8 Clicks from Nowhere ䷀

Dispatches ⌂

Category: Part 2 – Nowhere but Everywhere

Who is the creative professional and what does it mean to create at and for work, pay, and career? The work of creating of is more than a job, but rather it can form the foundation of how we work, why we work and the purpose we find in pursuit of making interesting stuff as we contribute to a complex society.

Chapter List

  • Self Employed

    Society has a bias towards cold, hard cash.

    Look, maybe it’s different where you live, but I’m writing at you from here in a cafe on a chilly autumn morning from the middle of a small Canadian city. Out the window it’s rush hour. Cars are zipping to and fro, on their way to real jobs. Folks are being so-called productive—at least according to the big churning wheels of corporate capitalism.

    Me. I’ll settle into some contract work later, but for now I have the rare privilege to sit here with a cup of tea and spill my thoughts into the keyboard. I’m not making any money being here, typing, writing, doing this thing I’m doing—but I to think of myself as working at this moment, as cushy and non-traditional as it seems.

    I’m basically self-employed, and the more I widen that definition the more I see a fit for how I spend my days.

    It bugs a lot of people, though. I get it. I hear it. I internalize it.

    Capitalism has a job-equals-paycheque bias.

    For example, I spent four hours yesterday (as I write this) afternoon, a Sunday, sitting in front of my laptop working on a short story, drilling into the plot, agonizing over word choices, trying to figure out how to land a strange premise and turn it into an interesting plot. 

    I would say I was working.

    The bias of society would tell you that I was dabbling in a creative hobby.

    The barista who sold me my tea this morning? She is getting a paycheque, earning a wage, and she gets to go home later snug and secure knowing that she made bucks, did a job, and can tell people she’s employed. And she’s not wrong. She’s provided a service and a product and, yeah, I gave her money in exchange.

    As a contrast, I sat here and did complex creative work, wrote something, shared something, made something—but because I did it for free (to many people) it doesn’t seem to count in the same way. 

    Am I wrong? Or have we built up our idea of value and worth on some skewed logic?

  • Start Writing

    At the heart of this website, the core of this little creative project I’ve been working on here, there is but a single message burning with the inner heat that drives the whole damn thing: it is one piece of advice. Start writing.

    Oh, I get it. You don’t have the passion or the time or the urge or the patience. 

    That device in your hands is so great at capturing your attention and entertaining you with the ideas and thoughts of other people—or maybe now I should include algorithms and slop—that you can’t be bothered to use it to make something.

    But writing is at the core of creativity. It is the uber-skill that shapes and refines all the others. 

    Writing is the materialization of thoughts—reflective and critical, personal and communicative, coherent and scattered—upon the page.

    Writing makes you better at evaluating yourself and whatever you do. 

    Writing closes the loop and fills the gap and bridges the points of something you cannot articulate is missing in your soul until you start writing.

    It’s not difficult.

    Open any app that takes text: your notes, your word-processor, hell, write yourself an email… but write something. And then write some more. And keep writing after that. It will improve you in ways you cannot fathom until you’ve written enough to see it for yourself.

  • Significance Gap

    I am as bad as anyone when it comes to looking for meaning in what I do.

    I spend my days working towards significance.

    Oh sure, I write for the sake of writing, make art without care for anyone ever seeing it, and play music with my headphones on so that no one ever hears the sounds but me—but nearly all of it is in service to some future significance, I wager.

    We practice to improve.

    We groom our skills towards a purpose.

    We reach out for significance—which is something that cannot reliably be measured.

    What is significance? What is purpose? What is meaning?

    In a way it might be something parallel to the idea of wealth. Wealth is the acquisition of money in search of a tipping point from insufficient to more than enough. Wealth is relative. It’s a marketing term for banks. It’s an ineffable concept. For some wealth might simply be financial stability. For others wealth is riches beyond imagination. Wealth comes in a variety as diverse as there are people on Earth.

    Purpose is similar, I think. Meaning and significance are intangible and indefinable, and likely they mean something different for everyone who utters the syllables. There is a gap in communicating what my definition of significance is to you and vice versa. For some it might mean something personal or linked to a small community, while for others nothing short of worldwide fame and history shifting effort would suffice.

    My only advice then: define it for yourself.

  • Success Blindness

    Do you remember why you started chasing your art?

    Do you remember why you started taking photos, painting landscapes, composing music, or scratching out short stories in a dimly lit cafe?

    I’m sure a few people have stumbled across this website and consider it a bit of navel gazing, culture-vibing, self-help sludge from a procrastinating wannabe, and maybe they’re right.

    I spend a small chunk of my day, nearly every day, doing some reflective writing on my hobbies and interests, and I do it for a very specific reason: I want to rekindle the memory of why.

    I want to keep the fire lit under the reasons I do any of this at all.

    I’ve felt burnout. I’ve encountered the darkness upon a long and lonely path and I know what it feels like to forget why you bother doing interesting things. Burnout cares not for strength of spirit or power of will. It only knows of despair and indifference. It wants you to forget the why. It wants you to overlook the origins of your passion and limit your recollection of the reasons you started out on the adventure in the first place.

    I stave of the darkness by writing these little short essays, often to remind even just myself of the answers to all those questions. I recall the beauty of a sketch gallery I wandered into in Dublin. I remember the vibe of yearning to play the violin whilst watching the symphony one winter evening. I recall listening to a beloved children’s author speak of the transcendent joy of the written word. 

    All of it lights against the darkness. All of it reminds me of successes lost to my own blindness.

  • Duty Bound 

    Reactive sharing killed my motivation for a while. 

    I was making art through a prolific period of newness. I was amped about sketching anything and everything. I was painting daily, though so little of it was anything but practice art and rough drafts.  But I was damn proud of it, and after I’d finish a piece I’d lay it out on a table and snap a pic with my phone and upload it to Instagram.

    Reactive.

    Oh sure, I got likes. Mostly from impressed family members or friends who were easily impressed by student-grade art attempts by someone they knew.

    None of of it was terrible, of course, but none of it was gallery grade either.

    I wasn’t sharing my best. 

    I was sharing everything.

    Reactive sharing.

    Draw, paint, dry, pic, post. (And sometimes I barely even waited for the dry.)

    It killed my motivation.

    Posting became performance.

    Performance became duty. 

    Passion became obligation to feed the algorithm.

    I remember going for a long walk one chilly winter evening because the pressure had built up in my heart around this sense of responsibility I felt to the dozen or so people who were liking everything I posted, and it was driving me nuts. I wasn’t even enjoying it anymore. I was walking and thinking, thinking and walking, and I decided there in the snowy streets that I was going to break the thread. I was going to stop posting art.

    I wasn’t going to stop making art, but I wasn’t going to push it out into social media because doing that part of the creative process had gotten out of hand and was ruining the joy for me.

    I still draw. I still paint. I still make something that I’m excessively proud of and I’ll post it, but I do it for the right reasons, I think, and skip the duty to perform almost entirely these days.