So you think about making art, but you don't do it. You like the idea of being a creator, but that's just not in the cards for you. You want to try, but you won't.
I'll kill you!
Sloths
Not everyone is an artist. You don't have to be an artist. It's your free time. It's your life. Your prerogative. Except it isn't! You are a nonfungible individual.
Your unique perception of the universe, the potentialities that lie under your skin, your imagination machine detecting unrealized dreams, it is not replaceable! There's not going to be another one of you. So if you're not going to put in the work to make that idle fantasy that could have been real real, it will not exist.
You're depriving the universe of something that it literally cannot have without you. To be clear, it's not like if you don't have any artistic ideas, you have to figure some out and make them happen, or else you're evil. It's that a lot of people do harbor creative passions and have genuine inspiration and real dreams, and instead of watering them, they let them die.
And I think that's wrong.
The art objects are how you transmit the transcendence, the conceptual performance is an object. Don't just fantasize about how cool it would be if you did make the art. Just do it! It's so much better.
Greedy
You will find this losely interrelated with the above, but there's a fundamental difference of outcome.
The sloths never start.
The greedy never finish.
What are you going to do, keep the art all to yourself? You greedy little... Stop hogging it! Share it with the boys. Distribute the bounty amongst the proletariat. Don't open a skittles packet in class unless you have enough for everybody.
Perfectionism, the sloth sin, cripples you, preventing you from even beginning your projects based on a comparison to a standard you set for yourself.
And if you don't reach that, then it's not even worth it because you're not going to be cool and a genius and people won't understand your truth. The flip side is you overcome your sloth, you get a first draft down, and then you start tinkering and tweaking and thinking and... then you never actually get around to release it, yet managing to maintain the fantasy that if you ever did release it, if you ever did actually get around to finishing it, then you'd be famous and rich immediately.
When you hoard your projects in a perpetual purgatory of perfectionist process, you're just convincing yourself that it's a labor of love and you're doing it because you care so much. And you know what? Trust me, I do understand obsessing over details and caring a lot about the quality of something, playing things close to the chest until they are ready to release. This is a good thing. Perfectionism is not an inherently bad impulse, but you have to earn that.
You don't get to be a perfectionist if it is unproven up to this point, if you can even make a thing.
First you have to prove you can just start, develop, complete and release anything.
To complete and release or perform a piece is an essential part of the creative process. And if you're not doing it, you have not experienced the full cycle. You have not done the artist thing yet. You're not perfecting your craft. You're shielding yourself from vulnerability. There are three prime functions of the complete peace and release feat.
- A. Working on one project ad nauseam is not how you gain experience and skill. You gain experience by completing many projects. If you have only played one video game for six million hours, I don't consider you an experienced gamer.
- B. Uncompleted passion projects function like blockage in your creative system. While you're still enamored and honeymooning with this big special idea that's so important to you and you're always talking about but you never got around to finishing, you've cut off the pathway for new ideas to form within you. Until you release that blockage, you're not going to have as many new ideas.
- C. Releasing builds confidence while not releasing forces you to linger in fear. Releasing art is a radical defiant act of self-love and bravery. And not like delusional flimsy bravery in the face of hopelessness. It's a process that actively, literally teaches you your value and competent by proving that it's true.
Here's a maxim:
Stop saving your best ideas for later. The time is now!
Put the best thing you've got on wax right now, drop it and abandon it. Because the universe deserves your best. It deserves your best right now. And while you're being precious about what you think is your best you're ever going to come up with, you are actively performing a lack of confidence in your own ability. You're operating on a mindset of artistic scarcity like you've got a limited amount of brilliance in your lifetime.
This brilliant idea that you're holding on to is one of ten brilliant ideas you're ever going to have in your life. And if you let go of this one now, at the inopportune time you're only going to have none. But that's not true! That's not a shard of brilliance that you're losing forever from your dwindling reservoir. The great idea is proof that you are capable of generating great ideas infinitely. If you pulled it off once, it's proof you can pull it off again. And if you keep at it, it's inevitable that not only you're going to reach that level, you're going to exceed it.
If you never clear out that blockage, if you don't teach yourself to complete and relinquish control over your art objects, then you stay afraid of that process and you're just cluttered in there with all your dusty old ideas, not allowing room for new genius to germinate. Here's a test for you. Make something beautiful and delete it. Just get the fuck rid of it. Can you do that? I do that for fun sometimes.