why?
the eternal question
Dear word explorer,
Every year, whenever June rolls around, I get hit with a moment of visceral realisation: six months, WTF?! Like December, this month is the pivot upon which our calendar swings.
Time is a practised bamboozler. Months pass as slow as chilly treacle and then speed up like a monsoon river.
In between there are quiet moment of sublime beauty, interspersed with lip-tightening frustrations and finger-clenched fear, wild optimism and loud laughter, along with black doldrums and leaden despair. The entire gamut of human experience can gallop through a person in the space of a day. Euphoria for breakfast, sadness with lunch, a side of boredom at dinner, finishing with a cup of quiet angst before bedtime. Perhaps a bonbon of elation before brushing your teeth.
This human experience is bonkers. It bewilders me on good days and flattens me on the worst ones.
And always, why?
The most dangerous three-letter word in the English language is that petit interrogation. We build our lives upon layers of inhaled ideals, reformed opinions, secret failures, open successes and wild coincidences, to confect a fragile mille feuille identity and all it takes is that pastry fork of why to slice through and collapse the lot.
It’s the 3 am question that can implode your life, but it’s also the impulse of our earliest years of exploration and understanding, the word that dogs our parents and our teachers. The word that provokes quick answers (‘Why does it rain?’) and lengthy pauses (‘Why does Uncle Billy smell weird?).
We need why, even when we recoil from its confrontation. It’s what prompts us to search deeper for meaning and figure out the world. It’s what unmakes us and builds us up again.
The child who saw the naked emperor, cried out ‘Why is he naked?’ And no one could unsee the nude ruler.
Released on 16 March 1992, ‘Why’ was the first single by Annie Lennox from her debut solo album, Diva. Before this she had a wildly successful career with Dave Stewart in the Eurythmics, starting in 1980, but their first smash hit was ‘Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)’ from their second album in 1983.
They disbanded in 19901 and you’d think that Lennox was confident in her skills and excited about establishing a solo career, but at 37 years old, and a new mother, she was having to establish herself to herself all over again. Could she write her own songs, and drive her own career? No doubt, the why of it plagued her even as it drove her forward to new achievements.
Lennox is an extraordinary beauty with an expressive face, and this music video2 showcases her fierceness and loneliness as she paints her face and puts on a costume.3 It’s all a show.
We are often mysteries to ourselves and actors for others.
For her 2009 Greatest Hits album, Lennox said:
“I think this song expresses something of a sense of 'I need to take a stand, and say this.' It's almost testifying, like 'My Way,' or something. The world can be so baffling at times, so you find yourself constantly trying to figure it out... It's also about looking at the aftermath of things. After all this darkness and disappointment with the personal battles you've gone through... Contemplating the ashes of experience, and questioning what it was ever all about. It's like the remains of a building that's crashed and burned to the ground.”
Intense analysis is at the heart of creative work. The most curious artists have a habit of questioning their approach as they progress, which can be counter-intuitive in a world where strategists encourage creators to establish a niche market or an identifiable brand and stick to it relentlessly. Crafting a presence on social media platforms is considered an imperative.
Recently I spotted two different bands post on Instagram (the irony is not lost on me) about a long period of time they’ve spent trying to obtain representation from agents and/or record companies. In one case the group was ‘in conversation’ with the reps for over a year, during which the reps never showed up to any of the band’s gigs, but finally passed on them because the band didn’t have at least 50,000 followers on Instagram or TikTok.
With a bit of money you can buy 50K ‘followers’, so that’s an arbitrary and empty metric. Undeterred, the bands kept doing what brought them joy: making songs, selling them directly to their audiences, and continue to play venues. This is the alternative freedom that parts of the Internet and direct audience interaction still offer.
Recently, Meta (Facebook & Instagram) announced that from June 26 2024 it would start training its AI algorithms upon the ‘public’ posts and photographs of its subscribers.
You can ‘opt-out’ by filling in a form, which asks you to justify your decision (in this case the ‘why’ is not to expand understanding but to unnerve you). I suspect they’ve built loop-holes into the loop-holes. Other people have your images and posts in their feeds. American users won’t get this question as they are not under the same GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) rules as those of us resident in the EU.
Plus, if they introduce an ‘ad-free’ service for which we might pay, they’ll be exploiting their subscribers’ data and being paid to do it too. What a winning scheme.
A few weeks ago I stopped posting on Instagram. It was before this current round of nonsense from the company, and it wasn’t a conscious decision at first. I didn’t think ‘this is my last post’, or even advertise it. I’d been trailing off for weeks. I simply experienced an overwhelming fatigue whenever I considered posting an image or even promoting this newsletter. I’d scaled back my use of Twitter (X) to almost nothing, Facebook, even less so, and although I’d signed up for various other social media platforms I couldn’t sustain interest.
It’s the ‘Why?’ of it that I can’t answer.
Why post when most of my subscribers don’t see what I contribute and my content (that hollow concept) is now being used to train AI? Why contribute to companies whose ethos is to divide people and ruthlessly exploit their information? Why must I opt-out rather than opt-in?
Until I get a better handle on how these platforms plan to evolve and deal with their users, I’m focusing on other things, including this newsletter. I suspect 2024 is going to see some major shifts in how they operate. Who knows, perhaps something better will arise from these turbulent currents? As someone who has been observing the tech scene since the 1990s I know it will all change again. What I’m more concerned about now, is my focus and my attention.
So I will continue asking why about my work, its style, and my approach.
Ye gods! Sometimes, I hate that word.
Yet, I can also laugh at the absurdity of myself. Sometimes navel-gazing only reveals lint!
I can step outside, hear the birdsong, and enjoy the summer’s splendour. Or spend time with friends or family. Engage in everyday activities, help others in direct ways, and focus on what I can contribute.
Whys spawn, alas.
Once you ask why, it invariably leads to another…
But if you understand the why, after that, you can work on the what, how, when and where.
They reformed in the late 1990s to record their ninth album, Peace, which was released in 1999, and have worked together every now again since then.
Directed by British director Sophie Muller. She won a Grammy Award for the Diva video album, and an MTV Video Music Award for ‘Why’.
I’ve been intrigued by the trend in Instagram Reels and TikTok videos of people going through a beauty routine — such as putting on makeup — while they explain something, often an insight to their lives, work, or politics. It has the sense of ‘this is the real me’, with an underlying insecurity that the viewer will stop watching without action. It’s all performance. It wasn’t until I re-watched Lennox’s ‘Why’ video, that I was acutely reminded of this play on public transformation long before the Internet trend. Of course filming a woman putting on make-up is an old trope in Hollywood movies (Sunset Boulevard, for example), which this video also homages. We live in the culture of replicated culture.
So many questions. Why do birds suddenly appear every time you are near? Why do fools fall in love? Why does it always rain on me? But most of all, Why can't I be you?
Excellent post.