To live a more fun, interesting, playful, and rewarding life– perhaps we should optimize our own personal lives for our own personal creative productivity.

Why create?

For myself, life is about creation. A world without constant creation would be a dying, decaying world.

Apparently every hour, 15,000 babies are born. 6,300 people die every hour.

Thus from a philosophical perspective, it seems that life thrives with new creation.

Us as artists– we create genesis to new “children” (our art-work). This is why we get so personal with our art-works; we don’t see them as separate from us– we see our art-works as a part of us.

Create for fun, as a spirit of play (not as a duty)

As creators, we are children. We create from a spirit of play, and to also have fun!

As children and creators, we have deep delight in changing, transforming, transfiguring, and ‘imputing’ ourselves in our art-works. We delight in movement and creation.

Thus as creators, we are producers. We produce things that we believe deserve to exist. We produce ideas, we produce art-works (photos or visual art-works), and we give birth to them– and share them with others in the world.

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Producerism

I’m working on this idea of ‘producerism’– the basic idea that:

I think we would be happier if we spent 90% of our time/effort/energy on producing and making things, and only 10% of our time-effort-lives consuming.

This is not to disparage consumption. We need to consume in order to live! We need to consume food, resources, water, etc in order to both survive AND thrive.

If you’re a body-builder and want to increase your muscle mass and muscular weight, of course you must consume more protein, meat, and other food-items.

Thus as artists, it also seems to make sense that if we want to increase our artistic mass and power, we also need to consume MORE external art-works to inspire/motivate ourselves.

But I still think the emphasis should be towards our final goal which is to produce and create.

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Not to become obsessed with ‘productivity’ for ‘productivity’s sake’.

I also don’t want us to think about productivity or “producerism” from this strange silicon-valley notion of always answering your emails, checking things off your todo list, or making money.

And the 90/10 ratio isn’t fixed. It can constantly be in a state of flux. There will obviously be times when it will be 80/20, 60/40, or even 1/99.

I just want us to shift our thinking —

Happiness didn’t come from consumption. Happiness comes from production.

The simple formula: consume in order to produce.

You don’t live in order to eat, you eat in order to live!

You don’t live in order to consume, you live in order to produce!

ERIC