WE SHOULD ALL BE DOING LESS

respect your creativity or get suffocated by the algorithm

‘I don’t know what’s going to happen then… All sorts of terrible things?’

I look away as I’m saying it, half-frustrated, quarter-annoyed with my therapist’s surgical precision for tapping into the permeable parts of my brain.

‘What if you allowed yourself to slow down for a moment?’ was the question, and I’m mad. She’s cutting through bone tissue and what I’ve been most anxious to confront. I’m not exactly Tony Soprano in Melfi’s office, letting out a joke or two every time an uncomfortable feeling travels up my throat, but still cocky and ready to attack and don’t feel like advancing into the why I’ve been growing resentful of the things that I love —my writing and creative work— for seemingly no reason. What used to be joy, catharsis, and butterflies is now a chain around my neck I feel I have to wear and make time for, clawing for likes, relevance, staying afloat, and maybe self-esteem. Everyone is doing stuff, and I just want to stare at the wall. Staring into the void is so fulfilling when you’ve outdemanded yourself. As we know, the fastest way to never doing a thing is feeling obliged to do it.

There’s quite a simple explanation for falling off track of your own imprisonment, one I promised would never be a problem because I’m built different, yet here we are. I’ve fallen prey to the productivity machine and let it burn a hole in my stomach. Creativity has turned contractual and pro-rated, oozing acid, with worth entirely associated with and dependent on output. A do-or-die state feels abusive when you’re meant to be creating things. These thoughts aren’t mine — they’re somebody else’s polyester dress I slipped on, but it’s itchy and miserable and tight in the waist. I’m aware that living in a world that profits from your urgency more than it wants your peace is something to resist, sure. Problem is, I’ve never been brave enough to try existing outside of the paradigm: having somewhat given up on tying worth to appearance (don’t try this at home, I beg) I’ve since delegated it to my productivity and result — but in the absence of production and its semantics, I retract into desperate negging. Once again, a complete refusal to just be, not do will do horrific things to an anxious mind. Am I letting my potential go to waste? What’s wrong with me if I can’t have a hit piece every month? Where’s my publisher? Why can’t I come up with new things all the time when others do it easily? But behind every attempt to outrun my natural pace and sensationalize myself lies primal fear and not at all ambition. The fear of everything I have so meticulously curated tied to identity with silk ribbons slipping away.

What would happen if you stopped trying to be the fastest or the greatest? If you didn’t have to excel at everything? If your best was enough? Who are you when you’re not trying to prove?

A downward spiral was inevitable when we all collectively decided to inject optimization into creative work for a little extra plump. A little bit won’t hurt? It’s natural to want to be the best, and now you’ve got the tools to help you. Look what I’ve got on my hands: a demanding day job, creative work on the side, being socially adept, a solid lover, a helpful friend and daughter, can you blame me? Perfect track record of doing everything at the cost of none of it living up to my standards. The paralysis filled days where out-of-breath autopilot is the norm can’t possibly feel good — dig deeper, and the flesh is raw and throbbing. If relevance and validation go out of the window the moment I stop, were they mine to keep in the first place? What are the accolades worth beyond my sleepless nights?

A lot of it comes down to what we’re perpetually running out of: time. It’s the most effervescent yet the most tangible measuring tool we’ve got at our disposal, expanding and contracting reigned by perception. We know the Western idea of time is a commodity made to control and maximize return on investment, with a linear emphasis on the definite, absolutely-happening future. Time is weighed by value — how much are you able and willing to extract out of the shortest timeframe you’re given? What’s meant for measure then turns to a hazard: of course there are more painfully self-referential Substack posts tallying how many pieces to publish in a week to grow in 3-6-12 months than quite literally any other topic. A numbers game or a fool’s game, it’s hard to distinguish at this point.

But time doesn’t have to paralyze us in terror — when not absorbed through the productivity lens, it could soften and ground us instead. I’d like to think that time is not a fixed structure predetermined for me but an infinite resource I’m generating through creation. In the traditional pre-colonial African setting, for instance, this was precisely the case — the flow of time isn’t a linear continuum but a multidimensional concept composed of an extensive past, a present, and virtually no future. According to Mbiti’s work, the dimensions through which time was experienced are Sisa and Zamani. Sisa covers the immediate “now”, both present and past, whereas Zamani is the boundless past reservoir, the dimension in which everything comes to a halting point over the horizon, and where all moments of the immediate past and present ultimately dissolve. The future then is nowhere to be found: a near inconceivable absence of tomorrow for modern Western cultures that experience time in a past-present-future sequence, tethered to output, with our key reference point being the next moment.

The traditional African conception of time reminds us that now is a gift in itself — not because it breeds the future, but because it’s all you’ll ever really get. If time is generated through creative work, then outrunning my brain into the next moment is as torturous as pushing a boulder up the hill — and why I only feel infinite when my creative flow dictates my schedule, not the other way around. Sure, I can’t bend the very structure of the world’s fabric to my liking, and I’m not going to pretend I’m above capitalism and its bills and desires or frivolous metrics of my manmade significance, but I can at least stop feeling guilty about not performing well under something that doesn’t let me sit still in the doing.

Striving for endless output also sends the wrong message: by succumbing to the incessant grind, do I believe that my work isn’t valuable enough to be properly digested, appreciated in slowness, and returned to? That my creativity is replaceable, my thinking interchangeable with everyone else’s? That everything I do is merely for content’s sake? The above is only true if I believe it to be. The game only works when you’re actively participating. What is this need to occupy all the available space anyway? If I vouch for both the quality and the importance of my work —and I do, wholeheartedly— why would I simultaneously believe that I have to outdo myself every time? No one’s keeping score, but as I wrote earlier this year, in an economy where nothing matters, everything is the biggest deal in the world.

Can I create less with more impact?

Viewing creativity as the gravity point around which everything else orbits is something we have to start practicing if we care about our sanity and keeping creation a sustainable long-term practice. That is the end goal. If the process itself is what dictates and collects time as it grows, flourishes, and branches out, then time alone can’t dictate the pace of my engine. There will certainly be days where the output is zero or negative, and growing comfortable with them is essential. Sometimes, when I have nothing to offer beyond my presence, I’d like to shamelessly pull Rick Rubin’s I have no technical ability. I know what I like and what I don’t like. (So what are you being paid for?) The confidence I have in my taste and my ability to express what I feel.

My purest quality work is born when I’m not sweating for it. I’d like to get a little bit more rebellious with savoring the creative process the way I savor Saturday mornings on my lover’s chest where the passage of time is an afterthought. Graceful and generous with the patience I give to my craft, the regard for it, the various, often weird shapes that it takes, the laziness that inevitably comes with it and pins me to the couch, the inability to sync my brain to a rigid schedule. There is a whole life out there that needs to be lived and breathed in for me to create well and with meaning. In a battle of output strides, taking it all in can be deliciously contrarian. Contractually or metaphorically, I’ve given up on optimizing the process — I tried my best, I really did, you saw me panting for it. It runs me dry and makes for brittle, anxious work that doesn’t add anything of value to this world. That’s probably why you don’t hear from me as often. That’s why I’m offline and my paid subscriptions have been paused since May.

The sweetness of a minute comes to me in waves and flashes, refined and soft, when my phone is on do not disturb and I’m watering my plants, talking to my reflection or a friend, swaying around, doing everything or nothing at all, shamelessly covered in vibrant chronicles of days well spent and nights well given. No shortcuts taken, no third party tools, just me in my stasis. You’ve got a sweet tooth craving for something slower as the world around you spins in twenty thousand directions at all times, and you’re not alone. I will never stop creating — but if I am to continue with grace, it has to be on my terms. One of us has to survive. Maybe a book deal won’t find me as easily as it will somebody who’s nailed the game of output tenfold, but just because I’m not moving fast enough doesn’t mean my craft alone won’t get me there. It may change, but in this moment, it matters more to preserve the structure of my interior than to do anything half-hearted for a bite of the reward. The girl that tends to get sleepy, tired, and lazy is the same one doing the hard work, so I need to respect both equally. One cannot live without the other. Eventually, they’ll have to become friends — they just don’t know it yet.

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