Abandoning Pop Culture.

Published in

Croquet

4 min readJan 9, 2020

If you want to reinvent pop culture, you must first abandon it. It’s easier that way. There’s already too much happening in pop culture, but in the quietness away from it, there are undiscovered worlds within your brilliant ideas. Watch them.

We can just as easily choose to be fascinated by important ideas, instead of unimportant ones. We use the same effort to work on both groups of ideas. Why do most of us choose to be fascinated by unimportant ideas, when all the knowledge and genius ideas in the history of humanity are freely available at our fingertips, anytime, anywhere, on any device?

There is generally an inverse correlation between how popular something is, and its value to civilization. Popular technology, gadgets, music, food, news, movies and shows, add little value to improving ourselves, or our species in any meaningful way. They are popular because they appease to the negative habits of humans, the worst of which, is the false feeling that we must think incrementally and adhere to the norms, so that we can be comfortable in the current culture of pop, and be happy that everyone else is like us.

This is the most uninteresting way to spend one’s life. Far more interesting is it to be in solitude, thinking about one’s thoughts, understanding them, developing them, and caring for them. It is the best way to augment one’s intelligence. And when we do choose to be around others, we must make our choices carefully, and insist on gathering with the most intelligent minds on the planet, and thinking of ways to get there (hint: email!).

Pop culture is about innovation, and innovation is not as noble a goal as it seems. Invention, on the other hand, shifts the course of humanity for centuries to come. We must look at pop culture as a ship that’s moving in the wrong direction. If we are able to shift the ship’s direction, we will be able to change pop culture, and shed light on remarkable inventions, instead of mediocre innovations.

Only then will pop culture be something worthy of admiration. Great art, great social systems, great music, great schools, great hospitals, great food, and great technology companies need to become part of pop culture, and we have within our knowledge all the tools necessary to bring these important ideas into the mainstream.

When you find an important idea, and learn about its history, you can bring it into pop culture, without much effort, and you can change the very meaning of pop culture. In the same way you can become popular with innovation, you can become popular with invention. Just think of da Vinci, Einstein and many others, who are as popular today as they ever were, and will remain popular for a long time.

The technology industry is filled with paradigm-shifting thinkers, people like Alan Kay and David P. Reed, and companies like Croquet, where remarkably intelligent and good human beings are as ambitious for humanity as you are. Talk to them.

We don’t have much time in our lives. If you’re middle-aged, you only have a few decades left to live, probably four decades –– five or six –– if you’re lucky. There must be an urgency to move quickly between ideas until you land on something wonderful. There are plenty of urgent issues in every industry. We are far, far away from having good solutions for anything. Even the Earth itself is on fire, screaming for help.

Be ambitious for legacy and wealth. There is nothing wrong with that. But be ambitious for a legacy that serves future generations, and be ambitious for wealth that you will use in the most helpful ways possible.

All we have to do is read a little, so that we can understand a little more, and learn that things aren’t as great as we may want to think they are, and neither are we. Then we can realize that very few people are really doing important work for the future of humanity, and that you can be one of them.

Pop culture is everywhere you go, it is more plentiful than you know, and it will try to lure you in every second of every day. It leaves millions of imprints on your mind. If you want to serve humanity, abandon pop culture as much as you can, one thought and one action at a time, and then a magical energy will find you and propel you into galactic dreams you never thought possible.