No, I'm not writing for myself

This week I’ve had a wobble. I’m not sure if there’s any point entering this contest. It’s very hard and overwhelming and I’m not even sure I’m capable of making something finished, let alone decent.

There are so many reasons to think that I have no chance of winning:

• It’s probably not the strongest storytelling

• I have no experience in film making

• I’m competing against experienced film makers and teams with budgets

• I feel like I need to be an expert in so many things at the same time - image generation, video generation, sound, music, editing…

The typical answer people give to this kind of complaint is, “Do it for yourself. Don’t worry about what other people think.”

Can I do that? Is this the kind of thing I want to do for myself?

These are some things I do for myself:

• Take long baths

• Take long walks

• Swim in the sea

• Read novels

• Drink half a bottle of wine on a Friday night

• Exercise

• Write in my journal

• Eat chocolate

• Brush my teeth

Is writing this book/movie/trailer rewarding like those things? Not really. It’s hard and it’s thankless and I just don’t seem able to do justice to the concept.

So why should I carry on?

Why am I doing it?

What is it about this story that has kept me coming back to it for the past 15 years or more?

Do I dare say that it’s for other people?

Well, let’s think. What have I had written on my walls and in my manifestation journals all this time?

Share a vision of a positive future with J2K.

Share. That’s right.

Not write in a private journal and leave it on a shelf forever.

Write for the world. Write for my children. Write for other people’s children.

So that people can see a future where we could build a rocket and go to another planet.

So yeah. I’m writing this for you.

Yes, you, who spends half your life doomscrolling. Who listens to bad news all day and thinks the world is in terrible shape. Who thinks that people are evil and that if the billionaires don’t kill us with their greed, the robots will take our jobs and leave us destitute, or the Earth will boil us because we keep filling up the atmosphere with CO2, or we’ll just kill each other because we’re so offended by something that someone said on Twitter.

You, who can’t imagine a future that doesn’t contain an apocalypse because that’s what most sci-fi looks like these days. Who watches Avatar and thinks that if we go to another planet, it’s only to pillage the resources and kill the locals.

That humans are so fundamentally evil that we deserve oblivion.

I’m so sick of this narrative.

I know you don’t care, and that my entry isn’t going to win, and that in the end, the only things that will come from it are that I learn new skills and enjoy the creative process (things I do for me, I guess).

But in my heart of hearts, this isn’t for me.

It’s for humanity.

Because as far as we know, there is nothing like us in the whole universe. We are the only thing that can even make chocolate and wine. The only thing that can build rockets. The only thing that can make movies about how evil we are.

We are a tiny beacon of awareness in a vast empty universe (as far as we know).

We owe ourselves some love.

To believe that we can do great things.

That if there are billionaires, it’s because they are generating wealth from nothing by building incredible things and they should be celebrated for advancing us all, not resented.

That if there are robots that are smarter than us, it’s because we created them! And they can help us go even further, if we can harness their intelligence to complement our own.

That we’re only just beginning to understand our abilities and potential.

We shouldn’t waste time hating ourselves.

Like adolescents, we need to grow out of our existential angst.

Yes, we are flawed and dangerous and volatile.

But we are also joyful and loving and kind and we have built a global civilisation unparalleled by anything anywhere that we know of.

And that could be just the beginning.

We could build a rocket and go to Mars.

Or to Kyron.

That’s a future I want to imagine.

Not just for me.

For all of us.

So, I will carry on. Do the best I can. Enter the competition with whatever I have come August 15.

And keep beating this ever-loving drum called optimism.