Day 365: George Harrison – All Things Must Pass

It’s finally day 365, we did it! The year practically flew by, I feel like I just started. I went into this project with the intention of just seeing if I can do it for a full year, and turns out that it pretty quickly just became my favourite part of my daily routine. I thought it’d only be fitting to close out the year with my all-time favourite album, George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass, and talk a bit about what’s going to happen with this project going forward.

Album cover courtesy of Apple Records

I’ve written about this somewhere before, but the reason why this album is so important to me is that I once went through a phase where I just felt like life was completely meaningless and I just didn’t really see any point of anything, I was pretty deep in the throes of an existential crisis and just felt terrible. I got into the habit of going on three hour walks around Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens every Sunday, listening to the extended 50th anniversary edition of All Things Must Pass and trying to pick out my favourite tree of the day. It was a simple habit, but it made me feel happy to be alive again – even if everything else in life is going to hell, there’s still good music and nature, and the ability to enjoy those two things is always enough reason to stick around.

I guess to some extent this project served the same purpose, even though I’m relatively crisis-free at the moment. Doing this gives me something to look forward to every single day, no matter how bad the day is going, and it has helped me fall back in love with music and the experience of music discovery. I think I fell into a habit of just relying on streaming platform algorithms for recommendations, which robbed a lot of the joy out of music discovery for me, but having to do it the old fashioned way has made it enjoyable again. I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s disillusioned with the algorithms and the platforms, either.

Even though I’ve now completed the year, I think I’ll definitely keep going for as long as I’m having fun with it, because it really is fun. It’s even more fun knowing that there’s people out there who’ll come to my website to read my stuff every once in a while. I just made this website by myself so there’s some kinks to work out, and as I’m continuing this, I’m trying to see if I can figure out a platform where I could neatly have a website where you can read all of this as usual, as well as an option to subscribe to get the write-ups via email. I am aware that thinking that people will want to sign up for a daily email from me might be a bit delusional, but let’s see. It’s gonna take a little while for me to get it up and running since I need to transfer all of my posts manually, but hopefully I should get there semi-soon

If there’s one thing I’d like to leave you with, it’s my recommendation for you to take up little projects, put yourself out there, be a hobbyist online. I think things went wrong on the internet when it all became a big exercise in personal branding. Platforms essentially push you to present an idealised version of yourself to seem more fuckable or employable, depending on which platform you’re on, but I miss when people were just expressing themselves and sharing interests. The internet has given us the capacity to share our passions and connect with people with similar interests all around the world, and now it feels like all major online platforms are just tearing us apart. But as much as the tech bros can try to ruin it, I think we can make our online spaces better, more authentic, and more fun, so long as we work at it.

This hasn’t really been that much of a write-up about All Things Must Pass and more just about this project, but whatever, I wanted to wrap the year up and explain what I’m going to do going forward. I also just want to say thank you to everyone who’s been following along, it’s been a great time and I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this even a fraction of how much I’ve enjoyed writing it. I’m not sure how long I’ll keep this up, but I’ll keep going for as long as it’s still fun.

And All Things Must Pass is obviously a 10/10, I’d strongly recommend, especially if you’re in some sort of a crisis.