The “Not Creative” Trap | Hacker News Reader

The “Not Creative” Trap

robert.bearblog.dev

> But every now and then that inner critic starts playing its soundtrack: "That's not creative, it's a waste of time. You're giving away your work and efforts for free to a multi-billion dollar company."

Do people relate to this? Does this person think everything they do needs to be creative? Are they some kind of toilet bowl artist and interpretive toothbrush performer?

I understand striving to do more of whatever you care about, and being hard on yourself for falling short, but surely you can’t be measuring every action and every moment against that standard?

Creativity is originality.

Engineering is accuracy/precision.

Financial is efficiency.

Design is connecting to the human experience.

Design is usefulness. Elegance, the appropriateness to the task at hand.

It's about design.

You must make things, all work is essentially about creation. But, nothing is pure creativity.

Even surrealist poets must make things that connect to their readers.

I can relate to the critic, but not the particular words. I've said to myself, "Why bother writing if I have nothing to say," and, "What's the point of open sourcing this when there's the chance Microsoft just copy/pastes it with no attribution", and other similar thoughts.

Personally, "even if I have something to say, why bother writing? It's the internet, and people will either ignore, lambast, misconstrue, say ackshually, etc."

I find it much simpler to lurk.

everyone wants to be heard, and no one's listening.

The older one gets, the wiser they become, and the closer they get to realizing that 95% of the things they write online are actually just a giant waste of one's precious, limited time.

(This comment is not going to be an exception to that.)

I feel differently, but can appreciate your comment as a sort of night-blooming flower, whose perspective is rarely heard from :)

I think it’s important to be pragmatic about the actual value of your work. Quite often it’s zero. So if you get enjoyment, for any reason, out of supplying data to a massive company for free, then that’s a win.

It's a hobby. Once a hobby becomes a paid service, it seizes to be a hobby. I don't know how to articulate this concept or why it is. But, I avoid it.

I agree. I put conscious effort into making sure my hobbies never make me money. I know that if they turned into a business they’d stop being fun and at my own pace.

sadly, if you want to work with/for other people...its difficult to get them to engage with you for free. I get a lot more interesting work by charging a low hourly and hiding a lot of my hours.

edit: oh yeah, a failure mode - some small business owners are like - hey, cheap labor, why don't you clean my walkin? usually that means the end of the relationship

seizes to be a hobby

Voice to text typo? You mean "ceases" here?

(Posting in case author is not english native, and needs to know...)

doing what you love for work turns what you love into work.

Which can be fine, depending what "work" means.

One of the most toxic beliefs around the arts is that they're essentially just a hobby for everyone, including successful professionals.

There's a lot of "I could do that", slightly less "I could do that if I practiced enough" and occasionally some "You're so lucky to be doing that."

Insiders know it's basically a job. There's a surprising amount of admin, marketing, and networking involved, a lot of stress around deadlines, sometimes stress and drama around coworkers/reviewers/critics/consumers/managing execs, and so on.

That's in addition to craft and technique, which even the most gifted creatives have to spend plenty of time on.

No one wafts out of their bedroom and casually sketches a hit single, a symphony, or a best selling novel.

So if people want to write reviews for free - that's creative in the hobby sense. But not so much in the professional sense.

The upside about creative professionals is that unlike hobbyists - and like other professionals - they will get the job done. Whatever the job is.

It may not always be the biggest success, but something will be produced, and it's very likely to be of higher quality than the output of a casual.

I once found myself in an elevator at Magfest with a minor celebrity. I had been at their panel the previous day and had picked up on subtle cues that they were rather uncomfortable and out of place as they worked to satisfy their fans.

I said something approximate to, “I enjoyed your panel. It must be very difficult to meet your fans at their level of energy.” Which was apparently a secret password because the individual just opened right up and poured.

My takeaway from the elevator confessional was summed up in their final line, approximately: “my day job is their passion. How do I admit that I’ve never even played the game?”

This is kind of tangential to the point you’re making, but I was reminded of this because I think fans regularly mistake the end product as a representation of the artist, because often it is. But often it’s just a job. A very demanding job.

from audience capture to captured by the audience!

The definition of value may includes many things beside money.

A nicely written review on Google Maps brings fulfillment to the writer, the subject (e.g. business) may find the review useful for improvement, other users may also make use of the review for their better plannings.

If you're against Google, or any other mega corps, consider contributing to Openstreetmap, WikiMedia Commons etc. I have a habit of uploading photos (restaurants, foods, shops, tourist attractions) to WikiMedia Commons, organise them in categories and then add them to Openstreetmap nodes as tags.

What happend to the inner critic character guy at the beginning? It's such a short piece but somehow he got misplaced somewhere along the line and never got a fair hearing.

Putting the pieces together, it probably went something like this. One fine day as OP was admiring a review he just finished (and we're all guilty of this) he had a secret thought that "aah. this is creative work". That is when our friend, the inner critic came in and started with "That's not creative". Now why would OP's very own inner critic say that?

The issue appears to be OP's lifestyle. He is not living a creative person's lifestyle. Which, alcoholism and poverty and what not aside, is rather glamorous and can be fun. Sure beats working 9 to 5. There is the promise of wild sex, drugs, cool friends, and a chance that some lost future generation may begin venerating you and your creative life.

So neither OP nor his inner critic are really being honest here.

"You're giving away your work and efforts for free to a multi-billion dollar company."

I agree with this. I never fill out feedback forms and rarely leave reviews. Especially if it's a product or service I use once. I've already paid for it. Want something from me? Pay me for it.

What about the recipient of the review? i.e. the company deserving of that review?

Don't get me wrong. I generally agree with you. However, some companies are deserving of any boost you can give them, even if it's within the Google matrix.

Your review is a drop in the bucket. It helps the company far more than it helps their customers. Unless it's negative, that is.

Isn't the collective good payment enough for these tasks?

You wouldn't ask to be paid for picking up a piece of litter off the floor.

These companies are a part of society, it's people all the way down who are being helped by this.

Trickle down "help"? haha

While I'm not against picking up litter, I've never picked up litter.

If anything it's trickle up, the first beneficiaries are the community.

So you think billion dollar companies are getting trickle up help? That is just very incorrect.

I was expecting a transition into "creative reviews", written from the perspective of some sort of zany character on vacation, such as a half drunk island-hoping writer disillusioned with being in a tourist trap for a week, or a review of an art gallery attic full of hipsters and music the world isn't ready for yet.

Well if you look at the other blog post titles, this person may have a bright future in the extremely creative field of self-help.

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