In the nearly eighteen months since my wife Rebecca passed away, I’ve become an unusually contemplative person, given to much inward thought about who I really am and what I want to do with the thirty-ish years I might have left. I wouldn’t call it grieving as such; the grieving never really went away, yet this is more of a reaction to new realities that involve navigation of mostly uncharted waters. In coupledom, there’s always someone to help set your compass for you and with you, as well as a set of ongoing circumstances that pretty much dictate what you’re going to do on a daily basis anyway: raise a kid, vacation together, choose shows to stream, meet friends, fantasize about what retirement might look like. Alone, there’s an opportunity that’s been given to me to reset what all of that looks like, and I suppose that, even if I didn’t want it, I’m forcefully grabbing it anyway.

The title of this piece is a mantra I’ve often said to myself on occasion. Maybe not often enough. I’ve been pretty atrocious at actually living it. Around 2000 or 2001 we were camping near Santa Cruz with some friends, and I hopped up onto a tall tree stump, lording over everyone and generally just showing off for no reason. Our friend Doreen calmly rolled her eyes and said “Jay, validate from within”. Rebecca laughed, I laughed, and from then on it then became something Rebecca jokingly said to me, and I sometimes said to myself when I was doing something far too obvious, likely just to get a reaction from others.

Alas, I kind of think that a huge portion of my life has been lived at a complete opposite from said mantra. Without really thinking about it, I have been seeking external validation from others since at least my college days in the 1980s. I have created blathering, show-offy public podcasts, blogs, radio shows and fanzines; written learned, braggy lists of my “favorite” this-and-that; and, of course, written articles just like this one or others like it not in a personal, inward-facing journal, but rather in a public forum where it might happen to gather reaction, attention and validation. In that respect, the internet and especially self-publishing’s arrival were godsends for those yearning to be heard, and therefore potentially validated. People like me, perhaps.

Now, there’s no reason necessarily to give this much thought, and most don’t, yet I’ve always seen the narcissism that’s so endemic to online behavior as really just another name for insecurity. I had a close relative perceived as narcissistic by some, but she really wasn’t. She was instead tremendously insecure and unsure of herself and where she fit in. I think my own preening and posturing online and my obsessive need to share my great musical taste with others sprung from a similar place, and quite possibly from genetics as well. I wasn’t a popular kid in junior high or high school, nor was I particularly disliked. I was just…..there. I suffered the same indignities that so many pubescent pre-teens and teens did, of course, but nothing more extreme than the usual immense, crushing concerns about my looks, of not being an outcast, of not being able to talk to girls, and so on.

What I was, though, was an absolute music obsessive, and I was extremely curious about hearing and mentally cataloguing music that was outside of the norm. Because this period was the early 1980s, and because I grew up in an urban area with numerous college radio stations and record stores, I self-educated myself to the point of absurdity on the dizzying and exciting world of punk, post-punk and new wave that was spinning around me. Sometimes, making lists and booking pretend 5-band bills in my room, it was literally all I thought about. By 1982 or 1983, it was clear that my musical taste and underground music knowledge was far more “advanced” than that of my metalhead and Top 40 peers. That was effectively the sum of my talents, aside from being a decent writer. I was too introverted and confused to do much of anything with it, so I instead studied further, listened deeper, and plotted for ways to receive external validation for the one thing I was better at than anyone I knew, such as it was.

And frankly, that’s almost certainly the true story of how I came to still be pumping out punk/underground music podcasts as recently as this year, 2026, at the ripe old age of 58, and writing snarky reviews of underground music fanzines that were written decades ago by people in their 20s; that I in fact bought when I was in my teens and twenties. And why? Because people fucking liked it, and because they told me so. Every time I lacked the ambition to do another episode, or post, I’d get some dopamine zap of external validation, or a cumulative batch of it, and I’d “un-retire” something I’d tried to walk away from. There’s really nothing like being admired for something you’re purportedly good at, even when it’s as low-stakes as all the musical malarky I’ve spent forty years championing and documenting. 

Surely there’s nothing wrong with writing or creating something and having even a small audience that enjoys it? Well, no. It’s when it tips over into performative, ego-stroking obligation that I object to, at least for myself. That seems to be the way the game is played now, even if we’d prefer otherwise. My music fanzine Radio Dies Screaming #1 was by far the worst seller of the twelve fanzines I published over a twelve-year period, and why? Because I’d quit social media and therefore couldn’t, or wouldn’t, relentlessly flog it there. Look at me look at me I’m a writer buy me buy me buy me. I just can’t. I’m strangely proud of the 200 or so copies that I therefore have sitting on a shelf in the garage.

Of course, many folks just keep on keepin’ on. I certainly did so for all this time, and I haven’t lost much if any enthusiasm for the music, either. My record collection isn’t getting any smaller. But the last eighteen months have sharpened my sense of self pretty significantly. Were it that it were not so, but I now see mortality in a way I never quite did before. I see the gathering of experiences, the expansion of wisdom, the discipline of maintaining health, of engaging directly and forthrightly with my fellow man (and other such platitudes) as being central to the time I have left. Not chasing dopamine hits on the internet.

Lord knows I have many thoughts, often negative, about the state of humanity at a macro level today. At a person-to-person level, I think people are usually just fine and are often far better than that. I loathe what the smartphone has done to attention spans, American politics, egotism, distraction, and to people in crosswalks and other public spaces. I believe AI, if accepted into one’s personal life, is an absolute brain-eraser, and to the extent I can avoid it entirely, I do. Many lesser evils – crypto, gambling, the profit-maximizing degradation of professional and college sports, short-form video, tattoos, terminally online “socialists”, men who ride electric scooters, people who call breakfast “brekkie” and sandwiches “sandos” – still drive me batshit crazy. I even deleted the Substack app from my iPad because it defaults when it’s opened to a social media-like stream, where even smart writers whom I otherwise respect feel that they need to preen, bluster and compete for attention in that awful irony-drenched social media-speak that is killing us all, very slowly.

I have spent so much of the last year and a half instead retreating into reading, into exceptionally long solo walks without headphones, and into travels to anywhere new and pastoral that it’s sort of forced a reckoning with the person I was and the person I might yet become. Sigh.

“Validating from within” seems like a great mantra to pick up again. I’m somewhere between seven and twenty-five months away from retiring from work for good – no part-time or “consulting” BS for me if I can avoid it – and a recent reckoning that I can do so without switching to cat food for sustenance has been pretty much the biggest dopamine hit I’ve ever had. I have a ridiculous amount of hobbies and interests, and not only the books/music/film I’ve built my life upon. I’ve ended the posturing blogs and podcasts and fanzines. I’m proud of them, sure, and I’m not sure what I would have otherwise done with all the time I spent creating them over the years, aside from having been an even better husband and father. 

I can even see writing a book or two, and I do have a few ideas, but I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be doing it for external validation but more the act of writing and editing and revising, even likely publishing it on my own just to have some copies to give to friends and family and whatnot. Anything I write here, to my Word Goes Flesh audience of tens of people, will likely be undertaken in the same spirit of “the journey is the destination”. If I’ve gauged my evolving psyche correctly, that’ll be more than enough mental sustenance, even in the complete absence of any likes, stars, “favorites” or comments.