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I had an old man moment last night. I was thinking about how working to find bands was fun. Having to scour liner notes. Having to know what websites to look at to see recs. Even with the piracy angle it was fun and still kinda "work" in a sense, and then only a small group on one or two message boards were talking about the band for a couple months. Streaming is awesome, but I do miss that chase and rush. The hunt. The vindication.
At some point, every creator hits a wall – it’s not burnout exactly. It’s misalignment. You find yourself fluent in a language you no longer believe in, you know how to hack the algorithm, when to post, what to say, how to craft the dopamine-hooked headline. You’ve learned to manufacture the kind of work that gets rewarded, but somewhere in the process you forget why you started making it at all.
The economy of attention doesn’t ask what you think; it asks how fast you can say it, how loud, and how often. And if you play long enough, you stop making anything for the people you care about and you start making it for the feed. The result is a race to the bottom with a leaderboard, a machine that needs to be fed even if it’s chewing up your integrity.
Preach.
The other byproduct of having been in that “game,” is you start seeing it everywhere. Numbers will go up, numbers will go down. Authenticity is the only thing that will last.
When things get you down Should you look back Don't turn your head around And take things one day at a time Don't plan ahead For mountains you have yet to climb
As a follow up to my Raycast post, I wanted to mention that the URL scheme that opens and pre-populates ChatGPT on the Mac, also works on iOS. I use this in Drafts to send the post directly to the ChatGPT app:
https://chat.openai.com/?q=[[draft]]
My most played last week. Fun pop punk filled mid-April week right there.
I’ve written quite a bit about Raycast in the past. However, I don’t know if I’ve written very much about how I use it, or why I find it so useful. One of my favorite features is basic fallbacks and quicklinks. Fallbacks are what display after you’ve typed a few words and Raycast doesn’t find what you’re looking for (after searching for apps, etc.). This is how I use the app to search everywhere else. Here’s my current setup:
The first fallback is just a basic Google search. This is the default way I search Google. And since I use xSearch in Safari this becomes a super powerful way to search a bunch of different websites with ease. I can type “ch blink-182” and it’ll search Chorus automatically for me. Or “az Mark Hoppus book” to search Amazon. Or any of the websites I have setup in xSearch:
I also have a fallback to directly run the search in Google Chrome instead of my default browser, Safari. There’s also a file fallback so if I am looking for a specific file and I didn’t launch the file searcher with a keyboard shortcut I have quick access to it. There’s some other handy fallbacks as well, like the dictionary, translator, and bookmark search. But the other fallback I’ve found myself using quite a bit, and one of the other awesome features of Raycast, is the quicklink feature. Quickinks let you open files, URLs, or paths instantly. I have one set to “drop” to open my Dropbox folder. I have “app” to quickly open the Applications folder. And quite a few others:
The Ask ChatGPT one is a recent addition. Raycast has basic AI features built into the app and their pro features let you expand to other models. For basic questions using the built in features is nice. Hit Command-Space and type a quick question, hit Tab, and get a basic AI reply. Simple. I have their AI chat “window” mapped to Option-Command-Space for longer chats or when I want to type a longer prompt. I don’t pay for the pro version of Raycast’s AI feature set for a few reasons. First, because during my testing I was getting worse, and slower, responses using the same models on their default apps or websites. Second, I like having my chat history with me on mobile and Raycast doesn’t have a mobile app. So, instead, I use ChatGPT’s service. They have a nice and capable Mac App. It even has a built-in keyboard shortcut feature where you can pop open a little window to ask it questions. However, I don’t really want to run the ChatGPT app all the time. It’s, currently, not an app I have in my Dock or running throughout the day. Raycast’s basic AI handles those queries for me. But there are often times when I do want to send a question directly to ChatGPT. If I want to quickly launch the app I can use my hyperkey for it (which Raycast now also supports), but the quicklink fallback lets me just start typing when I have a question and then decide where I want to send it (Google, quick AI, or directly to ChatGPT). And you can map quicklinks to keyboard shortcuts themselves. So, if I use Option-Space I get my custom ChatGPT quicklink query:
Type the question, hit enter, and it gets automatically populated in the ChatGPT desktop app. The mechanics of this are simple:
This just fits how my brain works. I like to have one app as the central “control” for doing a whole bunch of things on my computer. This then just becomes muscle memory for me to do things quickly with the keyboard. From quick file searches, to adding events to my calendar, to adding a quick note in Drafts, to adding a reminder to pre-heat the oven for dinner, to running more complicated searches, all the way to using various AI tools. At this point Raycast has also become my emoji picker, clipboard manager, TextExpander, quick gif search, and color picker.
I’ve liked other launchers in the past. Alfred was my favorite for a long time. But I haven’t loved one to the degree that Raycast has cemented itself into my every day workflow like this. I think it is now to the point where sitting down at a computer without it would feel broken. Rarified air.
I hadn’t seen this before. Well articulated struggle with problematic art and growing up. I once commented that it’s a painful rite of passage into adulthood for your childhood faves to break your heart.
It's just another manic Monday (Ooh-oh) Wish it were Sunday (Ooh-oh) 'Cause that's my fun day (Ooh-oh) My I-don't-have-to-run day (Ooh) It's just another manic Monday
It’s hard to focus. It’s hard to focus on the things in front of me, that I need to do. It’s hard to focus on the news, because it’s not just one thing, it’s a hundred things, news like fire ants, like you stepped on their mound and here they are, swarming, and each ant feels meaningless in the context of all these angry fucking ants. Looking at my phone or computer or any connected device feels like tonguing a broken tooth–an electric jolt of pain but one that feels paradoxically satisfying, like if I poke the bad tooth, maybe I’m fixing it, maybe poking it makes it fall out and the pain will go away. Which I know is fucking stupid so then I stop doing it — stop looking at the phone, stop poking the tooth. But there’s a little rat scratching in the back of my head and it makes me wonder, what are you missing, what aren’t you seeing, remain vigilant, constant vigilance, there’s a great wave coming, a wall of fire, a meteor, a swarm of wasps, better look, better click, and then I look, and am rewarded. By some definition of that word, “rewarded.” My anxiety is rewarded because things are bad, and things are happening constantly.
Great essay. That very feeling is what I’m trying to avoid these days. Trying to fill the space with things that fulfill me and not continually stick my hand (and brain) directly into the hornet’s nest.
I took these screenshots because, for me, it was one of those moments where I had to pinch myself just a bit. If you had told the teenage me that any of this would happen, I wouldn’t have believed you. Reminiscing on them today made me think back about when Twitter was actually fun. Mark joking around, everyone mostly just feeling free to be weird and share funny things.
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