Always someone else doing it too

Every time I start something new, broadly sensing that it was entirely my own idea – well, there’s always someone else doing it too.

I have come to think that this is a fundamental law of the universe – and should give some reassurance next time I worry that I’m being some kind of weird outlier.

For instance, my recent interest in podcasting voice notes – voice notes that I also don’t particularly share very vigorously, if at all.

Turns out that Miranda July has been making much use of voice notes too, and wrote about that in May:

"I know I’ve brought this up in the past but I just want to circle back with this update: I AM ONLY GOING HARDER WITH THE VOICE MESSAGES. It is rare that a day goes by when I don’t leave or recieve a voice message for a friend and they range in length from two to twenty-seven minutes. Whole lives are being played out in this medium that is less like letter-writing and more like film or performance. Relatedly, the Voice Memo function on the iPhone now has a Copy Transcript button (ok it’s not that new, since late 2024) — so you don’t even have to look at the transcript to copy it; you just tap the button and then open your text document and paste. This is important to me because I take a lot of voice notes every day, and I have been using my notes app, Evernote, for voice recording, but the Voice Memo accuracy is so much higher it’s not even funny." - Miranda July

jp at this domain name.