The Transience of Written Words
This blog has changed again and again over the past years. From the little diary of a Bavarian media designer to the story collection of creative minds spread all over Germany. From the bible of Berlin nightlife to the tabloid newspaper for hipsters. From a digital news site to a never-sleeping ticker of viral happenings. Until at some point, I was faced with a sheer monstrosity of false expectations and hopeless prospects. This website wanted to be everything but collapsed from not being able to do anything right. For a variety of reasons.
I had forgotten what this blog was really about and wanted to stay relevant at all costs. In this fast-paced media world. With my eyes forward, there was only one choice: Keeping up. Keeping up with the news. Keeping up with the trends. Keeping up with the loud and shiny and flashing. I was Marcel Winatschek, bitch, I had to be even more extreme than everyone else.
At some point, I was just blindly churning out news, lookbooks, gossip, YouTube videos, shitstorms, and boobs in a completely irrelevant mix. The main goal was that something was happening. Whether I liked it or not, it didn’t even matter anymore. Stand out at any price. Fake it till you make it. The future could only get better. But it didn’t.
I was breaking up a fight I could neither win nor even wanted to. The blog had filled to bursting point with nonsense and bullshit. Which, of course, I didn’t want to admit, while everyone else was already shaking their heads. It had to be harder, better, faster, stronger. Standing out at any possible price.
Every single year I had some kind of relaunch. Every single year the same promise, packed into a pseudo-epic article, that now everything would be the same as it used to be. That I finally understood what I really wanted. That my website would finally be good again.
But I broke this promise again and again. Because the world around me kept getting louder, shinier, and flashier and I couldn’t stop the merry-go-round I was on until my bad metaphors blew up in my face and the blog broke under the weight of verbal and illustrated crap.
By the end, all I wanted was for it to be over. I was on the verge of deleting the site, the archives, and all the files. My blog had failed. I wanted world domination. But what I got was a glimpse into the absolute void of what could have been a bright future that I had ruined for myself. There was nothing left of all the fun, the expectations, the hope.
One last night, soaked in cheap wine from the convenience store, I rummaged through the old texts. The ones I had published when blogs were just getting big. When life was still a game. When all seemed right with the world. The ones that had long since been lost in digital nirvana and pounded with a cement block of meaninglessness. I read them. And they were good. Those ten-year-old lyrics about love, dreams, and the expectations of an entire generation, they were good. Just good.
These texts were better than most of what I had published in the past few years. All the fast-moving dramas, rumors, and doings of some walking, breathing attention deficits. All the digital constructs of a money-grubbing industry whose little cogs had long since been ravaged by burnouts and depression. All the never-ending news of a world that seemed to spin a little faster with each passing day. They were already obsolete the moment I wrote about them. Wasted words with no mind. Without resonance. Without weight.
I realized that there was only one way to save my blog. And that was to do the exact opposite of what I saw as my task in the past years. To get off this metaphorically still incredibly stupid merry-go-round, which today almost seems to take off with speed, to look at it from a safe distance, and to go my own way, with my own definition of time.
What does that mean again? I want the writing that appears on this blog to be relevant not just in the next ten minutes, but in the next ten years. Someone in the far distant future, when hoverboards really can hover and we fly to some kind of space spring break over the weekend, should read them and think to themselves: this speaks from my soul. It inspires me to try something new. I should show this to those I like and love. Because its contentual quality is timeless.
Of course, no sentence is for eternity. Texts written from the heart are always snapshots. A portrait of the time in which they were written. But a Youth Is Wasted on Youth has a different half-life than a Miley Cyrus Pissed on the Floor Again. Although the second has also somehow its charm. For one or the other.
So what does this mean for this blog now? I want the site to be a motley grab bag of surprises again, with something nice for everyone. No matter if you want to read a review of an anime dripping with fascination or an ode to my new favorite author. Whether it’s the amorous introduction of a sublime singer or the painful memories of a time long gone. Whether you just want to look at some enchanting images or witness an epic story in the shallows of New York, Berlin, or Tokyo.
It’s important to me that the articles that appear on this blog from now on are so great, so beautiful, so worth reading, that they will still be relevant in one, in two, in five, yes, maybe even in ten years, without losing the rough edges for which the site is known. Cowboy Bebop will still have a cult following a decade from now. Haruki Murakami’s books will still be important a decade from now. Texts about heartbreak will still inspire people in a decade to take control of their lives again - or at least to sink a little more beautifully into self-pity.
To make a fresh start, I completely archived my blog, wiped the server, and just started all over again with a fresh design. Bit by bit I will now select old articles, revise, correct, smooth, and re-illustrate them and then publish them again. But of course, I will also regularly add new content and mix it in, so that there is always something exciting to discover. With each dawning day, my blog shall grow a little bit more. Slowly, steadily, and with joy.
The irony of this text lies, of course, in two points. First, it’s basically just another one of those repetitive pseudo-epic texts that praise the resurrection of my blog and swear on high and holy that everything will now go back to the way it used to be. After all, that’s how it always worked so far. Secondly, it denounces the transience of words and is itself one of the texts that, for content reasons, will lose relevance in no time.
I simply want my blog to once again become a small, peaceful garden amid an unmanageable digital jungle full of nonsense. Where everyone has fun, no matter if they want to indulge in the profoundly formulated transience of being or just marvel at a few pretty pictures of even prettier people. Everybody is welcome to look around and take the thoughts and opinions with them that they think are important, right, or simply amusing. In any case, I would be happy if I could continue to accompany you as a reader a little bit on your turbulent life, entertain, and inspire - doing it my way.