It’s March 2025, and I’ve just spent far too much time building a personal website. And so, here you are, reading these words, stroking my ego across cyberspace. Welcome.

Yes, I’ve tried Substack. I made an attempt to post on Medium for a while. I even started posting weekly on LinkedIn—lord help me. This new effort to put my thoughts out into the vast expanse of the internet is as vapid as I can imagine, but despite knowing this, I realize it’s a need I have to fulfill. Now that I mention it, I might want to remind myself to bring this up at my next therapy session. This reeks of the sort of approval-seeking I thought I had overcome a year ago.

At present, absurdity abounds. In the United States, we’re literally living in the Sisyphean Age. I’m struggling to provide arguments to support this; to do so would be pointless. If you don’t sense the profound absurdity of the current state of the world, I envy you. Keep trucking. I may have a blog post about cooking you might enjoy in the next few months.

To me, the act of creation is nearly the most perfect embodiment of absurdity. Despite all evidence to the contrary, our need to create flies in the face of everything our experience tells us—that the universe is uncaring, irrational, and meaningless. Yet we endeavor to create, in any capacity. We actively do things. We make shit happen.

And, if we’re lucky, those things work out. Creations flourish, they have some kind of network effect on the world, they may even thrive. But ultimately, creations die, they fall aside, and leave nothing behind.

I think about this in the context of my earlier years when my primary purpose was creating music. I didn’t want to be a professional musician. I didn’t really even want to be a rock star or, frankly, successful at creating music. In my twenties, I just created music because that’s what I had to do. It was the most honest effort I think I’ve ever committed to. Zero expectation of outcomes—just fulfillment of a deeply held desire to make something, and that thing was music. Or, what I thought was music, at least.

Music soured for me when the goal shifted from creation to achievement. When the focus was on making albums, going on tour, or booking interviews, it just didn’t feel right. So, I quit. My creation died. I moved on. What was left was a lot of effort to find a thing I truly wanted to create. I’m still looking for it, honestly, but I’ve had some great experiences during the course of that search.

One of those serendipitous moments in my search for meaningful creation was embracing my obsession with technology. Ever since I had a Commodore 64 in my room at age six, I’ve been deeply fascinated with the potential of technology to express myself. I was fortunate that my aptitude for this discipline translated into a lucrative career. It opened an entirely new world of experience and possibility for me. The thread between music and technology for me is pure. It’s wide-eyed optimism about the possibility of being able to make something. To create. And the act of creation is a salve against the absurd.

My failures, at this point, far outweigh my successes. I’ve created so many useless, pointless, meaningless things in my life, one might consider me a loser. After all, if you can’t point to a triumph in life, can you really call yourself successful?

The triumph in life is the act of pushing the boulder up the hill. There’s nothing more meaningful—and simultaneously absurd—in the entire universe. Success doesn’t matter. Failure doesn’t matter. Creation doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. Absolutely nothing matters in the end. So, do a thing. That’s what matters. Despite the absolute pointlessness, the complete uselessness of everything in all existence—doing a thing is better, despite that.

That’s really all I’ve got for you. Create useless things. Create meaningful things. All creation is pointless, so create anyway.

I’ll see you on the mountain.