A crypto Patreon I lurk in cancelled its five year running weekly livestream last night.
The creator said family stuff, then slipped in a line about "a dip in crypto interest lately." The comments were more interesting than the post.
Then I remembered Jaclyn Hill complaining her TikTok was being suppressed after a break, and the comments saying you don't live in the same reality as us, we can't afford what you're showing. Then my brother mentioned a comedian saying TikTok told him stand-up was getting quietly buried because it wasn't "doing well".
Then Iran. Then the energy crisis. The continuing UK cost of living numbers. Then AI eating the oxygen in every feed I scroll past.
None of these are the same story? Reasonable to think that. But they're all the same story. The attention economy is shifting again.
I've been pattern spotting this stuff in my head for years. Sitting on the sofa spotting the pattern saying "oh, that's interesting. That must mean xyz is happening and then immediately forgetting it. Picking up the patterns when someone complains about their social media feed and then forgetting what I said or thought. The cost of keeping it all up there, uncaptured, is that I can never actually see what I'm seeing. I just feel it.
So I'm building a tiny Supabase table for quick observations, category, evidence type, confidence, underlying causes and status, so when I forget it, I can persistently refer to it. Think of it as my external long term observations memory.
I added seven entries in it already, from one conversation. And guess what? I've already forgotten what the observations are, but at least they're captured and queryable. It's going to sit next to my newly formed decisions log (because who doesn't forget why they made a decision) in my little collection of instruments for noticing.
I don't know what shape it takes yet. It might become a series. It might stay private and just quietly make me stop forgetting. It might turn into something Rainforest Studio eats. Who knows.
But the instinct is the same one I keep coming back to. Make the implicit explicit. Get the pattern out of your head and onto a surface you can look at. Trust that future you will thank present you for bothering.
Having said that, it's very likely that I'll wake up tomorrow morning and have completely forgotten the table exists 🙃.