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How Obscurity as a New Artist Can Help You Create Your Best Work
“93% say that being a creator has introduced stresses that have ‘negatively impacted their lives,’ with 45% saying they’ve experienced ‘big emotional lows,’” report the authors of this paper which surveyed 1,624 respondents.
There’s no surprise to me here. As I’d covered in Marker before, making money as a creator is tough. The creator economy is thriving, and definitely intriguing more people appreciating the value of their own creativity, and considering spending more time on their creative process.
Unfortunately, these expectations also come with an intense pressure to monetize, or to build an audience, with our creativity. Tara McMullin suggests a better way to rethink the creator economy, and Nadia Asparouhova warns of the publish or perish mentality that the creator economy incentivizes.
Bill Bryson writes in A Short History of Nearly Everything (via a code to joy):
As a student, frustrated by the limitations of conventional mathematics, [Isaac Newton] invented an entirely new form, the calculus, but then told no one about it for twenty-seven years. In like manner, he did work in optics that transformed our understanding of light and laid the foundation for the science of spectroscopy, and again chose not to share the results for three decades.
