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Jan. 2nd, 2017 08:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI think sometimes about how TV and movies give us a wonky idea of what achievement really means.
I mean, there's a handful of people that pretty much everyone has heard of. A few names with an audience of logically less than seven billion, but maybe not by much. And even a regular TV show wants more than a million people to see it. A comic maybe ten thousand? Published books can get way up there too.
For most of human history, you'd live a very surprising life if more than a hundred people even knew you existed. And probably all of human prehistory. You'd be known to your family, tribe, clan, extended kinship network, people you traded with a couple times a year.
And that was okay.
I mean people lived good and worthwhile lives, happy and successful lives, on a planet where they'd never expect anyone to know their names.
Kings and suchlike put their name on all sorts, plenty of people carved their mark into monuments, and it's a really old idea that word fame never dies.
But we've got this weirdly distorted close up view of famous now, as if it happens to people we know. We could read all sorts of details about their lives. And there's entire industries devoted to the concept It Could Be You.
And in my head there's this niggly persistent idea that nothing I do counts unless it has an audience that's at least comics sized.
Which is rubbish.
I just binge read Yuletide, all those small fandoms that barely get writ the rest of the year, and it notably improved my life for a week or more.
That's a plenty good goal to aim for.
Write something that maybe a dozen people will get something out of.
Pretend we're tiny small humans in a huge giant world and all we really need is to nudge along together some more.
I mean, there's a handful of people that pretty much everyone has heard of. A few names with an audience of logically less than seven billion, but maybe not by much. And even a regular TV show wants more than a million people to see it. A comic maybe ten thousand? Published books can get way up there too.
For most of human history, you'd live a very surprising life if more than a hundred people even knew you existed. And probably all of human prehistory. You'd be known to your family, tribe, clan, extended kinship network, people you traded with a couple times a year.
And that was okay.
I mean people lived good and worthwhile lives, happy and successful lives, on a planet where they'd never expect anyone to know their names.
Kings and suchlike put their name on all sorts, plenty of people carved their mark into monuments, and it's a really old idea that word fame never dies.
But we've got this weirdly distorted close up view of famous now, as if it happens to people we know. We could read all sorts of details about their lives. And there's entire industries devoted to the concept It Could Be You.
And in my head there's this niggly persistent idea that nothing I do counts unless it has an audience that's at least comics sized.
Which is rubbish.
I just binge read Yuletide, all those small fandoms that barely get writ the rest of the year, and it notably improved my life for a week or more.
That's a plenty good goal to aim for.
Write something that maybe a dozen people will get something out of.
Pretend we're tiny small humans in a huge giant world and all we really need is to nudge along together some more.
no subject
Date: 2017-01-10 05:03 pm (UTC)