Lets talk about work… Not necessarily the work we’re paid to do, but the work we would do if nobody paid us. The work that occupies our minds long after we’ve closed our laptops, left our offices, or finished whatever it is we do to earn a living.
\nThe visible and invisible work. The passion projects. The things we once wanted to make, discover, build, or simply spend our lives doing.
\nAnd perhaps more importantly, the things that have disappeared entirely because life got in the way.
\nThinking about the relationship between creativity and the means to pursue it.
\nFor most people, indulging in a passion project requires funding. And funding, despite what the media and the more optimistic proponents of capitalism would have us believe, isn’t something one simply comes by.
\nSomeone has to pay for it.
\nSometimes that someone is you, through savings from a job you may or may not particularly enjoy. Sometimes it’s an institution, a wealthy individual, a government, or an organization that sees enough potential value in what you’re doing to justify supporting it.
\nI usually use examples like; for you to indulge in passion projects, it has to be funded. The fact that someone or some institution has to fund something you care about already defeats the purpose. If the funding gets pulled what happens to your project?
\nDoes the work cease to be important? Does your curiosity suddenly become less valid? Or does it simply mean that whatever you were trying to bring into the world no longer satisfies someone else’s economic interests?
\nThis is a complex topic with varying degrees of tangents in human evolution but for the sake of this short essay, lets talk about… How much human creativity have we lost by making the ability to create dependent on the ability to pay for it?
\nConsider the Wright brothers.
\nTwo men who became obsessed with the possibility of human flight. They weren’t employees of some aviation conglomerate commissioned to invent an aeroplane. They ran a bicycle business, and the income from that business helped finance their experiments.
\nTheir curiosity preceded the commercial opportunity.
\nOne could say something similar about countless artists, inventors, musicians, and thinkers throughout history. Although their circumstances differed considerably, many pursued ideas long before those ideas had any obvious commercial value.
\nPicasso didn’t need someone to establish a market opportunity for Cubism before experimenting with the form. That doesn’t mean he existed outside the economics of his time, or that patronage and money played no role in his career. They certainly did.
\nBut there is an important difference between creating something because you believe it should exist and creating something because somebody has agreed to pay for it.
\nAnd increasingly, the former appears to require the latter.
\nHumans without “means” find it increasingly difficult to exist as humans.
\nThat sentence is quite disturbing!
\nIf someone isn’t paying you “wage/salary” or living off “inheritance”, you merely can’t live, its practically impossible.
\nThink about it.
\nIf all you truly wanted to do was paint, or play musical instruments, or build sculptures or anything that you fell in love with as a kid and there’s something about putting colours on a canvas that makes being alive worthwhile to you.
\nNot become a famous painter. Not build a personal brand around your paintings. Not sell courses teaching people how to paint, or create content documenting your artistic journey.
\nJust paint.
\nBut now you’re a grown human specie and can’t exist without ”earning a living” which means unless your service is valued by someone, organizations, you’re doomed to not earn your keep as a member at the top of the food chain.
\nYou need somewhere to live. You need food, electricity, healthcare, clothing, and perhaps a few other things that make existence bearable.
\nNone of those things are particularly interested in your paintings.
\nYour landlord certainly isn’t.
\nHow ironic don’t you think?
\nSo you must find something people are willing to pay you for. And if painting isn’t one of those things, you must spend a considerable part of your life doing something else.
\nYour passion becomes something you indulge in after you’ve finished doing what society considers economically useful.
\nIf you’re lucky, you have some energy left for it.
\nIf you’re very lucky, you make enough money to buy back some of your time.
\nAnd if you’re extraordinarily lucky, somebody eventually decides your paintings are worth paying for.
\nWe’ve somehow arrived at a point where being human requires earning the financial means to remain human.
\nWe’ve evolved so much that we have to earn to be able to stay on earth, the alternative you would ask? Well, be incarcerated or in an asylum as “we’ve” agreed we should have no true freedom of existence except you’ve amassed a great amount of human created material wealth.
\nWe’re supposedly the most intelligent species on the planet. We’ve built machines that can traverse continents, instruments that can observe galaxies, and computers capable of performing extraordinary intellectual tasks.
\n\n\nYet we still haven’t figured out how to give the average human being the freedom to pursue something simply because they find it meaningful.
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We have become exceptionally good at improving the tools of human existence without necessarily improving the experience of being human.
\nNow, there’s another interesting dimension to this.
\nWealth.
\nOr more precisely, the promise of wealth.
\nWe’ve built an entire culture around the idea that financial freedom is available to anyone willing to work hard enough, take enough risks, or make enough sacrifices.
\nWork now so you can live later.
\nBuild wealth so you can pursue your passions.
\nSacrifice your twenties so you can enjoy your forties.
\nSacrifice your forties so you can retire comfortably in your sixties.
\nThere’s always another milestone between you and the life you actually want to live.
\nAnd while some people do manage to accumulate enough wealth to escape the necessity of working, that possibility is far from evenly distributed.
\nThe circumstances of one’s birth, access to education, geography, inherited wealth, social connections, health, and plain luck all influence how realistic that promise is.
\nYet we continue to sell the possibility as though it were simply a matter of individual determination.
\nIt’s a rather clever arrangement, isn’t it?
\nWe sell people the dream of eventually escaping the very conditions under which they must spend most of their lives.
\nAnd the price of that dream is often more of their lives.
\nI don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with wanting wealth. Nor do I think being paid for work somehow makes that work less meaningful.
\nIts deeper than that… the cost of being human is so high now more than it has ever been.
\nThe painter must first become financially stable enough to paint.
\nThe musician must first earn enough to afford the time to practice.
\nThe inventor must somehow convince someone that an idea nobody has ever seen is worth financing.
\nAnd the thinker? Well, they’d better find a way to monetize those thoughts… Loool.
\nI wonder how many extraordinary things have never existed because the people capable of creating them were too busy earning a living.
\nHow many remarkable musicians never picked up an instrument again after childhood?
\nHow many potential breakthroughs died quietly in the minds of people who couldn’t afford to experiment?
\nHow many artists abandoned their craft, not because they stopped loving it, but because the demands of existence left them with neither the time nor the energy?
\nWe tend to celebrate the extraordinary individuals who managed to overcome these circumstances.
\nThe stories are inspiring, certainly.
\nBut they’re also convenient.
\nBecause for every person who makes it through, there are countless others whose work we’ll never encounter.
\nNot because they lacked talent, ambition, or curiosity.
\nBut because curiosity doesn’t pay the rent.
\nAnd perhaps that’s the part of human progress we don’t discuss enough.
\nHuman beings have always had to work to survive. Our ancestors weren’t exactly spending their afternoons painting landscapes while someone else gathered food.
\nAnd modern society has made possible extraordinary freedoms that previous generations couldn’t have imagined.
\nBut surely the purpose of progress cannot simply be to create more sophisticated ways of earning the right to exist.
\nAt some point, shouldn’t advancement translate into more freedom to be human?
\nNot necessarily freedom from all responsibility or contribution, but freedom to contribute in ways that aren’t immediately reducible to economic value.
\nMaybe the real tragedy isn’t that we have to work.
\nMaybe it’s that we’ve become so accustomed to organizing our lives around earning a living that we’ve stopped questioning how much living gets sacrificed in the process.
\nAnd somewhere along the way, the things we once wanted to do simply because we loved doing them became things we hoped to afford someday.
\nThe cost of being human has become extraordinarily high.
\nNot just in money.
\nBut in all the things we might have been, had we been free to find out and express.
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