Here's a cool little trick. If you take this simple one-question quiz, I can guess your age.
Well, I can't really tell you your age, but I'd be willing to bet that whatever decade you picked, is more than likely to be the time that you were in your late teens / early 20s. And it's not just me, there's actually a lot of surveys and research that supports this finding.
Come to think about it, it sort of makes sense. You build your tastes for music, when it starts to resonate with your thinking and take a deeper meaning beyond the words and the melody. In that sense, though fifty years apart, my niece's craze for Taylor Swift is roughly the same as my mother's love for Kishore Kumar songs (lip synced by Rajesh Khanna, of course!). Not just music though, one can tell the age of a tennis fan by which of the Big 3 tennis superstars they support.
There’s some science to back this up. You start to become more aware of things around you, and your preferences start to firm up. As you grow older, the longing for more innocent times grows, and your affinity for your “first love” gets stronger. This is common across centuries, cultures and generations. So the question though is not why we prefer things from years gone by, but how does one stay relevant through years. At some point in all this though, the lenses with which you see the world change. Rajesh Khanna's star faded faster than you can imagine. JK Rowling is now persona non grata, and I'm told even Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi said and did things in their lives that would be frowned upon.
The point I guess is more that the world moves on. Like if something made you successful all those years ago, there’s no guaranteeing that that would still make you succeed now. If I were a betting man, I’d say the odds on Taylor Swift becoming irrelevant to the larger scheme of things over the next 10 years is quite high.
So, all things considered, how does one remain relevant over a long period of time?
Three months from now, this blog will complete 20 years.
It started out as a Blogspot page, then had a bit of Medium avatar, and then has been an independent Substack page. If this post is published - that is never guaranteed the way I write - this would be post number five hundred forty two over the three sites.
Fortunately for me, when I moved to Substack, I was able to move all my old posts from the other two pages, so I was able to just take a peek at all my writings. Firstly, I was struck by how much my writing has changed. In 2004, it was mostly frivolous stuff. It was a version of me that thought I was funny. Remember, this was pre-Facebook/Twitter/WhatsApp, when the only way to get a reaction was to write a blog and so many of my friends had a blog of their own. Like most things about me, my writing has followed a basic Dunning Krueger pattern.
I started out writing posts on whatever came to mind. I had answers for everything. I wrote about starting a political party that would be funded through a stock market listing (I could argue Donald Trump stole my idea). I copy-pasted entire articles from the internet. I wrote blog posts which were basically just tweets before Twitter was invented. I wrote about Parenting 101 when I had been a parent for like 1 year.
I have moved on. I looked at a list of my favorite things, and realized that about half of them really don’t matter to me any more. I’ve dealt with more joy and more pain in the 20 years past, than in the 25 years before that. My writing has moved on too. I don’t write for reactions anymore. I take a lot longer to write, and my posts tend to go through a metamorphosis of their own from thought to screen. Someone told me that my writing got a lot longer and preachy over the years, and I think that is accurate for not just my writing, but also me as a person. At times I think I sound like the old wannabe has-been, who’s very clear about all the things that are wrong with the world. If only they listened to him more often, things would be so much better.
But more importantly, the world has moved on. People don’t need to read a blog to be exposed to BS, when there is LinkedIn. Most who followed my writings then, don’t any more. Many are no more, and I’ve lost touch with almost everyone from my social circle then. Some who follow this blog, weren’t born then. The most hated person in the world in 2004, was probably George W. Bush, and now he’s a much loved statesman. And let’s not even go into the character arc of the individual who was the chief minister of a certain province in Western India those days.
So the bigger question is how does this blog stay relevant if it were to last 20 more years? Does this change into something more “social media friendly”? Does it need to become a podcast with TikTok/Instagram worthy bites? Or should it remain the same - a personal message in a bottle containing random musings about things that I think I think?
Unlike 20 years ago, I don’t have an answer. But if the past 20 years have taught me something, having an answer is not really the point of the exercise. The joy is in getting to the answer.
Here’s to 20 more!!!