here is my thesis the internet and its Almighty algorithm is training us all to abandon our own creative instincts and instead replace them with shame so much shame and this is not a secret or even a fresh take the internet used to be something that was inspiring and slowly it has morphed into something that we're all addicted to looks like a gigantic commercial Wasteland full of slob and it just makes you hate yourself I have this hunch a suspicion or Theory whatever you want to call it uh please do confirm it cuz I've noticed this
in myself and my friends but every single creative person I know who makes a lot of work has been publishing less and less of it so much less and it doesn't mean that they are making less necessarily it just means that they are overthinking themselves the algorithm has literally trained them to doubt their creativity I've noticed in myself that when it comes to making things a big section that would have previously just been used to make something better is now focusing on whether or not something will perform well and the anxieties around that are pretty
easy to understand I think you know art super subjective social media metrics super objective suddenly we're applying numbers to things and we can rank them based on popularity alone and that's really weird and super reductive but it gets in your head doesn't it and when it gets in your head you start publishing less you start doubting yourself more you start getting into these creative blocks these Spirals and you start thinking God damn this is never going to happen I'm never going to just be able to bust through break through whatever this thing is and actually
just create for the sake of creativity I bet if you were nodding along to this you had have a graveyard of projects that you would love to share with the world but you are too scared to share with the world and the reason that I would make that bet is because that is exactly where I'm at I have so much abandoned work I have so much unpublished work I have so much work that just haunts me that stares at me and is like hey put this online join the conversation come on yell into the void
with other people it might do something people might like it people might not like it what if they don't like it what if you publish it and everybody's angry at you God damn what a waste of energy I don't want to feel like this I don't want to spend my time thinking about this freaking gigantic pikme machine I don't want to lose creative momentum to social media but I have and I have to admit that to myself I really really have and I think that the only way is through so I've given myself two challenges
we'll get to the second goal right at the end but for now let's focus on the main one I want to resurrect an abandoned [Music] [Music] project the disposability culture that has been placed on all of us by the internet that says if it wasn't made in the last week it's irrelevant I hate that so here's what I've done right where did I put it hello last year I spent the year writing this doom and Bloom the case for creativity in a world hooked on Panic by the way it's available for pre-order check the link
in the description this comes out in May and if you buy it now you'll help me out a lot anyway I spent my year last year writing and drawing this which meant I also spent the last year writing and drawing a lot of things that didn't see the lighted day I have so many off Cuts I have probably like two extra books worth of stuff that didn't make this book and not all of it is trash I want to sift through it and find the treasure so I got this old story that I found got
all these magazine parts and then I want to reimagine it I want to repurpose it I want to use it I want to turn it into something beautiful and to complement that I've decided to use an art form that reflects this collage both my stories and these old magazines were headed to the bin but I'm going to intervene I'm going to go against the algorithm and say nah you're not disposable you just haven't met I'm going to make something cool in addition to the internet making me feel like only perfect things deserve to get seen
the general pace of technology is also making me feel like I'm losing touch with the analog world so it's real nice just ripping out Bits of [Music] Paper what actually gave me this idea was I made a tour poster recently for a band called Betty Rays I also made their album artwork here's some work I made why didn't I publish this why didn't I post this I don't know I don't know man I don't know but I love it I'm really really really proud of it Go me I don't know why that feels so weird
to say now the final step of making this is to actually share it share it with people I know social media makes me feel like unless something is better than freaking perfect it doesn't deserve to see eyeballs but I also know that if I spend all of my time polishing something I kill all the flavor it ends up as this vanilla piece of freaking garbage and I end up hating it but when I make something that's real I'm proud why do anything at all by Campell Walker AKA struthless let's start at the start you don't
have to do anything cool you can put your phone down and stare into space until you starve to death surprise most people don't survive [Music] dying at the risk of sounding sentimental every single person you have ever loved loved shoved kissed missed glared out stared at hated rated or tolerated will be dead this time next Century dead scientists estimate that in about 5 billion years the sun will explode taking out our planet like a gorilla would a weasel your entire existence is confined to our lonely Earth and the 86 is rotations around the sun your
body has granted you some people theorize that there's more Beyond this model experience and I hope they're right other people theorize that there isn't and sometimes I hope they're right too but whether you believe in the afterlife or you think we'll all be worm food it doesn't hurt to treat this Earthly stint as your one and only shot the not so cool part is how easy it is to feel useless hopeless and helpless if you hadn't been born the world would almost certainly still have its famines floods Wars and pandemics unless of course you caused
one of these things in which case dude not cool a few were never here people would still be horrible in comment sections old history books would still age like milk and some shadowy cabal would still cover up the fact that aliens definitely exist but the cool part is it's not over yet without you the world stays the same with you it can change ideally for the better this is where I got up to and so I shared up to here after I shared I immediately realized why sharing is so important the things that are inside
you need to get out into the world for them to fully complete the cycle and actually become treasure and this yeah was the thought I had immediately after sharing this but not for the reason that you're thinking the story is actually completely related yeah I posted this seemed to connect with people I was gearing up to make another one and then I stood up and fainted I felt dizzy like something is not right dizzy so I go to the hospital and a doctor tested my blood and then told me that my hemoglobin levels were 66
now two bits of context firstly you need hemoglobin to live and secondly here's a chart of what my levels should have been my levels were too low for this chart I was literally off the chart so I get not one not two but five blood transfusions I end up staying in the hospital for a bit it's pretty hectic definitely does not pair well with having a toddler and a brand new baby anyway as I had the blood of five strangers pumped into my body I felt myself coming back to life I didn't realize just how
sick I'd been the whole thing left me in this state of awe my new blood it didn't belong to just anyone it belonged to really really good people charitable Beautiful People the kind of people who donate when they see a blood drive what really hit me is how much of a difference all of that blood made when it was in me not because the blood changed but because the body changed its context changed in the bodies of the people who had made the blood yeah that blood was helping them it had an impact but they
were also healthy enough to spare a pint and then go about their day but when that same blood was in my body it brought me back from death's door and the more I thought about it the more I realize that it's the exact same with creativity what you make what you give to the world to you it might feel like nothing special but what we often forget when we make stuff is the impact on the other end what happens when our work Finds Its way to other people especially people who are feeling not a blood
deficiency but a connection to other people deficiency what I'm saying is what might seem like a disposable idea to you to somebody else might be life-changing of course there there's one more layer to this Blood metaphor and that is I didn't even know I needed it I knew I felt off but I didn't know quite how sick I was until I couldn't stand so if nothing else I hope you look at your work all the work you've made all the work you will make and instead of seeing it through the bullying eyes of the algorithm
I hope you see it Through The Eyes of somebody who needs it this is uh more or less how I say creativity you got two parts you have the part where you express your inner world and then you have the part where you edit whatever this expression is to make sense to the outer World a piece of creative work starts with something that's going on in here A Feeling a memory whatever it happens to be and you express it you put it into something you make something maybe you write maybe you turn it into art
whatever it happens to be of course the other part of the joy is refining whatever that thing is cuz while a first art can be Roar and fun there's also a joy in getting things up to a certain standard and that is the editing for the out world there's a quote uh I'll flash whoever set it on screen because it ain't in my inner world right now that says you can't create and edit at the same time they are different processes anyway the uh reason that I am breaking things into this is because these two
things they make stuff right but what I think has happened is the internet has made this one feel way more important to the point where this one is losing relevance now it's just make stuff for the outer World make stuff for the outer world did I just make the next song of the summer what do you think make stuff for the outer world it's like nauseating dude anyway there's one more side effect which is even if this is abandoned suddenly your inner world looks like a whole lot of this so it's like everything that you're
expressing is just a mirror for slop ah right that's my rant what do we do about it so this brings me to my second challenge of this video and if you're inspired by the first challenge to turn trash into treasure then uh you can tack this one on as well the second challenge is to you correct the balance earlier I talked about creativity as two processes expressing your inner world and editing it so it makes sense I think a correction is overdue at least for me for a while and that is I want to focus
a little bit less on editing and a little bit more on expressing my inner world I think uh I don't know ah man with everything just looking so freaking polished and information being so accessible and AI making all of this like artwork in the space of seconds I think what I am personally missing is human interaction and that Roar expression so I know what I want to be and uh this video is a step toward it all right enjoy have a beautiful day I hope you uh make some cool stuff and if you do tag
me tag me in it I want to say it uh once again check out my book please unless you don't want to that's chill I'm super super super proud of this I put myself into it anyway have a beautiful day catch you [Music]
