Remember when a recording artist was given a few albums to find their voice?
When record labels didn’t just chase hits, they developed artists.
A&R departments worked with them, shaped them, challenged them, and believed in what they could become, not just what they delivered on the first try.
Remember when NFL quarterbacks were drafted and given time?
Time to learn the system.
Time to sit behind a veteran.
Time to fail quietly, adjust, and grow into leaders before being handed the weight of a franchise.
Greatness was once cultivated.
Now you get one season. Sometimes half of one.
No patience. No investment. No belief.
Swipe right.
Swipe left.
Swipe up.
Swipe down.
If it doesn’t happen instantly, we’re not helping you.
We’re moving on.
The NFL moves on. Remember, it’s not sports anymore, just another entertainment outlet.
The music industry moves on.
The culture moves on.
And we call it progress.
Quarterbacks are thrown into broken systems with no offensive line, no stability, and no protection, then blamed when they can’t create magic.
We don’t ask who failed to develop them. We ask who’s next. The rookie year has become the audition, and anything less than immediate dominance is treated as disqualification.
The same disease infected music.
Artists no longer arrive raw, uneven, and human. They must show up fully formed, algorithm-ready, viral-approved.
If the first single doesn’t hit, the file is deleted. The artist is deleted. The investment disappears. No one asks what they might become, only what they can produce right now.
This isn’t about football.
And it isn’t about music.
It’s about a culture that no longer builds people, it consumes them.
Development has been replaced by analytics.
Mentorship replaced by metrics.
Patience replaced by dopamine.
Swipe culture didn’t just change dating.
It rewired how we measure human worth.
We no longer grow talent.
We test it.
Sample it.
Discard it.
There is no long arc anymore.
No apprenticeship.
No belief in unseen potential.
Only performance, or disappearance.
Greatness has never been instant.
It has always been cultivated.
And cultivation requires time, guidance, and belief.
We’ve eliminated all three, and called the wreckage efficiency.
And now AI arrives, not to fix this, but to finish it.
A machine trained on impatience will not build greatness, it will erase anything that doesn’t perform on command.
The tsunami didn’t come quietly.
We were just looking down at our phones scrolling while it rose a hundred feet in front of us.
-2025 Chu the Cud
All Rights Reserved
Chu The Cud 