HELLO friends this is Jake J. Thomas bringing you another episode of the Dialogic podcast.
I hope you all are well. I wanted to take some time today to discuss the important of creating content during this uncertain time. More than just the importance of creating content I want to think about the best kinds of content to create during this time. This is especially for anyone who has children, works with children and cares about children. One thing that I’ve noticed is that pressure tends to exacerbate whatever problems already exist. This situation is similar to a stress test that a financial institution would use. The stress is identifying where the weaknesses are. If a part of the system doesn’t seem adequate to withstand a moderate amount of stress it puts into question the viability of that part of the project. The failure to endure the stress opens up the space of removal.

I think now is the time to double down on the kind of content I was already creating; content that is actively imagining sustainability. I don’t think that now is the right time to judge anything or to look for silver linings. I want to share my experience of concern for people’s health and for the economic consequences of what we are doing, and this heightened concern motivates me to work on inventing solutions to the bigger problems we face.

We are identifying problems because of our inability to achieve certain goals. The symptom is dysfunction, the inability to reach a goal, which creates an emotional response. How do we respond to the feelings we have when our old ways of proceeding no longer work? Do we jump back into action? Do we find new ways to achieve our goals?

This is certainly a very stressful test. One thing that has worked for me is to challenge myself. Giving myself some kind of tangible goal that I can use my will alone to achieve gives me a sense of control. I also have an intense energy inside of me because I am a passionate and caring person and if I don’t find a way to channel that energy then I have no way of controlling it. The best way I have found to focus that energy is through hiking long distances.

If you are going to waste six hours looking at your phone, you could have spent six hours doing pushups, hiking, working on some physical fitness goal. Let’s not sell ourselves short. The feeling that I have if I spend six hours hiking is so vastly superior to the way I would feel if I sat around watching Netflix looking at Twitter that it is a no-brainer. The thing is, we have these programmed habits that have to do with economic schedules. We have monthly, quarterly and annual cycles that have deadlines that need to be met. We are drawing lines through the history of our times with the choices that we make, and sustainability is the most important thing to be thinking about and working on during this time and for the foreseeable future. While we are reimagining how the economy will function, we should also be preparing for other big concerns and that is what we should communicate in our work. I believe that art and marketing do and will merge at their highest level to work as a kind of attraction/ conversion cultural machine transforming people into agents to work on the task of imagining and sustainability and executing our plans sustainably.

So many things are going to change and probably one of the first things we will want to do is to figure out what we can have in terms of values and principles that will not change when the circumstances change. Transparency in communication and accounting, nonviolent communication, whatever it is that we can agree on as a fundamental unchanging character of our community will help us to endure all of the pivots that we will have to make when our circumstances radically change. A principle-based set of ideas will give us some structure that will help to navigate the chaos

We certainly need some better content to be created. When I look for content, I am overwhelmed with the impression that there is not enough good content being created. People are not doing enough. The thing is, it is challenging to figure out how to create content that is attuned to the feeling of our times. First of all, we need to address what people are going through and help them to make the most of the new limitations imposed on our ways of life.

One of the things I have been impressed with for hitting all of the marks is vegetarian bloggers. I have found some amazing people who are creating recipes and are promoting plant-based food options in a way that aligns with a more sustainable lifestyle and addresses what people need right now, which is good healthy food, joy, and pleasure. The politics of animosity and adversity are so much less interesting to me than the inventiveness of these vegetarian bloggers. So, that is one direction that I want to follow. That is a path that I plan to forge here in my own home studio with the amazing ingredients of our awesome agricultural region.