Friday, November 22, 2019
Help! Life is good and I don't know what to do about it!!!
For the past month+, everything I've posted was a complete or mostly complete draft that I had written at some point prior, in some cases much prior. I've got a handful of drafts nearly finished that I just can't wrap up, and a handful of ideas I haven't started writing yet and haven't been able to focus on. Only a couple of those are from more recently than a month ago and I have written nothing in that time. I haven't gamed in that time either, although that may change this weekend. I can kind of feel the bug coming back. The problem is that life has been really good lately, and I'm afraid that life being good is killing me creatively. I keep trying to remind myself that Republicans and Boomers are ruining the world and the president of the United States is a rapist traitor who launders money for the Russians and China is committing genocide and climate change is plausibly going to make my 401K irrelevant, and I am genuinely upset about all of these things, but on a personal level life is good, and apparently I lose creative inspiration and/or motivation to create when I'm happy? I don't even think I'm really happy, just the closest fascimile of happiness that I'm capable of experiencing that will likely crumble at any moment anyway, but in the meantime I don't know what to do about this. I'm trying to convince myself that this creative break will give me a chance to refresh and I'll come back stronger, but what if I just don't? I think I need to make a concerted effort here, but I don't know how or towards what ends. What is something reasonable and within my wheelhouse you'd like to see from me? Or maybe something outside my wheelhouse? This is a rant. Hopefully I'll have a real post soon.
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I’m sorry the great world keeps ruining your bad time. This must be very hard for you. Maybe you could worry about anthrogenic continental drift or the number of straws in the ocean or fossil fuel company CEOs still not being prosecuted or maybe someone, somewhere is thinking things you disagree with?
ReplyDeleteSee, there’s lots of other things out there to upset you!
lol ya I deserve the sass. I dunno, I mean all of those things make me sad and angry, but it's a different kind of sad and angry I guess :/.
DeleteYeah I sassed. I feel bad for sassing. There’s nothing we can do about big problems like that, not by ourselves. I like to think of it as bizarre performance art.
DeleteCreative block is serious. But not deadly. You will have more things to say soon.
I get what you mean. I think a lot about creativity, identity, and nihilism (fortunately my significant other is also deeply interested in such matters, so it's a regular topic of discussion), and how they are related.
ReplyDeleteI think one can consciously divorce creativity from feeling bad (because ultimately it's a learnt habit), although at the cost of expending extra effort to motivate oneself - it all depends on one's priorities, though.
Even just posting this was cathartic, and I actually did get a few ideas last night that I will hopefully actually start writing soon!
DeleteI 100% agree that being unhappy and being creative should not have to be causally linked, but that idea of learned association and having to put in the extra effort to retrain oneself to be creative while not unhappy is an interesting way of thinking about things.
When I was more unhappy, creating was an escape. Now that I'm feeling better about things, it requires more effort because I could easily just... not. But clearly it's bothering me that I'm not, so I'll have to figure out how to make it work.
Or just wait until I'm inevitably unhappy again, that's another option!
A few thoughts:
ReplyDeleteIt could be not so much that you're happy now that's draining your mental energy, but rather that your current job is more mentally demanding. Of this I can offer no treatment besides taking longer shits and typing what thoughts you've got on the toilet.
A break can definitely help. Taking a step back for a month or so can see you percolating up ideas that you otherwise would never have had, either because you needed that wider view or had gotten so stuck in a creative rut that you'd become blind to.
Otherwise, as Confucius has said, "a change is as good as a rest". I'm working on a post for the tragically underappreciated challenge Bogeyman's Cave posted here: http://bogeymanscave.blogspot.com/2019/11/a-blogging-challenge-mspaint-monster.html, and have found the changeover from text to visuals has been creatively stimulating.
I've quite enjoyed what you've posted in the last couple months, so I think it's only your frequency and not your quality that's suffered.
The new job is mentally demanding, but they're actually really cool and encourage good work/life balance and to take time to rest if we're not 'in the zone', I think it's more just a mental adjustment cost; it takes me forever to get into a good life flow when things change.
DeleteThat bogeyman's cave post is a cool idea! I've tried stuff like that a few times, but his "bad" art is still I think significantly better than anything I could do 0.o.
I really appreciate your compliment, thank you! Despite my efforts, TNT is not an especially popular game, but it's the first system I've felt really comfortable making new classes for, even compared to OSR / GLOG, so I'm really enjoying it.
In fact, even over the last couple days since making this post, I've got a pretty cool TNT post I'm working on...