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I’m sure that, in fifty years or so, I’ll be interviewed on a big talk show or the like about my long and storied career in the arts, my position as one of the world’s most prolific artists (which is inevitable at this point considering the amount of material I’ve produced), and I’ll be asked what my secret to success is. And I’ll respond:
“You have to be willing to lose everything. You need to dedicate every waking moment to the creative process. If you can do that, success is virtually guaranteed. If you can’t do that- if ideas don’t leap into your head like ammunition from the barrel of an automatic machine gun- then success isn’t guaranteed. And the more time you spend doing something else, the less time you’ll have to make art. Time is a finite resource and must at all times be accounted for.”
I recently picked up a copy of a zine, Yellow Rake #30, by Brian Polk. Brian is one of Denver’s resident satirists and I’ve read his stuff a couple times in Birdy- I found it mildly amusing, he seems to have a reasonably dry affect and tosses a couple zingers in here and there, even if his subject matter isn’t always the most interesting. However, there was an article which wasn’t written by Brian, it was by someone else, and it wasn’t even a humor article per se- it was more about the creative process, and this one guy’s perspective on art, and his place in the world as an artist, as he puts it.
This article essentially boiled down in a digestible blend all the arguments I can think of against living like this guy. This guy attempts to be profound but comes off looking like a supreme asshat, and I don’t mean to say that maybe he didn’t have good intentions going into this article- but he really misses the wider picture.
The article goes into detail about the guy’s daily routine, and how he works a job which demands ten hours a day for four days a week, with three days a week off. He describes his schedule in depth- how after work he’s drained of all his creative energy and has no ideas anymore. He repeats, twice in the same article, as if not to sound annoying, “I’m not complaining, just explaining.” Yet he fails to explain so many crucial things about his mentality, his underlying hangups, his psyche. And this fascinates me.
My daily schedule goes as follows: Wake up at 2 P.M. or around that, write some shit for a couple hours. Work on smaller projects like this essay you’re currently reading. Tackle the big fish. Bring out at least one page of a comic I’m working on. Print some copies of my comics, then burn some tapes on my tape deck. Tackle the smaller fish. Film a video, edit it. Later on, I might walk to an open mic to consume 4 or more hours of local music. While I’m listening to this music, I might draw more comics. Then I walk home. After that I spend about 5 more hours doing all the stuff I just listed over again, before going to sleep around 3 or 4 A.M. to repeat the process the next day, unless I have a particular event in mind.
I’ve been doing that, repeatedly, for around 4 years at this point, ever since I graduated high school, and I have no regrets. I feel entirely content. And the reason I’m able to feel content is because the creative process is the only thing capable of bringing me legitimate joy. Nothing else does the trick. I’m asexual and sober, drugs and sex don’t provide me with any incentive. Even food doesn’t, really, anymore. The only thing which makes me happy is to get my thoughts out on paper or whatever my medium of choice happens to be.
The secret to living a fulfilling life is to only do things that make you happy and to avoid doing things that make you sad. This might sound selfish, or indulgent, or even hedonistic, which it is- my argument goes as follows. I’m an Atheist, so the Protestant Work Ethic simply doesn’t exist for me. I don’t believe that working hard will earn me any favor in the eyes of God. I don’t believe that working hard will get me a prime spot in Heaven. I especially don’t believe that selling my time to a third party is more beneficial to society than utilizing my time effectively to achieve work which will make me happy and which serves my own fulfillment rather than God’s, which seems to be the sort of legitimately productive work which has been discouraged by the Protestant mindset for the last couple centuries.
As I see it, one cannot claim to be an Atheist and simultaneously embrace Protestant ideals. That is a flagrant contradiction. If there is no God, then work is meaningless, and everything you do is meaningless, even art. Nihilism is the only intellectually honest position. Ergo, money and society are exposed as the blatant social constructs they are, with only the meaning we bestow onto them. It can be frightening to view reality this way, as a set of human constructs beyond the self-evident properties of the natural universe. But it is correct, and no amount of delusion will change that.
Art provides me with meaning, it is all that has ever provided me with meaning or purpose of any kind. It’s how I avoid giving into nihilism, to appreciate the beauty and complexity of the human brain. Chumps like our friend, though, give me second thoughts about that complexity, because his understanding of the artistic profession is so limited and fundamentally broken that I wonder whether there is any redemption for our species.
I did not ask to be born, nobody does. And when I die- after a reasonable 80 years or so- I will cease to exist. Therefore I must maximize the amount of fulfillment and enjoyment I get while I’m here, and if that comes at the expense of others- which I don’t believe it does in any way, but if it does, then so be it- I must. Otherwise I’ll cease to exist prematurely. Undesirable things are undesirable. Desirable things are desirable. This is a simple equation.
I feel selfish these days, I’ve started to notice that, how all my artist friends see me as entitled because they believe they have to work long hours and don’t create as much art as a result. Which isn’t to say they actively guilt me for it or anything- but the sentiment is there nonetheless, that art should only be viewed as a hobby and has no actual value as a tangible commodity in an open market, which I know is bullshit.
In the article, the chump goes on to state that he embraces his state as an artist, he owns it, that going full-time has never worked for him. Yet to many artists, in particular with artists, I’m not sure why- being an artist is more than an occupation. It’s an intrinsic aspect of one’s identity, and to imply that someone can simply discard that aspect is dehumanizing and invalidating. It’s as if someone were to suggest that a gay guy could make a couple extra bucks by becoming a male prostitute for widows, engaging in sexual activity he doesn’t prefer against his consent. We would reject such an absurd notion- yet we remark snidely that artists should not consider quitting their unpleasant day jobs, as if doing so would not result in the formation of a more balanced, healthy, productive mindset.
I have yet to meet any full-time artists who spend every second creating, as I do, who have a pathological drive to create endlessly, with no other motives or objectives. Many of the local artists resort to weed or alcohol to numb themselves from the mundanity of their positions, most of them complain bitterly on a frequent basis, very few of them are productive. They lack incentive, drive, and most importantly they lack confidence in their own potential.
I cannot respect, on a fundamental level, insecure people without motivation. I respect creativity, I disrespect willful ignorance. Creativity and imagination are vital to the human experience, they define life itself in so many ways, and with every day that passes I feel more and more isolated and distant from my peers and I wonder whether I should become a thousand times more brilliant like a red giant, eating up the cosmos with an insatiable fury, or whether I should retract and get a job processing forms which don’t relate to me or my lived experience in any way, become a mediocre white dwarf amid a cluster of other white dwarves. I don’t think I’m capable of that.
Near the end of the article, our friend posits a hypothetical scenario where he lives in the mountains and a publishing company offers him $20,000 for a novel and he’s given 6 months to complete the novel, which he describes as an ideal dream scenario that he would find creatively fulfilling. Ignoring altogether the fact that’s not how publishing deals work, that no publishing house will even bother to approach you if you don’t have viable material to begin with, and considering that this lunatic sells the majority of his week to a third party- a proposition so absurd that it has never once crossed my mind- he will probably never have a novel anyone would consider worth reading, because new, interesting ideas are not born out of an existence where you spend four days a week in the same place doing the same thing over and over again.
I eschew routine in favor of unpredictable novelty. I spend hours at a time walking to meaningless locations, I explore abandoned parking lots and stare at passing traffic and wait at bus stops while blasting hard rock on my Walkman. This is how you encounter interesting scenarios which can then be transmuted into fiction, via direct exposure to the world.
The key issue with this man’s perspective is that he views his situation as unique, or worthy of writing an article about, when it is not remotely unique and is rather entirely systemic. He is no different from the majority of artists, who lack the motivation to create art because they fail to invest a majority of their time into creating art, which produces a self-fulfilling, vicious circle of wasted potential. I believe that an artist can only be legitimately fulfilled if they spend every waking second of their lives creating something meaningful. It’s worked for me.
On top of that, society itself views art as an unnecessary indulgence- producers of content are not viewed as important people with interesting brains which could be harnessed, which works great for most people who aren’t artists until they have nothing to watch or read.
Society, though, as mentioned previously, is a human construct. Money is a human construct. Much of the material world is a manifest illusion, we speak things and ideas into being. We have created, through our own human error, a world full of artists doing jobs they hate, which is a waste of everyone’s time, including the companies which hire those artists, who could instead hire people who are not predisposed to creation. There are people like that, who don’t find art all that necessary or fulfilling, and they work great in a professional capacity.
It amazes me that the amount of blatantly stupid ideas stuffed into this article aren’t considered massive cliches yet by the creative field. I have heard, time and again, the whining of a thousand people who would all be better off doing what they enjoy instead of what they don’t enjoy, but refuse to do so. It is completely inane, and I can’t allow myself to be distracted by it. I must create legitimately compelling stuff in the face of repetitive, bland dreck like this, because if I don’t, then nobody will.
If the conditions for artists are to improve, artists must respect their inherent value and demand adequate compensation for their labor. I don’t, always, because I believe in forcing free art onto the world whether the world wants it or not. But artists as a whole should absolutely focus on making money and pursuing their careers with borderline manic obsession. And if you die from starvation, then so be it. It is ultimately better to live a short, fulfilling life than a long, unfulfilling life, and if the world fails to accommodate someone’s existence, that is the fault of the world and not the corpse. The world should feel guilt.
I’ve never found Dilbert interesting, and I like to make fun of Dilbert as often as possible, because Dilbert is blatant corporate propaganda, and when Scott Adams came out earlier this year as the alt-right scumbag I always suspected, I was amazed at how many people didn’t even know who Scott Adams was. They didn’t know that this awful clip art looking comic strip was penned by a raving maniac, but I always knew that, because I had read his books and I read him drone on and on about how much his time at Bell sucked, and how much he hated his job, and how clever he thought he was for making a comic strip where he made fun of an inherently unsustainable system, as if he were the first person to observe such a thing.
There’s a line to be drawn, I think, between the Scott Adamses of the world and the George Herrimans, and that consists of the difference between a boring hack who viewed comics as a means of selling dangerous ideas to gullible people, and a legitimate cartoonist who viewed comics as a viable medium. One of them seems absolutely miserable and tired, and the other as far as I’m aware lived a happy life until death.
Maybe I am entitled, or selfish, but at least I’m not Scott fuckin’ Adams.
At the end of the article, the chump says that it doesn’t matter whether one’s job is art or whether one has a job that supports their art. I would have to disagree. That point does matter, in that it can make the difference between a phenomenal sensation and a forgotten footnote, a satisfying time on Earth or a premature departure via suicide. And the amount of time one pours into their art is absolutely a factor. If I came home drained of my creative energy every day, I would want to die.
I try to be as encouraging to my artist friends as possible, but many of them seem depressed and miserable, and being around them infects me with negative energy which causes me to feel empty and sad. I don’t know how there aren’t more people like me, but that’s what happens when you live under a system which is motivated to crush you. You have to crush it instead, through the power of your own will.
I can’t really take artists who aren’t full-time artists seriously, the same way I couldn’t take someone seriously who said they were a vegan but then ate a hamburger in front of me and said that they had to eat the hamburger because the meat industry was too powerful. That’s blatant hypocrisy. If you can be a vegan and refrain from eating meat- which I would say is much less helpful to society than the inception of novel ideas- then you can be a full-time artist and refrain from doing work which doesn’t accomplish anything meaningful.
The chump says that the sign of success is that he’s still doing it, but I would argue that the sign of success is that I show up in Google search results and he doesn’t, and that’s either because he doesn’t write anymore- the magazine came out in 2016- or because he never bothered to pour enough time into his art to the extent that people would care.
But if you pour every second of your time into art, I do think it’s inevitable that people will start caring. I don’t believe it’s possible, generally, even in a piss-poor environment like Denver, to create as much shit as I do without anyone ever taking notice.
Simple logic. 1+1=2.