Who is this even for anyway?
You know when you wake up late at night and anyway you turn you just can’t drop back off to sleep? Inevitably your mind starts racing and all the problems of the day come flooding in. All those micro-tasks that even if you were to jump straight out of bed and attend to, you wouldn’t be in a position to do them because it's the middle of the night.
That was me last night. While I lay there staring blankly at the hazy darkness trying my best not to disturb the other occupants of the room, my wife and baby daughter, a thought struck me. You know those nighttime thoughts that you wish you kept pen and paper close by for? Those unforced moments of clarity that can’t help themselves but to arrive at the quietest times of day.
This particular thought was, who are you doing these things for? and the more I mulled it over, the more I realised I hadn’t really considered this question. I mean the audience they are just faceless and nameless like we all are in a crowd.
When I attempt to create something, anything, who am I doing it for? if I’m honest, I mean truly honest, then I would have to say….Myself, but not myself as an audience member, myself as in my egoic self, the one that craves recognition. This is the thought that kept me up and it was certainly not something I could attend to at that moment.
What happens when you create from this place? In a word, anxiety. This can be a real stumbling block when you are trying to create things on a regular basis. Especially when it is for consumption on social media or the internet in general where every post or piece of content can seem like a gauge of self-worth.
As an artist, this is not the approach I would like to take. I would love to think that the things I make come from a place of inspiration and are unfettered by what the outcome might be. It’s just so hard to resist that little hit of dopamine when the mind wanders to virality, or likes, or comments, or shares or any of those other ticks checks and boxes containing a little feel-good factor.
This begs the question of how much of what is created now is done from that place of sheer joy of the process; Of a goalless goal, To climb a mountain because, well to quote William Shatner, “Because it’s there”.
I think as an artist this is one of the two purest forms of self-expression there is. Either you create from a place of inspiration or from the repeated performance of a well-honed craft.
This is at odds with the modern content creation treadmill we are find ourselves on. I mean the best things in life take a little time to do, right? Maybe I am just finding another way to procrastinate.
