Agent Palmer

I spent a lot of the last two months of this year listening to an album from 2020 by Tim Minchin, whose art I not only appreciate but am inspired by. Here’s the catch… I didn’t even know about the album until late October. In fact, I first listened to it the same day I finally listened to The Rolling Stones 2023 studio album Hackney Diamonds.

How did it come to this?

I’m not sure how or when it happened, and it’s not like I suffered greatly from it to begin with. But I no longer even consider myself a victim of FOMO, the Fear Of Missing Out, when it comes to consuming media.

It goes back to “Must See TV” and the idea of “Watercooler Talk.” And perhaps that is where we should begin.

With so much remote and hybrid work, there just isn’t the same workplace environment that there used to be.

It’s been more than six years since I started a post with “I’m not sure if I’ll do this again, or if so, how often,” but here I finally am again. Consider this another “take out the trash” from my mind post.

Now, it’s not really trash, of course. It’s just that when I sat down to draft this post, I had too many competing ideas. It felt better to write a little bit about a few of them than to try to compete with the chaos and work on just one.

I’ve written about it here and spoken of it on my podcast in various episodes. In high school, I was a shapeshifter. I was in marching band, jazz band, pep band, and symphonic band. I ran cross country and track. I was in a classic rock cover band and a metal band.

I did Science Olympiad and hung out with the gifted kids even after my grades kept me from officially joining. I messed around with the school paper and yearbook.

I have been out of work. I have been networking and applying and battling depression throughout a pandemic. But I have also maintained this blog and a podcast and kept up to date with digital marketing trends.

And yet, commonly, people I respect ask me “what of this have you done for money?” I’m sick of the sentiment. If a runner runs a few laps on their own because they got to practice early, most coaches will count that. If a musician practices on their own time to get better that’s experience that is important to the craft. There are many other examples of this.