Here’s the thing about a job that meany people overlook: everything ultimately needs to lead back to some kind of measurable, fungible value. Ah capitalism, you nasty freak.
I managed a team of web developers for half a decade and as manager I had a lot of tasks—but not the least of these (and in fact arguably one of the most consistent and time consuming of these) was tracking metrics.
I had to put numbers to productivity. I had to match quantifiable costs against measured returns, make graphs of employee time spent per tasks, public page interactions, project cost recovery models, marketing investment return projections. Everything had to to be tracked, measured, plotted, and understood.
Now that I’ve been create something of my own, for the sake of art, it has been too easy to fall into this same trap: measuring word counts, tracking web stats and search engine placements, allocating resources to audience building and working to balance effort with return based on numbers, even if some of those numbers are only tracked in my head.
When your profession and passion collide, what is there to do?
How do you stand arms length from the quantifiable measures of your art, words, and music as demanded by the professional side of the craft—often inseparable and important—and yet still find the mental space to think of it as a qualitative act measured in vibes and feels and beauty?
Terms FROm this POSt
- audience
- Creativity is often a dance between creator and audience. Art can exist in a vacuum, of course, but the perception of art by a receptive human mind seems to me to a critical half of the creative equation.
- capitalism
- I live in a time and place where it is commonly understood that people need to trade their time and skill for money. This is an income which allows the acquisition of currency that can be exchanged for goods and services from others. We assume everyone knows this and thinks about it because it is the system we were born into and we know no other. But it isn’t the only system and being inside of it necessitates certain choices about how creative people interact with the world that are worth thinking about, calling out, and discussing from time to time.
- job
- This is a fuzzy word for me as I write here. I am technically self-employed, the overseer of a little one-man Canadian consultancy corporation. Hustling for contracts is hard work tho, so I occasional look for more steady employment gigs that interest me, and allude to it in my writing.
- professional
- There is a formality to this term, linked to the idea of a captial-P professional like a doctor or a lawyer or an engineer. Instead, I often use it simple to refer to the span in my life as a average joe salaryman, sitting at a desk in a neat shirt and tie and replying to emails: I was a business professional, but lacking any real formal certification.
- value
- I use this word a lot on this site but I’m not always referring to cash money. There are many ways to find value in something: emotional, nostalgia, spiritual, environmental, social, and countless other personally meaningful ways. I do find the assumption that everything always comes down to coins in the pocket, but that might just be being disappointed with spending fifty years watching the capitalism struggle to deliver on anything meaningfully human.
- vibe
- There are many words that try to encapsulate the ineffable feeling or aura of a thing or an idea. Vibe is yet another comfortable and trendy stab at trying to pin down a definition for something that is hard to define about those very things. It often implies an alignment, positive or negative, with the feeling given off by the subject of the vibe.
