Dare to dream again

I think these last few days I’ve started to realise what’s been so wrong with me for the last few months. I’ve ceased to dream, to have hopes for the future.

“Something has happened to you these last six months” a dear colleague of mine said to me yesterday. “You used to be critical on your blog, but you ended what you wrote by suggesting ways forward. Now you are just critical.” She’s the same person who first mentioned the Steve Jobs Stanford speech to me, so she knows a few things about what makes me tick.

I also happen to be reading The Revolution Will Not Be Televised by Joe Trippi. OK, I am only 7 years late getting round to reading it, but in the part of the book that documents the Howard Dean campaign in the first half of 2003 it’s impossible to not be struck by the enormous euphoria of it all – 5000 people at a rally in Seattle, 12000 in New York and the jaundiced Trippi bowled over. I can’t remember anything professional that’s happened in the last three years – essentially since the high point of the Atheist Bus Campaign – that’s been remotely euphoric.

At an event at Europe House yesterday I ended up feeling bad while speaking on the panel about the intersection of new and traditional media, and tweeted this. “What will be social media’s impact on the 2014 European elections?” someone asked me from the audience. “Negligible” was my negative answer.

Hell, is that the best I can do? I’m behaving like Victor Meldrew, and I am only in my early thirties.

“What motivated you to go and live in Berlin?” the same colleague asked me yesterday, seeing my eyes light up at the very mention of that city I’d lived in in 2001-02. “I was naive then, I was in my early twenties, and I had a lot to learn,” was my response. How then do I recapture that when moving to Copenhagen this autumn? Dare I dream about the prospects in a city where I do not speak the language and have very few good business connections? Or have I just been too naive for too long, assuming that finding something worthwhile and fulfilling is going to even be possible? Maybe I just need to be like everyone else, having to work to live.