One of the biggest events of my childhood life was the season finale of the Television show M*A*S*H. It’s hard for anyone who came of age in the last 10, and maybe even 20 years or so to comprehend how big a deal the three networks were to the mass of Americans as they were the only real sources of entertainment and news. As there were only three national networks, we all watched the same entertainment and had the same information via the network news shows. For over a decade M*A*S*H was one of the biggest and most beloved shows on television. Its finale was something special in the history of all media creation. To this day, over fourty years later, I still get choked up thinking about it.
M*A*S*H ended because the world had changed, and the show’s message wasn’t as relevant as it once was. The network decided to let it go out with a bang. Hence, America, and the world, got a two and a half hour TV movie titled “Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen”. This article marks 10 years of blogging and almost as long podcasting. That’s about as long as the TV show M*A*S*H was on the air. Like M*A*S*H, this blog has run its course. I’ve said what I want to say, and perhaps more importantly, the world has changed and it’s time for me to move on. I won’t take two and a half hours to say goodbye, but I will use the occasion to talk about the world and why now is the time.
So why am I ending this blog, at least in the way it currently exists? The first reason I discussed previously is that I changed jobs. I’m not at the local workforce organization and I’m not spending my days knocking on doors of employers talking to them about their workforce needs. I’m also not going to the big high minded summits that are mostly wasteful but have good, if somewhat impractical, information on the broader trends in employer / employee relationships. Because of this I don’t have the emotional baggage that comes with employers who create havoc in the lives of their employees on a daily basis.
There were definitely a good deal of great employers I worked with. That being said, I can’t underscore how much exposure I had regularly to just horrible attitudes and actions out of bad employers. Even to this day I shudder thinking about some of it. I recall the guy who expressly cited a need for more robots and less people. This was at a workforce development conference where he was there to tell us how we can better train the people he was hiring. I recall a meeting with the fifth new HR manager at a company who’s owner continually lied to them and burned them out by demanding the impossible. I also remember shuddering at the employer who offered his minimum wage employees a 1% 401k match and was proud that he could “take care of his people”. There were many experiences like this. The emotional hit I took was intense. That emotional impact had to have an outlet, and this blog was it.
So, without that continual input from the world of workforce development, my passions wandered elsewhere. With age, and a new job, I started to really focus on travel and self improvement via education related to my new teaching career. If I have an hour to spend, I’d prefer to learn a new course that I haven’t taught yet verses trying to come up with another topic. If I have months off in the summer, I’d rather be in Mexico, Alaska, or on a cruise ship somewhere than sitting at home writing even if that means jumping through hoops to travel with my bad back and other ailments.
Also, the actual process is not as much fun as it once was. Writing is hard. It’s easier when I have topics burning in me that I have to get out. The aforementioned misbehavior by employers, financial topics, the structure of our society, the benefits employers give or don’t give as the case may be were all topics of great interest to me where I had something to say. Then, of course, there were the solutions I proposed. They were big ideas that would never come to pass in our current political climate even if they are just modernizations of old ideas that clearly worked. For example, ESOPs and board representation as a replacement for the unions of yesteryear is logical, reasonable, and would completely reverse the downward trajectory of the middle-class, it will also never happen. It’s the same with decoupling healthcare from employers. These stories and ideas are not the only things that I can write about but they are the things I’m most passionate about. Over the last ten years I’ve pretty much covered them all or at least the ones that resonate with me the most. As I’m not a fan of rehashing the same topics over and over, it’s becoming harder and harder to come up with big ideas or more bad behaviors by employers that I haven’t already written about. I won’t deny that this is sad to me. I truly miss that feeling of “I have to get this idea on paper”. It’s been a long time since that was the case. It still happens, but much more rarely than it did in the past.
Let’s not forget the mechanics of it. It takes me roughly a day to do the whole thing. The basic steps include writing the article, creating the art, posting it, recording the article, editing the audio, recording the intro and uploading the podcast. I started at three articles per week which was unsustainable. Then one per week, and now I’m at one every two weeks. Add it all up and I’ve said what I want to say and repeating myself isn’t worth the effort.
Adding to the challenge of the mechanical process, the world, or the way the world consumes media, has changed. I started by writing a book, and a blog at the same time. The purpose of the book was to own my own IP and then be able to control my own financial destiny. The purpose of the blog was to promote the book. The purpose of the podcast was to build the blog. The book spent three years in editing and got turned down by hundreds of publishers. Hot Tip: If you don’t have a big audience no publisher in the world cares about you even if you wrote the Bible Part II. If you have a big audience, even if it’s on YouTube and you never learned to read or write, someone will still give you a book deal. I started too late at least for gaining an audience via a blog. I didn’t focus where there was audience growth. You have to really be a multi-media creator and create content almost daily for sites like YouTube, Tik Tok and every other social media platform. I don’t have the time for that level of creation and my potential audience skews older and is less inclined to consume enough media where they will find me in the new channels.
Another big change in the world is the rapid adoption of A.I. and the tsunami of text based content that’s hitting the web. What’s written by a robot? What’s written by a human? I don’t have a hundred thousand other writers to compete with online anymore. I have an infinite number who can all churn out a day’s work every second. At first it was easy to tell if content was A.I. generated. Now it’s harder and harder to tell the difference. Again, I can’t compete. If I can’t compete, I’m not going to play. Hence, I’m done.
Now there were some surprising benefits to this whole effort. I learned a great deal, not just about the publishing industry and podcasting, but also about myself. I love to learn new things so I wouldn’t trade that experience for the world. I also was able to leave a written legacy behind for my kids and maybe even later generations. As I get older, like most folks who enter into the final decades of their life, that becomes more and more important. I do intend to do something with the content I created. I just don’t know what, maybe some kind of autobiography? The info is there, I just have to edit it all. In fact the biggest disappointment I have is that because I had to change so many names, my kids won’t know who I was actually talking about. I may go back and revise that at some point and really spill the dirt on the people I was commenting on.
So what is the future for this blog? Will I never write again? The blog is called “Peluso Presents” and that is generic enough where I can change the topic to anything I want. In the future to keep the feed alive I may revisit/repost the articles. Maybe I’ll have occasional special event articles for when things happen that I have to get out of me. I may change the topic area entirely and have several topic areas such as Travel, Technology and Work Culture. Maybe I’ll become one of those creators who adopt A.I. tools and churn out comical levels of content. I don’t know what will come next. There is still the media creation bug inside me and I’m sure it’ll come out again at some point.
I want to end this final regular article with a thank you to my, admittedly small, following, I’m tremendously grateful for you all. Especially the ones who took a moment to comment on my articles from time to time. I can’t begin to explain how much those comments meant to me over the last ten years. To quote the late musician Meatloaf let me just say “Thank You! THANK YOU!! THANK YOUUUU!!!”
I’m sure I’ll be back at some point, but for now, Goodbye, Farewell and Amen.
Mike Peluso – Blogger
March 31st 2025
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