dozen of hours sifting through and clipping video, making a negative hourly wage because my vision for a lyric music video that the band probably didn't care about had to be as beautiful on YouTube as it was in my mind's eye
[65hrs of editing - 1.3K views]
I remember walking out through the curtain to an empty room in nowhere Saskatchewan to get thrown around a ring, hurt my back, had a terrible match in front of a raucous crowd of 7.5 farmers who clapped politely after my 7.5 minute match.
[Didn't get my shit in, brother]

[...but]

I remember hours upon hours of loud, excited, often heated conversations about what could be, what we could do, what we needed to do; not for money, or success, or adulation, but because we had a story to tell, we had a vision, we had a purpose.
[The band broke up, the video bombed, the match sucked.]

[...but]

I remember feeling the fire.
That bright fire.
That passion to create because it needed to exist.
It needed to exist because it should, and everyone should see it.
Because it meant something to me, to us, and it might mean something to you.

Things can be bleak.

Not everything must be.