What’s the point of making stuff?

It’s been real quiet around here for a while. 

Justifying creative endeavours can be difficult when money is tight. There are internal and external pressures to focus your time and attention on making money and partaking in a hobby can feel indulgent and leave you feeling guilty. Creative hobbies are particularly vulnerable to this. While hobbies like exercising or playing sports have clear intrinsic value, creative hobbies may seem to others to offer nothing to those that pursue them; at least, nothing tangible. There is pressure to then build extrinsic value into creative hobbies, especially in an age of YouTube, Patreon, and social media. Making money off of your hobby is a dream, perhaps, and achievable for some, but the prevalence of this phenomenon plants the seed of commodification in the back of the mind of every creative at every level. The pursuit of creativity can then become something else entirely.

I love this hobby. There are so many people designing, writing, and drawing fantastic work. But I won’t lie that even at the tiny scale of my own contributions to this community, I feel pressure to create something worth selling. I worry about how the things I want to make fit into the space. I worry that my ideas aren’t novel enough, or are too similar to someone else’s. Creativity for its own sake has been difficult for me to enjoy for the last few months. My output was paralyzed by these thoughts and then by the guilt of not producing anything. It came to feel rather pointless to try to work on anything at all because someone had probably already done it better.

But why? What is the point of creativity? I’ve never sold anything I’ve made; I’ve had some short stories published in college magazines or online, but that’s it. What gets me excited about making things isn’t the prospect of selling it to someone, or even showing it to someone: it’s having a cool idea, or figuring out a problem, or making something good. That is the intrinsic value of creativity. The process is the point. The product is just what comes out the other end sometimes. And it doesn’t just have value. When I’m making something and I truly care about it? There’s little else out there that can top that feeling. I’m obsessed with it. It’s more fulfilling to me than almost any other way I could spend my time. At least when I don’t get in my own way.

If you’ve read this far, thank you. I hope you can take away something useful from it.