No Dancing

Are You Creatively Satisfied?

Every interview from The Great Discontent includes the question, "Are you creatively satisfied?". It's an amazing question precisely because of the same reasons it's a terrible question. It defies a real answer, but yet usually everyone comes to the same conclusion: "No. I mean, yes. I mean, maybe. Actually, it depends. Sometimes." The interesting thing isn't so much the final answer given, but in watching how the respondents wriggle in getting there.

I ask myself a version of this everyday, more or less indirectly: "Am I doing what I want to be doing?" If the answer is no, then I sit and write out my thoughts until I find out what the reasons might be. The next step is to make moves to correct my path. Right now, I feel like I'm working too much. I have a full time job and I'm working on a couple websites on the side. My time is a little more constrained than I'd like it to be. What I want to do next is to play around with photoshop again, make some collages and pretty images, maybe a poster or two. Thinking this through, whatever the answer, helps me become more optimistic and renews my interest in the world around me.

Creative satisfaction, for me, is determined on a timeline. It's not about being perfectly happy with my work right at this moment, but over a period of time stretching between a few months in the past and a few months into the future. It's hard to feel satisfied if you don't like the work you've recently done, or if you aren't excited about what's coming up, and it's not very helpful to worry about liking the work today. Today is for working and getting things done.

Satisfaction is a general feeling. It comes and it goes. And it touches down just as lightly as it blows away. Because of this, I do what I can to invite it into my life, but I don't struggle to make it happen. The goal, i think, is a matter of zen practice, being satisfied with being unsatisfied. The goal is too keep asking yourself the question.

A few of my favorite responses from TGD:

Frank Chimero:

I think this question is bullshit, man. I know that this is sort of the namesake of the site, but the reason I think it’s bullshit is because the way you frame a creative practice should not be in terms of whether you’re content or not. I think everyone has a window of approval for their work; sometimes that’s years and sometimes it’s months, days, or hours. Your approval of your work metabolizes no matter what, and it doesn’t matter how good you are. That’s why I hit you up on Twitter recently to say “What if we’re thinking about this all wrong? What if contentedness about your creative work is more like eating?” . . . It doesn’t matter how good the meal is. A few hours later, you’re going to be hungry again. Maybe the reason you’re dissatisfied is not because the burger you just ate was bad, but because you’ve already eaten it—your body processes it. Doing the work makes you better, so of course you’ll be dissatisfied with what you’ve already done. You’re better!

Jeff Veen:

I hope I never am—why would I continue to create if I was? But at the moment, I can’t think of anything to change. Right now, I get to work with some of the most talented people I’ve ever met in a culture that is tight and supportive—and only vaguely political—with what appears to be, after spending so many years in a startup, almost unlimited resources to achieve what we have set out to do. I put all those things together and it leads to a lot of satisfaction, though I don’t think you should ever be creatively satisfied. The only time I want to feel that way is when I’m recharging in anticipation of doing more stuff.

Aaron Draplin:

Fuck yeah, I love what I do. I worked all weekend on a logo, like a dumb-ass. I got to go in and present it today and I couldn’t get in there fast enough. You sketch and sketch and sketch and come up with something. I am proud of what I came up with and I hope they pick it. If they don’t, what are you gonna do? You fight to make something better that they’ll love the next time you present. . . . Yeah, I’m too satisfied. You know how you eat too much and you’re too full, like at Thanksgiving? I feel that some days. I’ll leave work and go home so full and exhausted. I’m so proud of that shit.

Development Is Design

I attended Brooklyn Beta last week. While there, I must have introduced myself a hundred times, which of course required me to explain what I do. My stock answer was that I was a designer and developer. Both. And each time it felt weird, as if I was either claiming to be a wunderkind who can do it all, or that I didn’t know the difference between the two enough to pick one.

So when Brad Frost makes the argument that development is design, I nod my head in agreement. I know why we generally think of them as separate, it's just that it is becoming increasingly difficult to define where design ends and development begins. Some front-end work is only translation from comp to code, as in how it looks, but so much more involves how a site works. So much gray area in there.

And so now, when people ask, I’ll just say I’m a designer.

Free Time

I used to read almost 50 books a year. Now I get through maybe a few a year. In the last two years, how I spend my time has completely changed, my priorities rearranged. This is what happens when you make a dedicated effort towards a new ambition. Life takes off in new directions. The time you used to have for fun, random stuff shrinks away.

I have no regrets, because I love what I’m doing now. These days, I have a Career, but my entire life I had always been a dabbler. I’d be obsessed with piano for a month, then literature, then drawing, then philosophy, then soccer, then guitar, then piano again, then studying art, then something else, and then drawing again, and on and on. I love all the things. It was so hard for me to dedicate myself to just one subject for more than a month or so. I always had my paws in so many jars. My free time was quite literally free, unbounded by any promises.

But at 29, I was a barista in New York, playing in a band, designing things for friends sometimes, doing some writing but ignoring a half-finished novel I had sitting at home. There was nothing central to my life, except for activity. I was never able to sit still. I had so much free time that I floated from hobby to hobby with no end purpose in mind, and it started to feel empty.

Free time is a strange thing. For one, it’s a lucky benefit of first-world, modern life. We must be thankful for the hours in the day we have for doing whatever we want. We don’t deserve them. We don’t have a right to them. But we have them. How we spend those hours is important. The hours we spend at work defines who we are at present. The hours we have to do what we want defines who we will be in the future. We are so fortunate to have this, and it can be so easy to waste them.

In 2011 I made a decision: I would finally dedicate my free time to one hobby and make it a career. I began to think of myself as a designer. Not just a person who sometimes designs things, but someone who is a designer. I began spending all my time reading design and dev blogs, building my own websites, playing around in photoshop with purpose. It was exciting and new. For the first time in my life, I was sticking to one project, becoming a designer.

And then, somewhat surprisingly, it happened; I became a designer (maybe more of a developer professionally, but that’s a minor difference, right?). How I spent my free time turned into how I spent my daylight working hours. It was an amazing feeling. And, of course, I owe so much to friends and colleagues for helping my get here. I couldn’t have done it alone.

Now I’m starting to think about free time again. I still have plenty of it, but by habit those hours are still stuffed with design and dev industry blogs, and my freelance design work. I’m unable to draw a distinct line between my job and my hobbies. They’ve blended together and started to feel a bit muddy. It feels a little wrong, a little bit wreckless, like building a tall skyscraper but neglecting to give it windows. I’m growing as a person, but in one direction, up, and not looking out enough at the world around me.

There are things I miss that I need to get back: finishing novels again, and other books that have nothing to do with design; playing music; taking photos; studying philosophy and religion. These were all things that once defined me. They still do, but it's all in the past. I need to pull them back up to the present. I need to make time for new stuff again, to round out my life with more variety. It’s as important as anything.

Parents in Dublin

Katz

Toronto Has Architecture

The Gowanus

Melted M&Ms Mug

Car Wash on 4th Ave