259. WHY IS THERE SOMETHING RATHER THAN NOTHING? - My Social Media Avoidance Project
I gave myself a creative challenge at the start of this year. Write, record and release a new song every month of 2025. I called it my Social Media Avoidance Project. A way of better occupying my mind and scrolling fingers than by endlessly staring at my phone.
The other rule was that the songs had to be written and recorded using only my Arturia Keylab synthesiser and the drums on Logic Pro. Not using real instruments I’ve spent a lifetime playing, like my trusty bass guitar.
Last week I completed the challenge. My final song for December.
Not only that, but I compiled the whole project into an album, complete with a bonus track. A cover version of a song I released back in 1999 with my old punk band, Academy Morticians. The original version was all jangly guitars and youthful energy. The cover is a brooding synth version full of adult despair.
What has any of this got to do with philosophy? Many things. Firstly the question “why is there something rather than nothing?” When it comes to creative acts the answer is usually simple: because someone chose to make it. And yet many feel intimidated or alienated from the possibility that they too could make some art. Art, of any kind, is often seen as something produced only by special, talented people. But in my experience the main distinction between the artist and the non-artist is simply the artist’s decision to have a go. Make something. See what happens. Make mistakes, and not be afraid.
I didn’t release my song each month because it was perfect. I released it because there was no more time left in the month. And I was inspired to write each month not because inspiration grabbed me, but because, knowing I had a creative deadline to meet, I engaged with the world differently, seeking out inspiration instead of waiting for it to seek me.
My musical background is punk. Do it yourself music. Not waiting around for the permission of record labels or venue owners to make music, just making it, however best you can. No more gatekeepers putting up the obstacles of ability and talent. Just grab an instrument or a microphone and make some noise. I have also been involved in improvised comedy for decades. Stepping into stages with no script, no plan, and just hoping ideas will come. And they always do. Why? Because like with my Social Media Avoidance Project, knowing you have to be inspired makes you find the shiny things in the everyday that will inspire you which might otherwise have been missed. The same way I seem to find something to turn my philosophical attention to every week when I decide I’m going to meet my Monday morning deadline for Philosophy Unleashed.
“Why is there something rather than nothing?” Because the desire to make something can make us redefine the original “nothing” and see new potential in it we were previously blind to.
You sit on a sofa, day after day, staring blankly at a TV screen, thinking nothing of it. Then one day you take a creative writing class and are given this prompt as inspiration you must use as the first line of your story: “You sit on a sofa, day after day, staring blankly at a TV screen.” Now you see potential where once before you saw banality. You add a next line: “You realise you stare more at that box in the corner of the room than you look at the faces of your wife and children.” Wow! Now I’m interested. Or perhaps: “You wonder how long it will be before someone finds you? Your death, your soul leaving your body and finding itself condemned to haunt this grim lounge for all eternity, was not nearly as shocking a revelation as the realisation it had been over a week now and still no-one had noticed you were dead.” Or maybe: “but you like your job as a security guard. You get to listen to music while you monitor the screen. And every so often, amidst all the nightly nothingness, you get those very rare occasions where you are given a God’s-eye view of a crime about to happen and you — only you — get to intervene and stop it from happening.”
Being creative is simply giving yourself the permission to see the potential in anything. And sometimes we need to force ourselves to do that by setting ourselves an arbitrary deadline or some unreasonable restrictions to adhere to, which give us no choice but to find the inspiration we were previously ignoring.
My Social Media Avoidance Project could also be considered philosophical because the lyrics deal with different themes and many of them raise philosophical questions.
Right Now asks us whether we need an alert on our phone to tell us every headline and current affairs event or if life might be better without it?
The Worst Is Not asks if anything can be considered the “worst” when you have someone to share it with?
The World’s Not Worth Saving Anymore is fairly self-explanatory and certainly provokes a lot of questions!
I’m Alright, We’re OK is about the disconnect between what we project on social media or in our creative outputs, and reality.
The Poverty of Low Expectations is about the distinction between education and schooling and the many ways in which schools fail to educate.
The Actor, The Cello, and the Dark, Dark Cloud is about cancel culture and the guilt of still liking the art of morally questionable people.
How Do You Ignore? asks us how we are able to continue living normal lives is such cognitive dissonance to the ongoing genocide in Gaza, climate crisis, and creeping rise of fascism all around us.
Is This a Song Yet? explores the very nature of art and who gets to define it.
Scared of the News is a Halloween song with a serious point: for all the terrors of famous horror movies there is nothing scarier than what we see in the daily news.
Holding My Phone Again asks whether the social media avoidance project worked, and examines how addicted we are to this harmful online world?
Early Christmas This Year questions if the date people start putting up their lights and decorations tells us something about the state of the world that year?
And what is more philosophical than asking about the meaning of life? There Must Be More Than This To Life does just that.
In other words - it was a busy week last week releasing my final single and a whole album, and tonight (Monday) I’m hosting an improv comedy show by students I’ve trained to make stuff up on the spot. So I didn’t really have time to think up an amazing piece of new philosophy for this week’s Philosophy Unleashed and was forced to find inspiration in what I had. And I think I did, thus proving the point. You read something rather than nothing, because I made a choice to find something in the apparent nothingness for you to read about.
Author: DaN McKee (he/him)
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