(The sound of a creaky chair adjusting, the faint hum of a cheap amplifier. A deep, weary sigh that seems to carry the weight of the last five years.)

Okay. Okay, look. You’re here. I see you. And that’s… that’s something. I mean it, thank you. For showing up, for plugging in, for still having the bandwidth to listen to a voice in the digital static. It’s a goddamn miracle, honestly. A testament to the human spirit, or maybe just our collective, stubborn refusal to fully log off.

I gotta say, I appreciate it. I do. The fact that you’re all here, in whatever this is—my digital office, my cerebral panic room—means a lot. It really does.

But. And there’s always a ‘but,’ right? That’s the contract. You click the link, you get the ‘but.’

If you came here, in this… what is it, 2026? Yeah, 2026. If you came here, to this little corner of the ever-expanding, algorithmically-sorted nightmare, expecting a soothing balm… if you were hoping for a gentle, whispered, “Hey, we made it, things are calming down now, let’s all just breathe and talk about vintage tube screamers and the trauma of middle school…”

You are profoundly, hilariously mistaken.

Calm? A transition? What, like a smooth handoff? A gentle fade into a sane and manageable future? Who sold you that bill of goods? Was it a pod? A drip? A sponsored post beamed directly into your cortex?

Let me look at the global scoreboard for, oh, the last Tuesday alone. Let me just… yeah. Right. So no. The ‘transition’ to the New Yeat isn’t calm. The ‘transition’ is the part in the disaster movie where the scientist points at four different screens, all flashing different apocalyptic symbols, and just starts laughing until he cries.

The ‘transition’ is us, all of us, collectively holding a live wire, while trying to read the poorly-translated instructions on how to maybe not get electrocuted. In five different languages. While it rains something that is definitely not water.

So. You’re here. Great. Wonderful. Buckle the hell up. Or don’t. It probably won’t matter. Let’s talk.

Given the state of the world, you have to question what anything is worth now.

(A long, slow sip of coffee, audible. A pause that hangs in the air like a held note before a breakdown.)

That’s the question, isn’t it? The big one. The one that wakes you up at 3:17 AM, when the glow from some server farm across town makes your ceiling look sick. Is any of it worth it? The painting, the song, the… the paragraph. The carefully chosen word in a world screaming in all-caps emojis and geopolitical threat matrices.

You have a book. I get it. I feel that. You nurtured this thing, this collection of thoughts and scenes and characters that felt vital, urgent, maybe even beautiful. You gave it a spine. A cover. You made it a physical object in a world that increasingly feels like a vapor. And now… now you have to promote it? You have to go on the digital street corner with a megaphone made of tweets and reels and say “Hey! Over here! I have made a meaningful arrangement of metaphors about the human condition while the actual human condition appears to be actively sprinting off a cliff!”

It feels obscene. It feels like arranging deck chairs. It feels like… what’s the point?

And I’m here to tell you: that feeling is the goddamn point.

Listen. The craziness—the global, vibrating, non-stop craziness—that’s the weather now. That’s the air pressure. We’re not waiting for it to clear. This is the ecosystem. And in any ecosystem, even a hostile one, life finds a way to… not just persist, but to declare itself. A flower in a crack in the parking lot isn’t an insult to the asphalt; it’s a rebuttal. It’s a quiet, stubborn, “And yet.”

Your book is that. Your art is that.

Promoting it now isn’t vanity. It’s not a naive distraction. It’s an act of resistance. It’s you saying, “The narrative is not solely owned by the chaos. I have a narrative, too.” It’s a stake in the ground that says human beings are still meaning-making creatures, even when the meaning is hard to find. Especially when it’s hard to find.

Think of it this way: in the middle of a blaring air-raid siren of information, of panic, of performative outrage… your book is a tuning fork. It hums at a specific frequency. The people who need that frequency, who are dying for that frequency, they might not hear it over the noise unless you strike it.

Yeah, it feels awkward. “Buy my book while the world burns!” But that’s a false frame. The world is always, in some way, burning. And it was always, in some way, beautiful. The job of the artist isn’t to fix the fire. It’s to report back from it. To document the shadows it casts, the heat on the skin, the strange things people save as they run.

So promote the book. Not because it’s the most important thing in the world, but because it is a human thing in a world actively trying to dehumanize us. It’s a concentrated dose of a singular consciousness. That matters. Now more than ever.

Otherwise, the craziness wins. It just becomes noise. And we become an audience, numb and scrolling.

So yeah. Do the weird podcast interviews. Post the excerpt that makes you feel vulnerable. Feel like a fraud doing it. We all do. But do it. Strike the tuning fork.

Let it hum. Someone out there is listening for it. If you need further reasoning, this video should help

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Alright, look. Let’s be honest about January. You know what January is? It’s the hangover. It’s the cold, grey, regret-filled morning after the gluttonous, twinkle-light bender that was November and December. And what do we do in this state? We let some marketing ghoul in a vest tell us we need to become a NEW PERSON. Immediately. While it’s dark at 4:30 PM and your body is 30% cheese and cheap champagne. It’s insanity.

They sell you this idea of transformation alongside discount gym memberships and plastic storage bins. “New Year, New You!” It’s a bumper sticker. It’s a fad. It has the same energy as those infomercials where someone’s struggling with a clogged sink, crying, and then the product arrives and their entire family is smiling. Life isn’t a before-and-after photo. Life is the weird, lumpy, confusing stuff in the middle. January isn’t for launching a new you; it’s for figuring out who the hell the old you even is after that holiday tornado.

You wanna make a resolution? Fine. Resolve to sit with your own thoughts for five minutes without picking up your phone. Resolve to notice that the quiet in January isn’t emptiness, it’s space. It’s the universe giving you a crappy, barren stage to just… pace on. To mutter to yourself. To look at the psychological receipts from the past year and go, “Yikes. I paid that much in emotional currency for that? What was I thinking?” That’s the work. Not kale. Not a 5 AM run. Introspection. The kind that doesn’t sell memberships.

Because think about it. Nothing in nature reboots in January. Nothing. The trees aren’t straining to burst into bloom. The ground isn’t forcing up shoots. It’s dormant. It’s resting. It’s gathering whatever the hell it needs underground, in the dark, where no one can see it. That’s us! Or that should be us. We’re supposed to be in our emotional root cellars, looking at our psychic potatoes, seeing what’s still good and what’s grown weird eyes.

Then, spring comes. Spring doesn’t ask permission. The sun comes back, the ground softens, and things just… begin. There’s no motivational poster. The “new you” – the real, adjusted, slightly wiser version – that should poke its head out then. When there’s actual light. When you can go outside without wearing a sleeping bag. Your growth should be organic, not a forced, guilt-based pivot bought on sale. Let January be for the quiet, inner mess. Let the change come when it’s ready, like a weird, stubborn crocus in March. It’ll be more real. I promise. And you won’t have to sell your soul to a fitness app.

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Anyway, that’s probably me for the week. I’ve a few creative projects on the go. My book Digital marketing for Creatives is available on Amazon here. I blog weekly on digital marketing for creatives, and I’d be really happy if you popped across to my blog here. Plus, if you want to receive notifications for this post, you can subscribe below.