What’s your hurry, or, Hold my beer while I save the planet

In my last post, I said I would blog and maybe psychoanalyze the feelings behind my urge to complete this project sooner rather than later.

UPDATE: I see I blogged about tempo and urgency once already! Repeating myself in my old age. Apparently I've been more preoccupied with this than I realized.

1. Urgency. This project is my response to the climate emergency, and nothing says “emergency” like “let’s relax and take our time, maybe see how things go”. Come to think of it, that’s exactly how governments and other institutions are responding to the climate crisis, but obviously this is the problem.

I recognize that this thinking is silly on some levels. Like what, the worst climate impacts are going to be averted because I completed my 252 concerts in time? But relatedly, I’m pretty pessimistic about where we are and where we’re headed—a few more years from now, no one is going to need any reminding that the planet is cooking and maybe cooked, and then what’s the point of me tooling around trying to raise awareness? With every passing month of climate news it becomes less fantastical to think that organized society may be coming apart at the seams seven years from now. Our save-something-worth-living window is now, and narrowing fast.

2. Moving on. I’m coming to be identified with this project, which is likely to become the most high-profile thing I’ve done. And I kind of like that, but I don’t want it to define me publicly for the rest of my life either. 

That said, if I proceed at a slower pace, maybe it doesn’t have to be so self-defining; I’ll have more time to do other things too. 

3. Newsworthiness. I feel that some of the project’s romance lies in its ambition, which derives partly from its scope (every town, 252 concerts) but also from its pace. If it takes too long, maybe it won’t catch people’s imagination. And buzz is not just ego-boosting, and not just something that helps the project build audiences and makes it easier to land invitations for performances, but really the central goal. In some sense, what matters most is how people hear and maybe think about it, whether that’s because they attend a concert, follow the project online, or read/hear about it in the media.

But as the project putters along, I’m not so sure that the heroic timeline is so central to its appeal. People seem to find the project inherently interesting and thought-provoking, and media attention continues to ramp up. And even if a slower pace does result in some loss in intensity of attention, the longer duration of that attention might make up for it.

4. Busyness. I’m happier when I’m too busy with my creative projects than when not busy enough. My key takeaway from the little existentialist literature and philosophy I’ve read is that we construct the fiction that what we’re doing matters, and this fiction is self-actualizing. We pretend something matters, and if we care enough, then it does. A corollary to that is that the busyness and sense of urgency that come with a tighter project timeline sharpens this sense of purpose, the degree to which I feel I can give myself over to the project, that I have a reason to get up in the morning (and to practice).

So…did my self-talk-therapy work? It’s anyway made me fully comfortable with changing the goal to seven years from “just under five years” (I’d originally said I would finish by the end of 2026, which would be 4 yrs and 7 months from the first concert). Beyond seven years…I’ll have to wait and see how I feel, and also see if my marriage can tolerate a 3-per-month average as we learn from experience how to do this more smoothly and efficiently.