It Saddens Me That I Have to Resort To The Very Thing I Am Against For My Idea To Grow
Building the greatest festival on the continent
It started with an idea, born from pain, frustration, and a need to escape.
Why?
Because adults have a difficult time. In truth, I don’t think adults exist. We all cry, just like children. Globally, we’re only starting to acknowledge how relevant crying is.
Marcus Aurelius cried. The greatest and most revered of Stoic emperors went through trial after trial. Even Jesus wept.
Frustrations abound in the lives of ‘adults’. Before the advancement of technology and industry, humans would live to a ripe age of 40. Then die. Ambition was capped by nature’s imposing limits.
Medicine and civilization have boosted our lifespan up to more than double that of ancient man. Struggles, nevertheless, continue to creep onto humanity’s achievements.
As Notorious B.I.G. sang, more money, more problems. No other time in human history have we had the kind of privilege we possess. We can have babies born without knowledge of who their father was. Invented to counter male infertility, a simple sperm, injected into an ovum, through intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), is enough to have a baby.
Mothers can raise their children comfortably. Men can choose other men, supported by multinational groups. A month has been dedicated to such groups.
Adults, or how I’ve grown to call them, puffed-up adults, are some of the most frustrated organisms in the world. Capitalism has held us at ransom, controlled our timetable, and converted stages of living into routine. The child has to go to school, the teenager has to explore his sexuality, the young adult needs to find his path, the middle-aged toddler has to face the pending crisis head-on, and the elderly have to hope their pension covers their costs when they retire, hopefully with an extra cushion from their children.
How terribly swell.
Meanwhile, the job market continues to change. Education no longer has the kind of leverage it once did. Maya Angelou got a diploma, a high achievement during her time. Today, it’s no different from a certificate course. It’s not so much a low-hanging fruit as humans have developed ladders and high heels. The fruits in the tree are accessible to virtually every early bird and worm.
Institutions have found ways of milking most people’s hard-earned money without any promise of returns. Sunk costs of humanity have led us to blindly continue with a programme that hardly delivers. Nobody is being questioned. On the contrary, the teachers and lecturers are being blamed for a system they did not build. Pawns always take the fall.
The lucky ones to get a job are largely oblivious to the manipulative tactics their superiors use on them. A small, albeit growing fraction would rather free themselves of these shackles than work for conniving leaders. Creator economy continues to explode from these grounds.
It is also just as difficult to set up a successful venture because creativity does not always guarantee a ready market. One-person businesses are difficult to run for first-timers. Breakthrough individuals have been the mainstay of stories, circulated to show that it’s possible. Few celebrate with as much aplomb.
Artists continue to lament that AI will tarnish their work. Some are riding the wave, future-proofing themselves and their solo projects, hoping AI does not replace them. We tend to do anything to get by. Remember these words, because they will also apply to me.
Taxes are rising. Global warming is converting our planet into an oven. Parents no longer give the advice that applies in the real world to their young adult children. Young adults don’t have the wave of certainty their parents had. Relationships are the most unstable, thanks to the cautionary stances amplified by social media. Trust is dwindling. AI is taking over entry-level jobs and redefining career ladders. Real friends are difficult to establish and sustain. Antimicrobial resistance is with us. Modern non-communicable diseases are spreading and killing faster than infections. Science funding is being cut. War is in the air in several parts of the world. Coral reefs are dying. Plastic fills every nook in the ocean. Forests are reducing in size to accommodate the exploding populations. Developing countries foster greedy leaders. Developed countries find it hard to sustain their aging population. And most important of all, cats are taking all the jobs of online influencers.
Adults are frustrated. Adults are angry. Adults are tired. Adults are stretched. Adults are unappreciated. Adults cry. Adults feel like punching a wall and watch as it caves under their fistful of force.
And that’s why I formed Funkie Fest. But I don’t like the way I’m forced to market it.
What I’m forced to do (and what I want to achieve)
I am not a fan of social media.
Once you see the light, it’s foolish to act blind. Social media’s effects are regressive. As Ariel and Will Durant lament in their book, The Lessons of History, the powerful seek more freedom and the weak hope for more equality. Social media has a way of granting everyone their wish.
The controllers get the money. They play tricks on massive numbers, amounting to the greatest social experiments ever done in the history of the human race. With money comes power. Power controls freedom.
The users, you and me, get more equality. We’re converted into numbers or accounts, whose online experiences can be tracked. All of us are channelled into a virtual pipe of their construction. We are all equal, in more ways than one.
I hate it. I hate that the owners know about it and do it anyway. Nature doing what it does best? Creating inequalities and sifting the quality corn from the chaff? I guess my defensive stance shows you that I’m not in the powerful cohort.
My position has put me at the mercy of the online dictators. Algorithms are merely their generals. I don’t even have a platform to talk to the ones pulling the strings. They are indifferent to our goals.
Aware of the game I play, I have resorted to using the very tool I detest to market the idea that will free adults of their stresses. I use social media to market and advertise my festival, Funkie Fest.
Funkie Fest is a festival of its kind. None like it exists in the whole world. It is a festival for adults. I have to start with that disclaimer. Adults were the reason I started it, and it will continue being strictly for adults.
It does not mean that we do the kind of things that kids only become aware of early in life through the Discovery Channel. No, we cannot compete with Nat Geo.
Funkie Fest was started to remind ourselves of our high school moments. Simpler days when your biggest worry was if the letter you sent would be received with glam by the recipient.
Letters are fading. Emails are no longer exciting as they once were. I recall my sister insisting on going to the cyber café to send an email. Her jollity was evident from the spring in her step, matched in energy with the smile on her face. Today, emails can be a bore.
We write letters at Funkie Fest. We encourage attendees to be as creative as possible, using their high school versions, sending the most heartfelt love letter to their imaginary lover. That’s just the theme. We don’t limit anyone. The letters are theirs to write. It could be a married couple, wishing to send each other words they wish to be written on paper, not prompted by AI.
As we used to do in high school, we’d have one of our team members walk around with a perfume to add a distinctive smell to the letter. You want the recipient to indulge all their senses when they receive it.
The festival happens three times a year, divided to match the three terms of high school. Term Two, the most recent one, was themed: “Music Fest”. We chose a set-piece and divided the attendees into four groups using bandanas. Groups were extremely creative, so much so that we didn’t see the need to award anyone. I doubt that would be the case in future editions.
During the day, we had all sorts of games to remind us of our inner child. This is the child adulthood is suffocating.
We picked the powerful blend of high school, when you believed you were an adult, but were still a child, and when the child tried, failingly, to behave like an adult. At Funkie Fest, adults can be free. They can leave the children at home and leave their adult versions at work.
The experience is real-time, rife with nostalgia. What’s more, we encourage people to come dressed in stylish high school uniforms. No festival in the world does that. We are the first. And we will take it to the world. It will be the biggest festival in Africa. Mark my words.
However, I am forced to advertise it on social media, the very platform I am against. Everyone is competing for every other set of eyeballs. The amount of investment put into making the festivals successful can be frustrating. At the expense of alleviating adults of their frustrations, my team ends up stretched.
I don’t know if they take back home the satisfaction of participating in the creation of an escape for other adults. I know I do. As demanding as it may be, I have enjoyed every festival we have run. Yet, I have to pay a small amount of dollars for our posters to be circulated. And they call it just that — an ad.
Content converted into ads. I don’t like how they have made it difficult to switch. In the past, festivals could be advertised through word of mouth, newspapers, or physical posters. Online is where the eyes are nowadays. And if you have the capital, you have the eyes.
We have neither. Thus, we not only use the very platform I am opposed to, but we don’t have the funding to secure the numbers we hope to free from the cold clasp of social media.
Still, we don’t cower.
Funkie Fest will be big. And we hope people will begin to live a little. Living is not a virtual experience. It’s real. It’s not descriptive. It’s real. It’s the kind which, as Kendrick sings:
I do what I wanna do
I say what I wanna say, what I feel and I
Look the mirror and know I’m there
My hands in the air,
I’m proud to say yeah,
I’m real, I’m real, I’m really really real
What I’m trying to say is…
If there were another way to market my festival, I would use it. In fact, my team is already doing it. We do word-of-mouth marketing. It is by far the most effective means.
But how many people can you convert by word of mouth? How can you pay everyone to talk to people when the art of talking continues to wane thanks to social media?
Well, my goal for Funkie Fest continues to evolve. As long as I live, it lives. And as sure as the surest thing you can surely think of, Funkie Fest will make its mark.
Now what are you waiting for? Get your tickets.
This song inspired some of the lines used in this article. Source — YouTube