Creative Pressure and Full Days
This was originally published in my Prime Lenses Newsletter. You can sign-up for a weekly update to your inbox here.
If you’ve listened to the show for any time at all you’ll know I take my camera EVERYWHERE. I wear it on the school run. I take a camera to the shops, I wear my camera while I’m strapped into my airplane seat! It recently occurred to me that while I do think it’s a good idea to take a camera everywhere, there is an unintended consequence of doing that. I am putting myself under pressure all the time to create. To deliver. The endless stream of thoughts and images from the various colourful apps on our phones reinforce this idea.
Gotta be out there hustling/ making images otherwise what are you doing? This came up in my conversation with Sean Tucker in episode 23;
"Yeah but my schedule is always very very scant like I mean I never wanted, I couldn't make a video every week I don't have an interesting thing to say every week"
It also came up in the last 24 hours as I was putting this email together. Listener to the show, Tom was out in the world making images and messaged me some pictures with the caption “Reasons I take my camera everywhere.”.
I have struggles some weeks with the newsletter too. Am I adding value by putting something out? Do folks even want to read something each week?
Well, mercifully for you, things can ebb and flow. Sometimes they’re long and sometimes they’re short. This week it’s short-ish. I’m giving myself a break from carrying a camera EVERYWHERE.
Instead, I’m going to focus on something I heard on The Good Life Project Podcast. I’ve made minor edits for clarity.
Craig Mod: [01:32:46] Fullness of days. … how do I maximize the number of days that at the end of the day, I slide into bed and I am just totally used up in the but used up by the best possible things, and I just feel a fullness that I could not have played the cards that were dealt to me that day any better. I’m purposely vague about it, because that sense of fullness can come from so many different things.
So when I’m on a walk, it’s about the physical act of walking. The saying hello to all these new people meet, hearing their stories, getting to the inn or the hotel at the night, and spending the 4 or 5 hours writing, editing, reflecting on the day. That is its own kind of fullness. And then there’s obviously fullness of family and spending a day with my stepdaughter, bringing her to New Zealand to go to school or whatever. And like, those are big days where I’m not doing anything that looks like work. But at the end of the day, I’m getting in bed and going, wow, okay, couldn’t have done more with that day. And so I think if you keep that sort of compass point on the horizon of like fullness a full day, and the difficulty is that you need to build up an archetype of what a full day looks like and what that feels like.
And I think for a lot of people, you haven’t experienced a full day. And I think you can kind of say, what aren’t full days as a way to try to get to what our full days are? I think swiping on TikTok for four hours automatically means that cannot be a full day. So anytime your agency is taken away in service to some kind of capitalistic or corporate hunger, I think you are immediately removing full day-ness from things. I think you can have a rich full day of playing video games, but it has to be the right kind of video game. During Covid, one of my things was to play Zelda with my daughter. Zelda is a great example of a game that is not trying to take away from you. You buy it once, you own it. It’s not a casino, it’s not a jackpot machine.
You build up skills inside the game of how to play it, how to use it, and there is a concrete kind of completion zone, whereas something like Candy Crush is just pure casino, right? So like, can you have a full day having played Zelda? Sure. You can do like ten hours of Zelda and like be like,
“oh my God, I went on this amazing adventure in Hyrule.”
But if you do ten hours of Clash of Clans, absolutely not. You’ve just thrown that away. You’ve burned that day in service to actors with malevolence towards you as a user. You know, Nintendo is one of these great companies that I think does respect, for the most part, its customers in a way that’s pretty rare today. … So when I say that the good life is a life of full days, it can take many, many different forms.
So that’s what I’m going to do. Take away the physical act of having something with me at all times for arbitrary reasons which leads to making product which may not be useful which then needs to be catalogued or processed and stored. That can feel like fullness but might actually just be busywork. I’ll let you know how I get on and would love to know if you struggle with this too.