What is your Content Production to Consumption Ratio (CP2CR) ?
Players win, spectators always loose!
At twenty five , life seems like an ocean. By the time one reaches forty five — most of us start seeing the other end of the lake. It’s a numbing feeling — but makes you realise that reading five newspapers on a sunday, binging of sitcoms, watching cricket matches doesn’t make much sense anymore. The shore is always mocking at you.
After crossing forty — a day on Earth feels like a day on Gargantuan. Time seems to be rushing at a mach 7 speed. I was forty yesterday and am forty five today.
Years back I used to watch one day cricket matches — from 9 am till the end of the match in the evening. Luckily Indian cricket was hit by a series of corruption charges and I lost touch / faith in cricket.
Used to read three newspapers daily ; murder Sundays lying in a pile of five/six newspapers. Gradually, I realised that (a) each newspaper house had a political agenda/inclination (b) journalists/opinion makers who wrote in these newspapers were just furthering the newspaper’s agendas (c) the last thing political parties want is progress of a nation. Politics is a job/a business - plain and simple. Now I limit myself to economic newspapers only — and I read them for facts not anyone’s commentaries.
Used to watch cable TV. Then realized that the never ending entertainment was like looking at your image when standing between two parallel mirrors...endless amount of trivial content - from Friends to Big Bang Theory to Breaking News. Jennifor Aniston was making money off me in 1999 and is making money off my son now.
Now I usually limit myself to movies — 90 minutes, give or take. Off and on, I drown in dopamine inducing , time consuming black holes like “ Breaking Bad”. But that’s a known sin :-).
As mortality has crept over, I have drawn up a personal metric — the Content Production to Consumption Ratio (CP2CR). A healthy ratio is anywhere above one.
Content Generation can be any internet related activity... posting on Instagram , uploading videos , writing on LinkedIn or Medium…anything. (Even posting doodles is acceptable!)
This metric helps me monitor my consumption binges. Binging on Instagram is OK — if I am able to generate commensurate output. Anytime the denominator increases - there needs to be a consequent increase in the numerator too. I can binge on Medium articles as long as I am able to write something based on what I have read.
Nowadays it’s pretty easy to “generate and share content”. In one of my articles, I discuss this.
As a spectator (consumer) — I’ll always loose. It’s only when I participate- by shooting a photograph (or video) rather than watching ; by writing instead of reading — that I make the ratio more than one. By playing cricket rather than just watching cricket.
Generating content, even posting a doodle you drew at the edge of a newspaper, cracks open a crevice from where — maybe someday - an elephant can enter.
At times I judge my content to be crap but heck as per the 1–9–90 rule only 1% of the internet is uploading anything.
As long as I am part of the elite 1% — I rock 👊
