That quote found me this morning, floating above an image of faceless figures with television sets for heads, each screen showing the same hypnotic spiral. The masses, the market, the algorithm. The crowd you’re supposed to court if you want to make it.
I stared at it for a long time. Then I laughed.
It took me nearly seventy-four years to accept something I should have understood decades ago: whatever gold I can pan from all these years on the planet is mine to enjoy. Not to market. Not to monetize. Not to package for strangers who might scroll past it anyway.
The treadmill of trying to become famous, accepted, appreciated, celebrated, treasured—it was a giant illusion. A con I ran on myself for half a century.
Here’s what actually happened when I let that go: peace. Deep and wide and worth far more than any physical gold.
Over the last years I have lost the once automatic urge to photograph something beautiful. I just stand there and soak it in. The light through winter trees. The way snow sits on a fence post. My retriever’s face when he’s dreaming. These moments used to trigger an immediate response—capture it, share it, show someone. Now I just let them wash over me, then wash away. They’re mine. They were always supposed to be mine.
The networking stopped. The tooting of my own horn. The endless, exhausting effort to get people to notice, to read, to care. I’d rather just do more work.
And lately that work is shifting. My friend KT suggested this some months ago. After all the work focused on writing the first book of my memoir trilogy, I find myself being pulled back to music. My home recording studio sits waiting—I’ve been rearranging it, reconfiguring the gear, running cables, testing sounds. The prospect of spending this year in there playing and experimenting with sounds and words fills me with something I’d almost forgotten: creativity without expectation.
That’s the key phrase: without expectation.
When I was young, every creative act carried a silent rider—and then maybe someone will see it and recognize me and my life will finally begin. The work was always a ticket to somewhere else. A means to an end that kept receding.
Now the work is just the work. The song is just the song. The words are just the words. If no one ever hears them, they still existed. They still mattered. They were still made.
Those TV-headed figures in the image? They’re waiting to be programmed. Waiting to be told what to want, what to like, what to consume. The spiral on their screens is the algorithm, pulling attention toward whatever serves the machine.
I don’t want to appeal to that. I never did. I just thought I was supposed to.
There’s an irony here I’m not blind to—publishing a piece about not needing an audience on a platform designed to build one. But sharing and needing are different things. I can put this out there because it’s true, not because I’m hoping for something back. If it resonates with someone, fine. If it doesn’t, also fine. The writing did its work the moment I finished it. Hitting publish is just opening a window, not begging someone to look inside.
So here I am. Seventy-three. A home studio. A patient wife. Two dogs. Vermont winter pressing against the windows. And for the first time in my life, the complete freedom to make things for no reason at all except that making them feels right.
That’s the harvest. That’s the real, solid gold.
It was here all along.