A number of conversations I’ve been having recently have me reflecting on the role of good luck and good timing in what I only occasionally feel self-conscious referring to as my career — namely, the fact that the circumstances that allowed me to get where I am today no longer exist, despite all that happening in the past two decades.
It’s a sign of the ways in which “digital media” has evolved — and the rate at which it’s happened, for that matter — but every time I look behind me to try and recommend that others follow in my example to try to further their writing careers, I realize that I’m talking about worlds that simply aren’t there anymore… something that feels especially surreal, given that, as I was coming up, I was moving in unchartered territory that hadn’t existed just a handful of years prior, either. Forget about the internet boom; the more I think about it, the more I realize that I came up in an internet burp.
The democratization of media that the internet appeared to offer — the very thing that allowed someone like me, with no training or, let’s be honest, special skill, to find an actual, real career as a writer — was, in retrospect, a temporary aberation that happened almost by accident as companies struggled to adapt to whatever the internet economy was going to become. I managed to sneak in while the lava was cooling, and before the continents shifted into place. Doors didn’t just close behind me, they burst into flame and ceased to exist entirely. (It was probably the lava’s fault, in this tortured metaphor.)
I’ve always credited my job to luck: to knowing the right people by accident, to being in the right place at the right time. But the more the internet becomes what it is, the more that I see how it devalues the “content” it relies upon to exist, the more I realize that the luckiest part of all was being there in the era in which no-one had really figured anything out, and was still willing to try stuff to see what stuck.
