8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions

Category: Jovial June

Chapter List

  • Post Conformity

    The funny thing about semi-retirement is that while one is still not completely decoupled from the workforce, I have noticed there is a marked volume of indifference that I am able to cultivate and nurture with regards to the performative creativity that I once did when I was younger.

    I can paint for the sake of painting.

    I can sketch things that are interesting to me.

    I can take photos of curious and interesting things.

    And I can do all these things not worrying that it somehow doesn’t fit perfectly into a portfolio or a personal brand.

    The ironic thing, this dismissal of external validation and approval, this refusal to fit into a box for some generic employer evaluation that might skim through these works in the future to see if I’m a good fit for their open job, means that I am probably producing better—or at least more authentic—art.

    It’s one of those lessons that takes a lifetime of creative output to learn and embrace, and once discovered is probably something that would have benefited me vastly more than I realized at the start of my career.

    Honed skills are great, but voice and authenticity are the work of a lifetime, after all.

  • Green Echoes

    I went to the park to sketch the other day. It was a whim. I wasn’t planning it, but the moment arose and I grabbed onto it. 

    I got there, set up, and pulled my collection of pens from my bag.

    All but one pen was dry.

    And the only pen that was not dry was a thick, green-inked brush pen.

    Let me add to this tale of artistic frustration that my pen of choice is usually a black ink fine-liner. This is pretty much the opposite of that is a clunky green ink shading pen—a pen that I really only brought along because I thought I might get bold enough to add a splash of colour to my spring-inspired sketch, whatever that might have been.

    Yet there I was, sitting in the park having added a few lines of black to the page before the blank ink fully failed and, well, I needed to finish the sketch.

    Art, I truly believe, is as much story as it is product. The best art, the best photos, the best music, and the best anything is threaded through with an artistic narrative that gives it meaning beyond the final product. Polishing a perfect piece of art that has no story behind it may work for adding commercial value, but artistic value?

    Less so. Arguably.

    Admittedly, the story of my dried up pen collection is not the best story, and my minor inconvenience is hardly a tale of hardship worthy of the ages… but the story of why I now have a clunky sketch made with a green-hued felt brush in my sketchbook is arguably better than the sketch itself. 

    That alone is worth it.

  • Artificial Audience

    I’m writing this on the day that Google died.

    I know, I know. Google is a thriving company with years of profitability ahead of them. I should probably also disclose that I own exactly 0.0209 shares of Google currently valued at approximately eight American dollars. So, I get it. Google is probably not dead, at least not in the strictest sense of the word.

    But the company was founded on the idea of democratizing the internet by helping average people find websites built by other average people, people like me building websites like this, and as Google switches over to an AI-forward search engine that mostly summarizes answers and, as an afterthought only just might send one of those average people into a click… well, the idea of getting readers from search is basically dead in the water.

    I bring it up here and now because like most creative people who create things, we do it with the idea of sharing those things with average people. 

    If you are reading this it’s now unlikely that Google helped you find it.

    And as we increasingly commodify creativity and ever more turn to AI to be the gatekeeper of what is seen and known, it is a difficult distraction to overcome as a creative human being wondering what it is even the point of making stuff.

    It’s not wrong to feel that way. I have felt that way a lot lately.

    All I can say is that I also feel it is worth it to keep making stuff, sharing stuff, and looking past the gatekeepers of what was for a moment—but is no longer—the most democratic creative outlet humanity had ever built.

  • Poise Purpose

    Three years prior to writing these words I was on the brink of a huge professional change.

    I’ve made a lot of excuses for that change over the span of time that followed it, but it was locked in step with the topic of this category of writing: finding purpose and keeping ones poise, and the side effects of failing in either or both.

    This isn’t a self-help blog, but it is very much the reflective writings of a guy who burnt out hard at his career because of a lot of big ideas that are in lockstep with both professional poise and purpose: that for many a job is a job, your salary could always be higher but you get the work done—but also that for many of us finding meaning and an honest life in our work can be an essential part of the balance.

    Burnout follows when that balance fails. And that balance is more precarious than ever when one pursues work that is already heavily skewed towards purpose and meaning, like creative pursuits, and away from salary and strict process, like creative pursuits.

    That doesn’t need to be a fatal blow to those efforts. At least, I think so.

    Under the category of Poise & Purpose I’ll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.