Writing hasn’t been as easy as it used to be. In a sense that’s not true, I’ve just lied in the opening sentence.
It’s more like I have different levels of honesty and expression, some easier than others, and to just casual throw another article out into the ether isn’t as satisfying to me as it used to be. Much of that was done to practice expressing base level ideas, to get better at expressing my values, to train my intellectual mind to say what it’s thinking with better accuracy.
I am getting tired of that, partially because I haven’t created a very dedicated audience, I sometimes wonder if in this attention economy on hyperdrive if a dedicated audience is a thing of the past.
I notice my favorite bands have 100k monthly listeners after an album comes out and fast foreword a year, they’re down to 8000! People used to come back to their favorites more frequently but I can think of tons of artista I love thst I haven’t listened to in ages, because there’s just too much going on in the world and more and more people are accustomed to expanding outwards.
Whether this is an exploratory drive or an exploited addiction to staying in the loop is a complicated topic, I think it’s both in the case of people around me.
But if the only way to create work that remains relevent over time is to win the favor of brokers (TV, radio playlists, etc) and constantly fight for attention and win it over time, that feels like an uphill battle I am not interested in fighting.
I would rather continue to work towards evolution and exploring my own capabilities, to keep creating new improved visions for myself and pursuing them.
Now that my mind is trained as much as I care to train it, I’d like to focus much more energy on the heart and allowing it to express itself more effectively.
But the heart is different than the mind, it expressing much more nuanced and complex emotions. It doesn’t work in formulas. There are layers to each and every moment to explore and the heart can dig deeper into these moments and find treasures in each of them.
This process requires more space, more time, more setting the mood. It can’t be created on the fly, not honestly at least.
I want 6 months in the forest to see what I come up with, but that isn’t plausible right now, and so I am left budgeting my creative energy.
It’s why I don’t write as regularly now. I want a chance to not only write songs and jam and share my writing, but also the chance to connect to the heart and find ways to channel it through my voice and my fingers.
For someone like me who doesn’t naturally have a product in mind, it may help to force myself to create a product. While I want to flow freely, perhaps this is an invitation to channel all my energy into the places where the final result is exciting but the process itself is more challenging.
I may need to hunker down and cut myself off from the world for a bit. I am not sure when and how and how long but I feel it’s becoming more and more necessary to cut out all tjongs that distract me from a single creative focus.
Let’s see what I come up with