The Cult of First

Someone emailed me—actual effort, actual send button—to inform me that the Cee-Lo video I’d posted, No One’s Gonna Love You, was already a week or two old. That other people had written about it first. The implication being that I had done something wrong.

I’m genuinely baffled by this. The video is extraordinary. I found it, it hit me, I shared it. That’s the whole transaction. Since when does a timestamp determine whether something deserves your attention? Not everyone has an RSS reader firing every six minutes. Not everyone wants one. Some of us find things on our own schedule and feel something about them instead of processing them on a conveyor belt sorted by freshness.

There’s a specific kind of person who treats novelty as the primary virtue—who measures the worth of a discovery by how early they arrived at it. It’s an exhausting way to engage with culture. You end up skimming everything and sitting with nothing, just to be the one who got there first. First to what, exactly? To have briefly noticed something before moving on?

Good work circulates on its own schedule. I’ll share things when I find them worth sharing, regardless of whether the timestamp passes muster. If that offends the chronology police, they can take it up with their greasy cheeseburger.