The only thing holding you back is you:

When we think about happiness or life goals, I think we make the wrong mistake of thinking of:

• Fame
• Money
• Power over other people

Instead, I think we should strive towards:

• Creative productivity (cresting new artwork on the daily)
• Stimulating ourselves with our own new artwork, new visual stimuli, and the creative ecstasy with making new things
• Having infinite optimism and hope/excitement for the future (the excitement with waking up every morning, excited to make new art works!)

Why do we feel miserable?

I think we often feel miserable when we don’t have the ability to ex-press our creative instincts. Our creative souls are being sucked away by email, office politics, and too much concern about money, promotions, and the “prudent” future of saving up money. I say fuck this mentality — this is to think like an office worker-bee. Time to Tyler Durden it up, and let us enter the Dionysian ecstasy/joy of making art!

To me, anything we create with love, intensity, and intent is art. The only way to judge your artwork as good or bad is to ask yourself:

Does this artwork bring me joy, levity of soul, and wings to my feet and mind?

We are heading towards a theory of aesthetics (aesthetics as the philosophy of what is beautiful or ugly).

Beauty in grit and grain

For example, I see beauty in grit, grain, texture, decay. I find new hope and joy in the past, death, and decline. This perhaps makes me optimistic in the face of tragedy.

Too often we get suckered into thinking of “Platonic” beauty. We think beauty is in perfect shapes and forms (perfect Euclidean shapes like squares, circles, straight lines). But in real life or nature, no straight lines exist. Try to find a perfectly straight line in a forest.

Even if we philosophize about an artificially made straight line, at the atomic level, the atoms aren’t perfectly straight!

This means, true beauty resides in chaos, irregularity, grit, and what most people would consider“ugliness”.

Compete against yourself

One thing I learned from powerlifting:

It doesn’t matter how strong you are compared to others. What only matters is whether you’re stronger today than you were last week.

Better yet, I strive to become stronger on a daily basis — especially with my artwork.

Everyday is ripe for the picking — to pick new visual fruits (photographs) from reality.

Never lose hope in your infinite future. Life is too short to tantalize yourself. Life is yours for the picking!

ERIC