Chess
I like chess. I started playing maybe a couple years ago when I played Understanding in real life a couple times. He beat me easily so I set out to learn the ways. I will eventually beat him, but it hasn’t happened yet.
These days I play online just about every day - you may have noticed by now that most things I do, I do quite regularly… it’s fair to set I’m comforted by a routine. Occasionally I play against random people on the internet, but I mostly prefer to do the lessons, puzzles, and play the computers on the chess.com app. It’s my preferred way to learn. I don’t know why, but I get nervous playing against randoms sometimes. I don’t want to be judged in the chat when I blunder and when people are anonymous they tend to be quicker to bully (see all examples of the internet, ever). Some of the computers have a static rating and make the same mistakes over and over again, so once I figure out their weakness I can exploit it fairly easily. When I beat a computer three or four times in a row with respectable accuracy I move on. However, the app also offers the opportunity to play against some AIs. Me vs AI… here we go again.
Sometimes I’m able to hold my advantage and beat a learning opponent, but sometimes they best me. It’s quite frustrating. This is exactly how it feels trying to develop an effective social media marketing strategy. I’ve been posting new content every day for about two months now and it’s resulted in essentially 0% growth. We haven’t gained any followers. All our reels get relatively the same amount of views. There’s very little engagement in the form of likes or comments and again, essentially zero shares. I recently checked my story insights on Instagram to find that only about 4% of our followers even see the stories I’m posting. I don’t say this to complain and I realize that if you’re reading this you’re more likely to be one of the few people who is already sharing and listening so THANK YOU very much and please continue to do so, we appreciate and depend on your interest in us. I just have literally no idea what to do to increase these numbers. These numbers that will determine my fate in today’s society. I am lost in the abyss, screaming into the void, trying to get people to laugh and engage, jump on the train, and eventually to enjoy the music we’re releasing on the label, and I’m fighting and losing to social media algorithms.
I’m not going to let it break my heart. Understanding always says that his dad says persistence always overcomes resistance. Fine then. I’ll just have to find a way to beat this computer too. We’re playing chess.
-J.P.