Ambivalence is Death by 1000 Cuts
there are many axes on which you can slice people, but my favorite is:
does a person have predominantly productive or consumptive tendencies?
Some people have a compulsion to make things. Personally, I have a compulsion to yap. My mind’s so much of a mess that if I don’t yap, a low-grade depression starts to settle into my life. I guess you call this high-grade neuroticism.
Anyway, I’ve come to realize something about art and creation. I always had this sense that people make things to share. In some sense, the quality of a creation is measured by the relationship you have with the creation.
If you watch a movie, and it evokes a sense of joy, understanding, or hope in you, then it’s surely a good movie. Same goes with other mediums. If your relationship with that piece is positive (in any sense of the word), then it’s good art!
But when interacting with a piece, there are not two bodies in interaction. There are three – you, the art, and the artist.
The relationship between myself and what I make has always been tenuous. I hate most things I create. Frankly, most of it is mediocre, and to know that I created that mediocrity is soul-crushing. I feel like I’ve made the world uglier by bringing such things into existence.
And inevitably, you care about the relationship your creations have with the people who consume them.
Will they like it?
Will people say mean things about it?
Will it be ignored
God, people must think I’m a fucking idiot.
The internet has dramatically altered this dynamic between creation and consumer. When you were small, you only had a few people to share creations with. Friends or family, who you know will think positively of you, despite whatever they think of the art.
But now there’s a compulsion to share with many orders of magnitude more people. To have an “audience” or a “community”. And nearly everybody has this ability nowadays (over half the world is now connected to the Internet, and by the end of the decade it’ll be >80%).
The world is unkind to people who want to create. The most likely response to publishing anything is silence. Even things that are good – great, even – will be ignored.
But most people do not make great things. Not every time, not most of the time, and sometimes never. Mediocre art does not get appreciated, it gets ignored or critiqued.
And with far, far, far more consumers and critics than creators and appreciators – where does that leave the artist?
Ambivalence is death by a thousand cuts.
The most important lesson you can teach anyone who wants to make things in the 21st century is to ignore everything that isn’t related to your creative process. Ignore feedback, ignore critiques, ignore your friends, family, strangers, and yourself. The only things you need to focus on are the things that encourage you to keep on creating.
If those things are your internal state or your friends or your family, then of course pay attention to them. But most people will have no strong feelings about what you do. It’s more likely people do things to discourage than encourage you (whether by accident or intention).
The only relationship that matters is the one between you and your process for creation. You must find the things that give you energy to create more and only feed that. I repeat: You must find the things that give you energy to create and only feed that.