Continued from an earlier post: Creative Positive (Part 1)

I need to routinely remind myself that every time I don’t post something positive in my feed it leaves a gap for something negative to slip in and take up the space I left for it.

The darkness is insidious. It is sweet like raw sugar upon the tongue, lighting up our emotions with an ability to draw us in and feast upon our time and energy.

You may be reading these words—all of them, the project and every post and every image and all the adjacent works of public performative creativity that goes on around it—and pondering the purpose. 

I have a hundred reasons to write and create and sketch and make and build and do interesting things. But I have a very short list of reasons to share: it is, yes, about money and brand and fame, of course it is, it always is—but it is also about balance. It’s about holding my little patch of digital ground against the darkness. 

It is about creating human-made ideas and sharing them into the ocean of slop.

It is about being a net-positive in an electronic sea of rage.

It is about finding the good of the world and launching it back into the universe for something bigger than myself.

So long as I have hope that the world still needs something bigger and brighter than the dim shadows of this societal chasm we seem to be traversing I will get up each morning and try my best to find something positive to make …and share.

Branched · Part 1 Continued in Creative Positive (Part 2)

I need to routinely remind myself that every time I don’t post something positive in my feed it leaves a gap for something negative to slip in and take up the space I left for it.

Our feeds, all of them, are filled to the brim with algorithmically pushed trash.

Some of it is important. Some of if drives awareness of injustice and tragedy. Some of it sparks action and reaction. Some of it is vital to understanding the world, society and the universe.

But creatives have an important role to play too: positive balance. 

It is not our jobs to join the rage.

It is our job to balance it all out, to remind people that there is beauty in the world worth fighting for, and it is our job to maintain the flame of art and story and music and hope in a wasteland of anger and AI slop.

It is so easy as an artist to reject the darkness of these platforms and avoid them, and I have struggled myself, even recently, trying to understand my role there.

The way I see it? Our role is not to repost angry memes, or rant about authoritarian politics, or even rage against the machine. 

Rather, our role, the creative’s role, is to keep playing the music of humanity in all its forms and make sure when the dawn returns there is still a bit of our humanity left to remind us why we were fighting the darkness at all.