More people and less things for them to do—that’s the world we live in now. Perhaps Vonnegut was right when he said our purpose on this planet was to fart around. Seems there’s more people farting around than usual. This isn’t a bad thing. Farting around is okay, fun in most instances, but making a living out of farting around is difficult.
Used to be we made things. Skyscrapers, rockets, cars, houses, gadgets, widgets, food, physical goods. We still make and sell all those things, but there’s a whole other sphere of intangible products that we make and sell. Nowadays, there’s more people selling things that don’t physically exist, and most people want to sell those kinds of things instead of making the physical things, or farting around. We’ve come to place where we have to ask ourselves: do I want to sell something that is tangible, real—a physical thing—or do I want to sell an idea or package of ideas or basket of digits and rates and services. We’re also at a point in history where these two things—the tangible and intangible products—are merging. For example, most people want music. We don’t need to go out a buy a physical album anymore; we can download it, but we need to download it to something. It’s that something that is the physical object we have to go out and buy. It’s the song we can’t touch, but we can feel it, and if we try hard enough, we might be able to feel the time and energy and soul the artist put into making that song.
Making. That’s what it’s about. What is it you want to make? And not the amount of money you want to make. That too is intangible. (Does anyone have all their money physically with them? I suppose some do, but for most of us, our money is a series of digits on a website.) What this current upside down equation of more people and more farting around and less doing is about what there is to make. There’s still a hell of a lot of things to make. We just have to decide what it is we want to make.