Like a lot of writers (probably), I feel like I spend a tremendous amount of time worrying about my creative output. Especially these days, even when I’m just writing for myself.

It’s apparently become impossible for me to sit down to write without also thinking about word counts, publishing schedules, and consistency. I maintain newsletters, a blog, and multiple social media profiles, always while considering where else I should consider planting a flag. And of course, I worry about visibility, as well as wonder whether people are even paying attention to what I write half the time.

As crazy as I feel half the time, I also know those concerns make sense. Still, I suspect many of us have become so focused on producing that we entirely forget to replenish the source once in a while.

Every few weeks, I stumble across another conversation about creative block, lack of inspiration, or the feeling of having nothing new to say. (Hell, I struggle with those myself at least a handful of times a month.) The advice almost always arrives in familiar packaging we’ve all seen lots of times before:

• Write every day.

• Develop a routine.

• Eliminate distractions.

• Build discipline.

And doing those things certainly helps. They don’t cover the entire picture, though, especially when it comes to the part about actually coming up with new and interesting things to say.

Imagine trying to draw water from a well you’ve shamelessly ignored for years. Eventually, that bucket is going to start coming up suspiciously light. Creativity is similar, as interesting work rarely appears by accident.

Most of the writers, artists, musicians, and creators I admire most have spent years building rich, colorful inner lives — a big part of what made me want to pursue any of the creative arts in the first place. They collect experiences and chase the answers to big, impossible questions. They also make a habit of meandering their way down rabbit holes that lead nowhere practical, yet somehow yield something valuable anyway.

Over the years, especially as I’ve aged, I’ve realized that the goal isn’t necessarily to become interesting to other people. It’s more about becoming interesting to yourself, because once that happens, writing and creativity tend to take care of themselves.

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Chase Fascinations, Not Trends

If five (!) whole decades on this planet have taught me anything at this point, it’s that most trends have the lifespan of a fruit fly.

One minute, everyone is discussing the same hot topic. Then, three weeks later, the whole-ass internet spots a completely different shiny object in another corner of the room and sprints toward that at full speed. Rinse, repeat, forever and ever, amen.

Fascinations operate differently, though. They have a way of sticking around.

I can’t help but think about the various subjects I’ve researched repeatedly over the years. The things I read about for pleasure when nobody was assigning homework, and the topics that keep appearing in my browser history, like quirky recurring sitcom characters.

Maybe for you, those topics include folklore, ancient history, architecture, or mushroom identification. Perhaps you’ve been through phases when you were all about deep-sea creatures, forgotten religions, or shipwrecks. (Pretty sure I’ve been at least marginally “into” all of those things for a hot minute over the years myself.) Or maybe you’ve spent fifteen years reading about one oddly specific thing and still haven’t gotten tired of it.

Whatever they are, take a long, hard look at your personal patterns and pay attention to them. Because a fascination often reveals more about your creative voice than a trend ever will.

If you’re anything like me, you’re probably “into” something new and completely random every other week, so try keeping a fascination list. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy or formal, either. Just jot down any subjects that consistently seem to draw your attention. You’ll eventually notice certain themes appearing over and over again.

And know that those recurring interests aren’t distractions from your work. They are your work or, at the very least, the fertile soil where a lot of it grows.

Collect Experiences, Not Information

Creative people can spend hours reading about a thing without ever actually doing the thing. And the internet makes this remarkably easy. (I should know!) One article leads to another and then another. Before long, you’ve consumed seventeen thousand words about bread-making while still sitting on the couch eating crackers. (Mmmm, Cheez-Its.)

No one knows better than I do that knowledge is freaking awesome. But it needs experience to give it context, meaning, and value.

Because reading about beekeeping and standing directly next to a buzzing, thriving hive interacting with actual bees feel completely different. And looking at photographs of a historic cemetery isn’t quite the same as wandering through one on a cool autumn morning while trying to decipher all the beautifully weathered inscriptions.

I’ve noticed over the years that creativity thrives best at the edge of familiarity. Too much routine spawns frustratingly predictable thoughts, but new environments force the brain to pay attention. (And I’m saying this as a diehard armchair traveler and homebody.)

You don’t need to be able to afford an expensive plane ticket to branch out, either.

Try visiting a museum you’ve never been to before. Stop thinking about attending a local lecture and actually go to one. Explore a botanical garden, stroll through an old neighborhood, or spend an afternoon at a neighborhood cultural festival. Find that weird little attraction in your town that everybody drives past without visiting, and stop by some weekend.

To be fair, this is something my husband and I have really lapsed on over the years, but we used to refer to these little outings as “adventures,” because that’s truly what they are.

So, go have an adventure of your own at your earliest convenience. Your future writing will appreciate the fuel.

Learn Weird Things on Purpose

I personally believe that every creative person should know a lot about at least one thing that confuses the vast majority of the people in their LinkedIn feed. In fact, several things would be even better.

The modern world encourages specialization, and with good reason. Specialists are valuable, but they also run the risk of getting trapped inside one or two increasingly narrow knowledge corridors.

Curiosity far prefers open doors and plenty of space to move around in. Learning a weird, random skill just for the hell of it stretches the mind in unexpected directions.

For example, a writer who studies genealogy can’t help but start thinking differently about family stories and the many ways people are connected. Someone who digs into historical cooking gains insight into daily life that would never appear in the average textbook. Meanwhile, amateur astronomers develop unusual relationships with time and space that really fuel imagination.

Some of the most fascinating people I know have wildly impractical areas of expertise. They can identify all sorts of random birds by sound alone or explain medieval pilgrimage routes in painstaking detail. I even have a friend who got really into scent science at one point and can discuss perfume composition like an absolute boss.

And me? Well, I can tell you exactly how Victorian mourning customs worked or teach you all about ancient Egyptian mummification processes, whether you want to hear it or not. I’m also oddly proud of that ability.

So my advice to you is to consider adopting a new curiosity every year. Pick one subject that intrigues you, and give yourself permission to dive a lot deeper than you normally would. Follow references down winding rabbit holes, read books, watch documentaries, and ask questions. Become the person who knows way too much about something delightfully obscure.

Because the world already has more experts than it really needs. It could always use more enthusiasts, though.

Ask Better Questions

A depressing number of adults move through the world accepting everything at face value. Objects, customs, traditions, buildings, technologies, and institutions simply exist, and very few people stop to wonder how they arrived here or consider why things are the way they are.

But interesting people notice things. They also stay curious about what they notice. Questions, after all, have the power to transform ordinary experiences into fascinating ones:

• Who invented this?

• What problems did it solve?

• Why does this tradition persist?

• What came before it?

• How would life change if it disappeared tomorrow?

Now imagine finding an old railroad spike. One person almost certainly sees it as nothing more than a rusty piece of metal. But another might feel inspired to start researching railway expansion, industrial history, migration patterns, regional economics, and all the communities built around those many miles of tracks.

And if you’re me, you might decide to accumulate multiple railroad spikes and make them the basis of a protection ritual for your newly renovated home.

Same spike. Entirely different experiences.

Writers have a way of searching for story ideas while they’re already standing ankle-deep in them, but curiosity is your metal detector. Turn yours on and watch it start beeping right and left.

Build a Cabinet of Curiosities

The Renaissance wealthy used to create cabinets of curiosities — elaborate collections filled with unusual objects, specimens, artifacts, maps, shells, fossils, and oddities gathered from around the world.

After building one of my own in my newly renovated office space, I’m convinced all writers should build their own versions.

Obviously, you can take a page out of my book and build a physical version, but digital alternatives work, too. Collect photographs, save quotes, and record observations. Keep running lists of strange facts, screenshot things that spark questions, and write down random snippets of conversation overheard in grocery stores.

If it makes the taskmaster side of your personality feel any better, know that there’s a practical side to all this.

Human memory has all the reliability of a shopping cart with one wobbly wheel, so good ideas disappear with astonishing efficiency. A cabinet of curiosities creates a place for wonder to accumulate. Some items can sit untouched for years before suddenly becoming useful, and that’s OK. The value comes from having plenty of raw material available when inspiration does decide to drop in for a visit.

Creative drought becomes much less frustrating when you’ve spent years storing rainwater.

Talk to People Outside Your Bubble

I would hardly call myself a social animal or anything, so take this with a grain of salt or ten. But some of the most memorable conversations I’ve ever had have happened with people whose lives looked nothing like mine. (Once upon a time, I earned my living working with the public, if you can believe it.)

Think retired mechanics, hobbyists, collectors, craftspeople, volunteers, and avid travelers. People who dedicated decades to subjects I barely understood. Each conversation offered a glimpse into a different world and a unique point of view to consider, and those interactions turned out to be surprisingly valuable.

Because, like most creative people, I fall into the habit of spending all my time only with other creative people. And yeah, that environment brings a lot of encouragement and community to the table, but genuinely fresh perspectives are in pretty short supply.

A local historian might actually understand your town better than any textbook you could read, and a lifelong fisherman can probably tell you stories that you’ll never see trending on social media. Even your long-retired elderly neighbor remembers a version of the world that vanished long before you arrived, and it might be worth asking them about it.

Every person becomes more interesting once you discover what they care about deeply. So ask questions. Listen carefully to the answers. People are walking libraries that far too many of us forget to even explore.

Lots of People Want to Be Interesting

And if they’re creative types, they want to create interesting work, too. Writers dream of producing essays that are impossible to forget, stories readers share, and ideas people carry around long after they’ve devoured the last sentence.

But a more useful question lives a little further upstream for most of us.

Are you building an interesting life? (Not are you rich, well-traveled, or approved of by your peers.)

“Interesting” has very little to do with fame, money, or exotic travel. Curiosity remains one of the most accessible resources on Earth, as it costs almost nothing in most cases. It also applies absolutely everywhere and has the power to turn even the most ordinary days into treasure hunts.

So, follow your fascinations with wild abandon, deliberately learn weird things, and get really good at asking better questions. Do that long enough, and you eventually stop worrying quite as much about finding things to write about.

So, there’s a really particular issue I’ve noticed with pretty much any writer once they start exploring the wide, wonderful world of personal content. (Been there, done it. Passed on the t-shirt, though.)

Someone launches a new blog, Substack newsletter, or social media account and decides to use it to write about their life. So they start filling it with stories about their childhood, marriage, career, hobbies, spiritual journey, or whatever else occupies their thoughts. Then they hit publish and wait for readers to come eat it up.

Sometimes those readers do show up, but other times, the digital equivalent of tumbleweeds rolls through instead.

The difference usually has very little to do with whether the story itself was any good, because even the most ordinary lives usually contain enough decent material to fill several memoirs. The challenge lies in something else entirely.

Many new writers create personal content to reveal (or possibly process) something about themselves. But readers approach that sort of content from an entirely different angle. They’re looking for unique ideas, personal insight, entertainment, or maybe even just a little inspiration.

Your own personal story can easily be the vehicle that delivers those things, but you need to tell it a certain way.

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The Difference Between a Journal and a Published Piece

A journal serves the writer, but a published piece serves a conversation (or at least it should). Both are valuable and have a place. Both can even cover the exact same events. But the difference between them is about what happens after the facts appear on the page.

Let’s say, for example, that I decide to spend 1,200 words describing how I reorganized my office. Over the course of the piece, I explain where every book went, which shelves I cleared, what I discovered in the back of a drawer, and how much dust apparently accumulated while I wasn’t paying any attention.

By the end, anyone who actually sits through all that will possess a remarkably detailed mental map of my workspace. Whether they care is another question entirely, though.

Now, imagine I write about reorganizing my office because it occurred to me that I was surrounded by the detritus of projects I’d already outgrown. I might try to turn the overflowing shelves into evidence of all the obligations I kept carrying long after they stopped serving me. And maybe the clutter turns into some metaphor about a season of my life that came to an end at a specific age for a specific reason.

Suddenly, my office piece isn’t really about the office anymore. It’s about change, identity, and the realization that sometimes we keep old versions of ourselves around long after we’ve effectively moved on.

Even readers who have never seen my office and couldn’t really care less where I keep everything can potentially connect with that take, because most people have experienced some version of it. The physical details create the setting, but the larger meaning creates the connection.

Readers Secretly Like to Read About Themselves

As bluntly rude as that might sound, it also explains why certain stories resonate deeply with people while others struggle to hit any sort of mark at all.

Take a moment to consider your favorite memoir. (Mine happens to be Angela’s Ashes.)

I didn’t pick up Angela’s Ashes for the first time because I desperately needed information about some stranger’s poverty-stricken Irish childhood in 1930s Limerick, and that’s certainly not what kept me turning the pages once I started. My love for that book is about something much deeper than that.

Frank McCourt wrestled with questions I’ve asked myself many times throughout my own life. Even though the difficulties he’d survived were very different from mine, they still mirrored my own on an emotional level. He also used such beautifully expressive language — language that perfectly described feelings I’d carried around for years without knowing how to put them into words myself.

Stories help us understand our own lives, and that’s been true for thousands of years. Humans gathered around campfires to tell stories, and we still gather around stories today. Those campfires just have comment sections and subscription buttons now.

Finding the universal thread

Every personal narrative contains at least two stories. The first consists of the events involved, but the second is about the meaning behind them. Writers are often most fascinated by that first layer, because it’s the layer they personally lived through. But most readers connect with the second.

Take another simple example, like an essay about planting a garden.

On the surface, it’s a story about soil, seeds, watering schedules, weather forecasts, and the ongoing cold war between gardeners and the horrible little demons commonly known as squirrels. Useful information may well emerge from those details, especially if your audience wants gardening advice.

That doesn’t necessarily mean the essay is actually about gardening, though.

The deeper story might explore building a sanctuary during a difficult season of one’s life. Or it might examine patience, hope, resilience, creativity, self-sufficiency, or the human desire to purposefully nurture something that grows slowly.

The garden itself is just the doorway. Readers decide to walk through because of what’s waiting for them on the other side. In that same way:

• A story about moving becomes a story about belonging.

• A story about learning a new skill becomes a story about humility and growth.

• A story about turning 50 becomes a story about time, possibility, and deciding what still deserves a place in a person’s life past a certain point.

Events absolutely matter, but readers need something concrete to hold onto. Deeper themes give those events substance and help them travel beyond the boundaries of a writer’s own experience.

Ask the reader to sit beside you

A lot of personal essays wind up placing the writer on a stage, spotlights shining and audience watching. But that same setup creates distance when readers become spectators rather than participants.

Strong personal writing feels more like sharing a bench with someone as you speak. You’re still telling your story and drawing from your own experiences. But instead of saying, “Look at this fascinating thing that happened to me,” and expecting people who don’t know you to actually care, you’re saying, “I stumbled across something interesting through this experience. Maybe you’ll find it interesting too.”

Readers respond to generous writers and enjoy spending time with people who seem curious about the world rather than endlessly fascinated by themselves.

Think about the writers you return to again and again. They likely reveal plenty about their own lives. You certainly walk away from their writing knowing all about their quirks, habits, opinions, and stories. Yet you never once feel trapped inside somebody else’s autobiography while your own head fills up with oatmeal.

Instead, you feel like you’re having a conversation — like there’s actually room for you in the piece.

The Most Useful Question You Can Ask

I definitely still have my moments where I get way too carried away with whatever I’m talking about to remember the reader the way that I should. But when I tell personal stories, I try to remind myself to stop and ask a simple question before deciding how it’s all going to go down:

Why would another human being care about this, especially if they don’t know me?

Carefully considering that has never failed to improve my draft. Never.

The writer’s job is to build a bridge between the emotional significance a story holds for them and the reader waiting on the other side. So, when you write about personal experience, ask yourself:

• What did this experience teach me?

• What surprised me about it?

• What changed for me afterward?

• What larger truth emerged from my spending two hours with that old story?

Once you answer those questions, your piece opens up and gives readers a reason to join you there.

Your Story Is the Doorway

Readers want real experiences from real people. They want details, context, personality, and perspective. But they also want something they can bring back into their own lives after they finish reading.

Your story is a door, and the reader is the guest. Nobody visits a house because they’re obsessed with the front door, right? The door is only important because it provides an entryway into something much larger.

A walk through a garden, a cluttered office long overdue for a cleaning, a milestone birthday, a difficult season, a favorite movie, or a simple conversation over dinner. Any of those moments can yield meaningful writing, but they have to open into a larger idea that readers can recognize in themselves.

That story begins with you. The conversation belongs to both of you.

So, like most freelancers, I get that creative work (especially freelance creative work) involves periods of instability pretty much by definition. But I don’t think I’m alone in feeling like the current landscape extra sucks.

For the most part, everything’s been super unreliable, even for those of us with established businesses and client rosters.

Some weeks, my inbox is packed, and I’m almost too busy, but others find me with way more free time on my hands than I’m comfortable with. Some projects go on for a while only to evaporate later, while others fail to materialize at all. Clients pause projects, and of course, entire industries are suddenly deciding they only need “light AI polishing” instead of actual writers.

All that has added up to multiple intermittent stretches of unwanted downtime lately — frustrating to say the very least.

Usually, I really like downtime, and I’ve been through many periods (some not that long ago) when I felt like I didn’t have nearly enough of it. But I’ve also discovered that I’m not particularly great with it when I’ve got too much of a good thing on my hands.

By that, I mean I’m apparently “that guy (or gal)” who defaults to doomscrolling and self-shaming if I’m not careful. And the solution always feels like it’s to scrounge for ways to make the rest of my life “productive” somehow, so I wind up incessantly asking myself questions like:

• Should I turn this walk into content somehow?

• Is this cool new hobby I’ve discovered something I can monetize?

• Should I be learning six new professional skills right now?

• Would a more disciplined person already have launched a course?

And it’s not like I’m pulling those out of my ass or anything, especially considering I’ve never been what I’d call a natural workhorse.

Modern productivity culture has convinced so many creative people that every moment must either generate money, build visibility, or otherwise support future earning potential. Especially when money’s tight or work is slow. But unfortunately, creativity has more in common with an actual living ecosystem than it does with a software platform.

As creative people, we need more than productivity (attempted or otherwise) during unstable periods. We also need ways to stay mentally and creatively engaged, regardless of what the external landscape might be doing at the time.

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Creativity Runs on More Than Just Work

I’m still seeing way too many hustle influencers talking about creativity as though it emerges directly from discipline alone. Discipline certainly counts for a lot, but so do skill-building and even simply showing up in the first place.

And all creativity needs fuel. Writers, artists, filmmakers, musicians, and other creative people absorb enormous amounts of material from ordinary life. Think examples like:

• Rambling conversations

• Weather and seasonal rhythms

• Random memories

• Music and books

• Off-the-cuff observations

• Recurring fascinations

• Everyday sensory experiences

I like to remind myself that fruitful, creative lives once included a lot of activities modern productivity culture dismisses as inefficient. Think long walks, afternoons spent wandering bookstores, writing (or reading) letters, hanging out in cafés, gardening, and accumulating odd little interests for no obvious reason.

Those experiences weren’t distractions from creative work. They actually formed part of the very machinery producing it.

But right now, I also see a lot of freelancers and creatives cutting themselves off from all of those things during slow periods, and not always for financial reasons. They stay indoors, refreshing inboxes, and stop noticing seasonal changes because their attention narrows entirely toward survival and uncertainty.

That response makes sense emotionally, but it also slowly starves the creative mind. After all, you can only revamp your resume and update your freelance profiles so many times.

How to Use Unwanted Downtime Without Spiritually Turning into Office Furniture

Slow periods feel much more survivable when you stop treating them exclusively as professional emergencies and start treating them partly as maintenance periods for your larger creative system.

Now, that doesn’t mean pretending financial pressure isn’t real, because I think we all know it is. But it’s important to recognize that preserving mental vitality is just as essential.

Recalibrate your attention span

If you’re anything like me, then modern freelance instability often feels nearly impossible to navigate without collapsing into a soup of tears and anxiety. My personal fallbacks when I’m in the throes of a panic episode include compulsively checking email, dashboards, notifications, and analytics throughout the day, searching for any signs whatsoever that things are taking at least a temporary turn for the better.

It rarely does anything to make me feel better, but the constant scanning leaves my brain feeling jittery and unfocused, regardless.

One of the better things I’ve learned to do during unstable periods involves deliberately reintroducing forms of uninterrupted attention into my daily routines:

• Long walks or gardening stints, sometimes sans music or podcasts

• Reading actual books, including fiction

• Cooking, baking, or other household projects

• Sitting outside at dusk (or even breakfast time, when you can swing it) without simultaneously consuming six forms of media

Activities like these help calm the nervous system while quietly keeping associative thinking skills strong. I’ve noticed that creative insight often returns sideways instead of head-on.

Feed your fascinations without demanding immediate usefulness

In the past, I’d stop allowing myself access to any sort of “irrelevant” interest during unstable work periods. I had a bad habit of blaming myself for market shifts or client decisions beyond my control, so part of me just plain felt I didn’t deserve it. And if I would indulge myself anyway, I felt like every activity needed to at least somewhat justify its existence economically.

That’s a terrible trade-off, actually.

Private fascinations create cross-pollination. (Lately, some of mine include weather, architecture, folklore, film history, cities I’ve never visited, bird behavior, spiritual rituals, and interior design.) All of these things enrich the symbolic and observational layers involved in creative thought.

Not every interest needs to become a side hustle, brand extension, or yet another monetizable niche identity. It’s good for us to allow some things to simply remain interesting.

Improve the atmosphere of your actual life

I’ve had to learn the hard way in life that people absorb the emotional tone of their surroundings constantly. During uncertain stretches especially, I know I eventually end up living inside environments that are psychologically (and sometimes physically) stale, while all of my energy shifts toward resuscitating my work life.

I struggle with deeply ingrained feelings that I don’t deserve beautiful, clean, inspiring spaces to spend time in if I’m not also earning buckets of money right that second, but that’s a whole other conversation.

Small atmospheric changes really do matter more than people realize, so don’t let them fall by the wayside:

• Lighting lamps instead of overhead fluorescents

• Opening windows (something I always do, rain or shine)

• Rearranging spaces

• Playing music intentionally

• Cooking fresh, nutritious meals

• Spending time outside

• Tending plants and living things

• Creating small seasonal habits

None of these things solves economic instability directly, but they do help keep a person’s whole-ass life from reducing itself to a permanent waiting room. Some environments naturally invite observation and reflection. Others make the human soul feel like it’s waiting for jury duty.

Cultivate small motion

Historically speaking, there is no middle ground for me if left to my own devices when it comes to dealing with slower professional periods. I either pressure myself into massive productivity campaigns or stop interacting with creativity entirely.

Neither approach ever does much except make me feel worse. Tiny forms of creative motion work much better. A few of my favorites:

• Journaling

• Taking photos

• Writing short observations

• Sketching ideas

• Brainstorming fragments of creative writing or poetry

• Experimenting without pressure

All of these things help safeguard the continuity between me and the creative part of my identity, between casting call applications and LinkedIn networking bursts. Because the only thing worse than not having “enough” to do is finally going to tackle something new, only to find my creativity is covered with rust from sheer underuse.

Why This Is So Important Right Now

Even when it comes to non-freelance content production, today’s creative landscape is all about volume, speed, visibility, and constant output. Algorithms and AI overuse are a constant frustration, while entire industries increasingly prioritize scalability over individuality.

But that environment makes curiosity, symbolic thinking, observation, humor, and genuine perspective even more valuable. And those qualities don’t emerge from nonstop optimization. They come from lived experience, fascination, and engagement with the rest of the world beyond productivity systems.

Creative life cannot survive indefinitely in a non-stop state of constant emergency.

People don’t stop needing beauty, sensory richness, private interests, meaningful routines, and moments where the mind isn’t perpetually harvested for output. So, sometimes the most important thing you can do during unstable periods is stay awake when it comes to the rest of your life.

Because eventually the work returns in one form or another. And when it does, you want something alive waiting there to meet it.

So, technically speaking, I guess I can say I contributed to an Oscar-nominated documentary. Not really something I’ve thought much about since I realized this, though, as it hasn’t had much of an impact on my everyday life.

Nobody appeared at my door carrying a velvet robe and a fruit tray while whispering, “You are one of them now.” I didn’t levitate six inches above the kitchen floor, either, buoyed aloft by sheer glee. And that’s really only partially because my contributions were more or less anonymous, as is usually the case for ghostwriters and consultants.

As far as how that even happened, MasterClass approached me a while back to see if I’d be interested in being part of one of their feedback panels for an original documentary they were producing. I’ve done this in the past with a couple of their courses and truly enjoyed the experience. Plus, I usually score… like… a year of free MasterClass membership for my trouble, so I said yes, of course.

I was given a dedicated login and tool dashboard to work with, plus access to an unfinished rough version of the documentary (Diane Warren: Relentless). I watched it and submitted the requested feedback and suggestions via their system. Then I promptly forgot all about it.

Then this past March, I found out the final cut of the documentary had been nominated for an Oscar while watching the televised ceremony. (Pretty cool beans!) But I didn’t do much more than point it out at the time to my husband and go, “Hey, neat. That’s that one I worked on a while back. You should watch it. You’d like it.”

After a discussion about accolades the other day, it occurred to me that maybe I should have taken the fact that I contributed to something like that a little more to heart.

But then, I’ve always reacted that way to stuff like this, even when we’re talking about actual awards handed directly to me with my name attached and everything. For example, back in high school, I won a California Art Scholar medal and responded with all the emotional intensity of somebody receiving updated printer instructions.

All that got me wondering whether some creators simply experience prestige differently from everyone else.

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Sometimes Creativity Is More About Identity Than Achievement

Making things is just something I do and have always done, like breathing or emotionally reorganizing reality through increasingly odd metaphors

I never personally dreamed of plaques or even of earning a living making things one day. I certainly didn’t make art because I hoped somebody official would eventually stamp a document confirming I had successfully “arted.”

In other words, I’ve never had much of a relationship with the concept of formal recognition, and I’m realizing that a lot of other creatives are the same.

When creativity functions as part of your identity instead of a ladder to climb, awards can start feeling oddly separate from the actual experience of making the work. Somebody hands you a certificate acknowledging the thing you were already planning to continue doing tomorrow anyway.

To me, it always felt a little like presenting a fish with an award for successful swimming. Whether or not the fish appreciates the honor, it still intends to swim some more later.

Sometimes Impact Matters More Than Authority

I’ve also realized I care much more about whether my work resonates with other people (or with myself) than I do about “winning stuff.”

A thoughtful message from someone who genuinely connected with something I made tends to stay with me a lot longer than formal recognition does. Knowing a piece helped somebody laugh, think differently, feel less isolated, or spiral pleasantly into some wild existential reflection hits harder than institutional approval ever has.

I definitely still enjoy money, actual opportunities, and real visibility as much as the next exhausted internet goblin trying to survive late-stage capitalism (especially money). But emotional connection is still largely where it’s at for me.

Plus, I’m not really sure traditional accolades mean the same thing, now that the internet and social media are part of the chat. Something like contributing to a documentary’s Oscar nom now shares timeline space with:

• Somebody earning six figures reviewing gas station mozzarella sticks on TikTok

• A creator building a loyal following by ranking haunted horror movie dolls

• An Etsy seller paying their mortgage via spiritually supportive frog stickers

And it does so for a very short time at that.

All of it lives together inside the same glowing rectangle where people also spend hours arguing about whether cereal counts as soup. I suppose that means I sometimes don’t really know what creative success even means anymore, but that’s a whole other conversation altogether.

Sometimes Prestige Feels Uncomfortably Abstract

In most cases, the lived experience of creating feels messy, immersive, occasionally repetitive, and sometimes even oddly domestic. But I associate formal recognition with things like impressively constructed bios, announcements, certificates, nominations, and the like. (A viral LinkedIn post might count under the right circumstances.)

Creative work happens while sitting at cluttered desks in old t-shirts, eating crackers out of my desk and cussing under my breath about software updates that come through at the worst possible time. Prestige arrives later, wearing shiny formal shoes and speaking in complete sentences.

Achievements have never felt like proper finish lines for me.

I guess it’s hard to feel that way when you always still wake up the next morning feeling like yourself. You still have a phone full of email notifications to deal with once you get some coffee in you. There will always still be that one specific houseplant that remains spiritually committed to dying, no matter what interventions you attempt.

Even very cool realities evaporate and segue back into real life pretty quickly.

Naturally, that doesn’t make achievements meaningless. It does mean external recognition rarely transforms people as drastically as the movies would have us believe.

For Creators Who Experience This, Too

Because even though I always feel like I must be the only “weirdo” in the pool, experience has taught me that that’s rarely actually the case. So on that note…

Don’t assume your emotional wiring is wrong

Some creators just plain operate from a place governed by internal motivation systems more than they do external validation loops. I should know, because I’ve been one of them since I was a small child.

That doesn’t make you arrogant, ungrateful, or someone who thinks they’re “too good” to care about things other people care about (regardless of what anyone tries to tell you). It simply means recognition may never hit your nervous system with the same intensity it seems to hit other people.

If anything, that’s healthier than constructing your entire identity around applause you may or may not ever get.

Let recognition help your career without letting it define you

Awards and visibility definitely still matter professionally, even if they don’t trigger a full-on spiritual awakening on a personal level.

Because recognition opens doors, prestige creates opportunities, and accolades help people discover your work. Those things do count in practical, career-boosting ways, even when they don’t also emotionally rearrange your soul.

In other words, don’t be like me and keep forgetting to add them to your resume (or your LinkedIn profile). In an increasingly competitive professional world, they can really help.

Pay attention to what actually lights you up inside

For some creators, the truly meaningful moments look surprisingly small. Some of my own greatest hits include:

• Finishing an emotionally difficult piece

• Nailing the perfect sentence

• Making somebody laugh (or even just feel better about life for a second)

• Creating something emotionally authentic

• Losing myself inside the process for a few blissfully uninterrupted hours

Those moments count for a lot. Sometimes they count more than the shiny milestones everybody else notices first.

Stop waiting for recognition to make you feel significant

I get that a shocking number of creators these days assume legitimacy will descend from the heavens the second they successfully publish something, win something, go viral, or otherwise receive some sort of institutionally approved recognition.

But then that milestone arrives, and they discover they still feel suspiciously “the same” afterward. Usually because they are.

Seriously, I’ve gone viral before. I’ve won writing contests. I’ve received medals. Sometimes it’s cool, especially if it comes alongside any sort of monetary reward or promising future opportunity. In most cases, though, it doesn’t change much on a permanent level.

The Act of Creating Changed Me More Than Any Recognition Ever Did

When I really think about it, the things that shaped me creatively over the years had very little to do with any prestige I ever might have rubbed elbows with. That came from years of:

• Making things

• Experimenting

• Surviving obscurity

• Developing a voice

• Paying attention

• Continuing anyway

That said, the Oscar-adjacent documentary story is objectively cool, and the California Art Scholars medal was objectively impressive. I do genuinely appreciate both experiences and others like them. But neither altered me nearly as much as all the ordinary accumulated years spent creating and sharing things for the sheer sake of it did.

To me, that’s what actually makes a creative a creative. Whether you still feel compelled to keep making things after the applause fades (if it ever came in the first place) and somebody else becomes internet-famous for two seconds for selling weird raccoon tote bags on Etsy.

So the other day, I found myself thinking about how human beings have somehow managed to turn every enjoyable activity into a career development opportunity over the past decade or two.

Like, you can’t just bake bread anymore and casually share the fruits of your labor on social media just because you want to. Because the second you produce a halfway decent focaccia, some e-friend or nosey relative materializes out of thin air, going, “You should totally sell these.”

And that mindset is absolutely everywhere. A knack for painting or making crafts needs to become an Etsy shop. A passion for photography has to transition into a content strategy. Even something as random as homemade pottery needs to yield a branding package and discussions about “audience growth” before the clay even dries.

At this point, I fully expect someone to interrupt me in my backyard while I’m watering my lettuce to ask whether I’ve considered scaling the operation into a wellness empire called Rooted & Radiant.

I find it absolutely exhausting, and I don’t think I’m alone.

I personally love that people still clearly want to make things, as well as that you can see it everywhere in the rise of gardening, journaling, fiber arts, baking, miniatures, newsletters, and adults suddenly deciding they need to learn how to make soup “properly.”

People need this right now.

What they don’t need is the rising pressure surrounding creativity today. Every attempt at cultivating a hobby now carries that faintly acrid smell of optimization with it. As a result, everything wants to become:

• Content

• A side hustle

• A personal brand

• A monetization opportunity

• Proof you’re using your time “correctly”

Hobbies have stopped feeling like little sanctuaries away from the horrors of the world, they’ve started feeling like unpaid internships instead, and I hate it.

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The Internet Changed the Emotional Texture of Creativity

Something else I’ve noticed about all this over the years. Most of this pressure isn’t even coming from some e-villain standing over us with a clipboard. Half the time, the call is totally coming from inside the house.

Modern internet culture trains people to experience their lives through the eyes of an imaginary audience. So you take up watercolor painting and immediately wonder whether you should document the process online. You can’t even arrange mushrooms artistically on a cutting board anymore without mentally drafting captions and thinking about affiliate links.

It doesn’t exactly help that everything is measurable and quantifiable now:

• Views

• Likes

• Engagement

• Reach

• Growth

I feel like people have stopped asking, “Do I enjoy doing this?” and started asking, “Does this justify my making it at all?” Thinking this way eventually turns even the most casual sketchbook exercise into a performance review waiting to happen. And the last time I checked, the human nervous system was not designed to experience embroidery as a quarterly growth strategy.

Casual Creativity Used to Be Beautifully Messy

One of the things I miss the most about the OG internet is how gloriously chaotic people used to be creatively.

I miss the way personal websites often felt a little clunky and DeviantART pages contained everything from breathtaking masterpieces to anime wolves wearing seventeen random necklaces. I even miss the fanfiction archives that operated like sprawling underground cave systems, fueled entirely by caffeine and child-like intensity.

People made things simply because they wanted to, and like a lot of people were, I was all about that.

Teenagers could spend six hours making aggressively unnecessary music videos in Windows Movie Maker and feel spiritually fulfilled afterward. And not once did anybody interrupt to ask about scalability.

That kind of low-stakes experimentation mattered more than people realized.

Because interesting creative work so often comes from weird drafts, abandoned projects, ugly sketchbooks, failed experiments, and phases that feel completely embarrassing in hindsight. Modern optimization culture struggles to achieve the same level of heart because it prefers visible progress and polished outcomes instead, just like Meat World always did.

Creativity behaves a lot more like gardening than it does manufacturing. Consider the messy, beautiful ways gardens include dormant periods, volunteer plants, accidental hybrids, and occasional mysteries nobody fully understands.

Factories, on the other hand, want efficiency and nothing but. Give me a garden over that noise any day.

Constant Performance Has Made People Weird

Something that’s been borderline depressing me lately as a creative who once couldn’t wait to get home from my then-day job at the mall to come post online. Modern creators approach hobbies like frightened Victorian children anticipating a whipping.

People apologize for beginner work before anyone else has the chance to critique it. Then they abandon hobbies, three attempts in, because the results don’t look professional enough yet. All this while some shit-show algorithm hovers over everything like an eldritch weather system, deciding whose watercolor mushrooms deserve visibility today.

That’s one of the most effective ways to kill creative momentum that I can possibly think of. (Seriously, ask me how I know.)

Creativity at its best requires temporary delusion, so you need a certain amount of irrational confidence in your would-be work. Most artists, writers, musicians, and other creators spend years producing questionable material while developing instincts and taste for that reason.

And that awkward middle stage isn’t some minor detail that the process can just as well do without. It is the process.

Every meaningful creative life, including my own, once involved an entire graveyard of strange experiments. But today’s internet culture encourages people to start curating themselves almost right away. They become marketers before they become explorers, as a result.

Explorers make better art.

How to Reclaim Casual Creativity Again

Now, you don’t necessarily need to flee into the woods and communicate strictly through candlelit newsletters moving forward to fix this problem. I know most of us, myself included, still enjoy sharing work online and at least potentially connecting with audiences, no matter how much things have changed over the years.

I think the solution is to build healthier relationships with creativity itself — something I’ve been focusing on a lot lately as far as my own work goes.

Keep some creative work private

Not every idea needs to see the light of day immediately (or at all).

Things like private sketchbooks, messy drafts, strange little experiments, and unfinished projects help someone’s creativity breathe differently. Because once an audience enters the room, self-consciousness tends to follow, clipboard and unsolicited opinions and all.

At times, some of your most important creative work may never appear online at all. That doesn’t reduce its value by any means.

Stop trying to turn every hobby into a career

When I was growing up, the adults around me would immediately latch onto every single activity I showed any aptitude for at all and try to talk me into making it my next career choice. Even when I was still just a little kid.

And I absolutely hated it.

In fact, it made me apprehensive about ever sharing anything I made or cared about with anyone else, but that’s a whole other conversation. What I’m trying to say here is that it’s OK if a hobby simply enriches your life.

You don’t owe the world a monetization strategy every time you discover joy, and some activities should remain delightfully inefficient. A person should absolutely be allowed to learn watercolor purely because rainy afternoons exist.

Those watercolors don’t need to ever transition into:

• Brands

• Businesses

• Productivity metrics

• An entire identity, professional or otherwise

It’s perfectly fine (and even healthy) for a hobby to simply occupy some weird little corner of your life where your inner child can frolic around barefoot and unsupervised for a while.

Let yourself make strange, unimpressive things

Seriously, create ugly art. Write bizarre essays and take weird photos nobody understands. Build playlists with suspiciously specific emotional themes like “songs for staring into the refrigerator while reevaluating your personality at 11:47 PM.” (I have. Try it sometime!)

So much modern creative paralysis comes from trying to skip directly from the starting gate all the way to polished output in one big leap. All while your best ideas hide behind seven deeply questionable ones.

Let them through anyway.

Create before you evaluate

Modern creative culture encourages premature judgment. Because the second someone comes up with an idea, they start asking:

• Is this good?

• Will anyone care?

• Should I post this?

• Is this marketable?

Interesting work so often begins as absolutely clown shoes, though. So give your initial ideas time to become themselves before dragging them through their first round of performance reviews.

Create first. Assess later.

I Think People Miss Slow, Quiet Creativity

Now, this could just be wishful thinking or some other absolute Fig Newton of my imagination, but I feel like people are circling back to more grounded forms of creativity lately.

Gardening, journaling, sewing, cooking, personal blogs, tiny newsletters, and handmade gifts. Even the simple act of reading physical books while sitting outside, vibing like someone in a vitamin commercial, seems to be making a comeback, and I love to see it.

Because activities like these reconnect creativity to daily life instead of making it one more part of today’s constant public performance. People are getting hungry for this again. They want texture again. And tangibility, small routines, less algorithmic pressure, and more human-shaped living.

Truly, I get it. Deeply.

Some of my favorite creative moments these days happen far away from optimization culture entirely. They hit me while I’m chilling in my garden, tending my radishes and checking on my lettuce. Or they might make an appearance while I’m rearranging a room until the atmosphere feels right, or even just drinking coffee at the kitchen table while time drifts by unnoticed for a while.

Those moments are also part of a creative life. And I think they count now more than ever.

Make Something That Doesn’t Need to Win

I don’t think ambition is the enemy here. Creative people deserve success, recognition, and opportunities, and plenty of meaningful work reaches large audiences and genuinely improves lives.

The problems start when every creative impulse arrives hand in hand with the pressure to “make something” of it.

Hobbies can (and sometimes should) remain hobbies if that’s what a person wants. It’s OK to grow tomatoes, paint moths, knit scarves, or write rambling essays about Kubrick movies without also constructing a monetization funnel around the whole experience.

Because humans created art long before web analytics arrived with little blue checkmarks and hot takes on “engagement strategy.”

So make strange things. Make private things. Create really badly for a while. Wander around creatively without demanding a fresh round of measurable outcomes from yourself every fifteen minutes. Let hobbies be habitats and refuges instead of factories sometimes.

Because some of the most important creative acts in your life will never become profitable, optimized, scalable, or widely visible.

They will still shape you anyway.

Open a bunch of portfolios in separate tabs and scroll through them like a normal person sometime. And by that, I mean do it quickly, probably while a little distracted and with at least one other thought running around in circles in the background. Give each one you see a fair shot, close them all out, and then try to remember which of those people actually did what.

You’ll probably fail miserably.

You’ll remember that the basic presentations looked polished, everything seemed competent, and that someone somewhere definitely described themselves as a “storyteller,” which at this point tells you about as much as “I enjoy water.”

And none of it is bad. It is a big part of the problem.

Every detail today’s professionals throw at would-be employers and clients these days sits in that wide, over-comfortable middle where nothing ever offends you, surprises you, or makes you think, “wait, go back to that one.” Differentiating between them feels a lot like flipping through a stack of magazines, where every article technically reads well, but none are particularly exciting.

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The Barrier to Entry Is Gone

And that sounds awesome until you actually sit with it for a second.

Putting together a portfolio used to involve at least some challenge. You needed work experience under your belt, some kind of structure, and a willingness to accept that your formatting choices might come back to haunt you later. No, it wasn’t glamorous, but it did force you to fully participate in what you were doing.

Now you can build something sleek and utterly convincing in a single afternoon while half asleep.

Templates can handle the layout, while tools help shape the content, and suddenly you’ve got a site that looks like it belongs to someone who not only has everything under control, but definitely drinks water out of a glass instead of some random mug they found on their desk.

And on paper, all of that is very efficient. It opens the door for more people, and it removes the awkward “how do I even start this” phase that used to trip so many people up.

But it also means that “this portfolio looks nice and professional” no longer tells you anything about the person behind it. That box comes pre-checked before the work even begins, which sounds good until you realize it also removes one of the easiest ways to tell who actually knows what they’re doing.

There’s now so much to look at that an employer’s attention span can’t help but pack its bags and bounce pretty early on in the evaluation process. They skim and scan in search of something that actually breaks the mold, even a little bit.

And most of the time these days? Nothing does.

People love to call this “saturation,” which makes it sound like the problem is that there’s just too much good work out there competing for attention, but that’s not quite it. The real issue is that a massive amount of work now meets the baseline and then just sits there instead of pushing past it.

It doesn’t give anyone a reason to care. It just sits there before evaporating entirely.

What “Meaningless” Portfolios Actually Look Like Now

Once you’ve seen a few dozen of these, you start to pick up on the patterns, the same way you would with anything else.

Way too template-dependent

Some portfolios lean heavily on templates that do an awful lot of the thinking. The layout looks great, the sections flow nicely, and everything lives exactly where you expect it to. But you could easily swap out the name and keep the rest without anyone really noticing, which isn’t what most people actually want in an applicant.

Hyperpolished, thanks to tools

Others rely on tools to generate clean, well-structured material that never once steps out of line, and we all know what that looks like by now. The sentences are irritatingly polite, and one idea correctly leads to the next, while the tone sits perfectly in the middle, like it’s trying desperately not to make eye contact with anyone.

You read stuff like this, and you understand it. But then it slides right out of your head without even leaving a forwarding address.

Context that’s puddle-deep

Then there are the portfolios that explain everything while committing to absolutely nothing. You might well learn who the person is, how they work, and why it matters in a general sense. You don’t walk away with an actual point of view or anything else to signal that you’re actually dealing with a capable human.

Energy that just feels beige

Some portfolios look incredible until you actually attempt to spend time with them. The design looks great, and the structure keeps you moving, but the content itself never quite gets you where you hoped you were going. It’s like ordering something that looks amazing on the menu and then realizing it mostly tastes like the idea of food.

Examples that are all over the place

And of course, there are the “I can do everything” portfolios. Think multiple industries, tones, and types of work, all presented as hard proof of Versatility™. It’s the kind of portfolio that makes sense, but only from a distance. Up close, it gives you nothing to hold onto, though. You leave knowing the person is capable, yet with zero idea why you should pick them.

This All Feels Like More Competition

It isn’t, though. Not really. Take a closer look at how all that “work” clients and employers now have to evaluate actually functions, especially as a collective.

Most of it doesn’t push anyone toward any sort of preference or give a client a clear reason to choose one person over another. At best, it meets expectations and stops there, and that’s not competition in any meaningful sense.

Your real competition is the smaller group of people whose work actually breaks the scrolling trances we’re all prone to these days and makes a person slow down. Those are the people you’re actually up against, which is both better and worse than competing with everyone, depending on how you feel about real effort.

How to Build a Portfolio That Actually Means Something

Resist the urge to add more to your portfolio, and start making more of what you already have.

Build around perspective, not just output

Anyone can put out polished, finished work now. But most people still struggle to show how they really think, and that’s something a client needs to know about a person before hiring them.

A good portfolio gives someone a sense of the person’s decision-making process, not just their deliverables. So, when a piece reflects an actual point of view — how you approached something, what you emphasized, and what you deliberately ignored — it starts to feel like it belongs to you.

Cut anything that could belong to “just anyone”

If a piece wouldn’t look at all out of place in someone else’s portfolio without raising any questions, best believe it’s not helping you. If anything, it’s actively airbrushing you into the very background you’re trying to stand out from.

The goal here isn’t to show prospective clients everything relevant you’ve ever done in your life. It’s to show what actually represents you.

Show decisions, not just results

A finished piece might show a client what happened over the course of a particular project, but the decisions behind it tell them why it matters. When you explain how you approached something, even briefly, you give people a reason to trust your thinking.

A few clear lines about your choices can do more than an entire page of carefully curated buzzwords. No mind-melting case studies, charts, or graphs necessary.

Make it specific enough to exclude people

I get that trying to please everyone feels safe. But that’s really only the case until you realize it’s also the quickest way to make sure your work never stands out.

Adding actual edges to your stuff helps the right people see themselves in what you’re offering. It also tells everyone else to keep moving, and that’s exactly what you want it to do. You’re not running a general store here (unless you are, in which case, carry on).

Don’t be afraid to sound like you

Listen, I get it. Sounding like a polite, slightly improved version of everyone else on the internet seems like the right choice, especially if you’ve ever been spanked by the rest of society just for being unique. But that won’t help you much in today’s job market, especially if you freelance.

So, yes, let people hear your voice. But also understand that having a voice doesn’t mean turning everything into a personality piece. It means making choices about how you communicate instead of defaulting to whatever feels safest. When your tone reflects you, people remember it, even if they can’t quite explain why.

Reduce before you add

When something feels off about your portfolio, the instinct is to pile more on top of it, especially if you’re kind of a maximalist like me. Another sample, another section, another explanation that will surely fix everything — it all feels very satisfying and certainly like the right thing to do.

But experience has taught me to try taking something away instead. Then take another thing away. Watch how quickly the remaining pieces start to stand on their own. Quality has a way of shining through as soon as you give it a little breathing room.

What This Means for Freelancers

It means you don’t need to match the volume you’re seeing everywhere, and that it’s not even in your best interests to try. That will drain you and leave you feeling burnt all the way out long before it ever helps you.

You need to zero in on ways to stand out and be recognized instead.

Start by making decisions about your work and sticking with them long enough for people to get a proper read on what you’re trying to do. Show people how you think instead of hiding behind what you produce. Allow your work to have a personality, even if that personality doesn’t appeal to everyone.

That’s how you step out of the blur and become an anchor point that helps people get their bearings again.

Once upon a time — about a million years ago, when I was still in high school — a friend of mine invited me over for lunch. This should have been a normal, low-stakes social situation, like so many others. You know — sit down, eat something, make a little bit of polite conversation, maybe do some homework together in front of some MTV, and leave with your dignity intact.

That’s the script, everyone knows how it goes, and I would have been more than cool with that. But then this so-called friend opened the fridge and brought out a giant bowl of potato salad.

I’m not talking about the respectable kind with fresh herbs and a structure that at least semi-makes sense, either. I’m talking about the kind that looks like it was assembled in a lab — pale, glossy, and aggressively committed to being mayonnaise first and potatoes second.

This friend knew damn well I don’t eat that kind of thing (or anything with mayonnaise on it, for that matter). And I’ve never eaten that kind of thing. I would have sooner gnawed on a sofa cushion, butt prints and all, than voluntarily put a spoonful of that cold, white potato sludge into my mouth.

But I didn’t make a big deal out of it or anything, even though I knew this friend knew better. I just said, very calmly, “No, thank you. I don’t eat food that has mayonnaise.”

This should have been the end of the interaction. But instead, this friend put on this total wounded face, as if I’d just slapped her. Then she insisted I try the potato salad, elaborating that she made it “just for me,” which felt like a bold strategy given that it contained the one ingredient I consistently treat like a biohazard.

When I repeated my “no, thank you,” she scooped up a heaping spoonful and held it directly in front of my face before going, “No, you have to try it. I want you to see how good it is.” At that point, I was through being polite.

I told her, very clearly, that if that spoon entered my mouth, the situation would escalate immediately and dramatically, and not in a way that would enhance anyone’s lunch experience.

She did not appreciate this. I did not eat the potato salad. Everyone survived (somehow). But that afternoon has really stuck with me over the years, not because of the food, but because of what thinking about it eventually made me realize about the general population out there.

People don’t just approach food this way. They approach everything this way.

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Stop Covering Things That Plain Don’t Need It

Most people don’t trust things to stand on their own. As a result, they can’t seem to resist taking something perfectly fine and immediately adding all sorts of wild layers:

• More condiments

• More explanation

• More decoration

• More “just in case”

Somewhere along the way, simple enhancement morphs into a full-blown burial, and no one seems to know where to draw the line. Ever.

You see it in cooking and in writing, too. And you see it in how people present themselves online, at work, and even in everyday conversations. A simple idea enters the chat, clean and usable, but then someone panics and slathers it in extra words until it resembles that god-forsaken potato salad — technically consummable, but there’s just no telling what the damn thing started as.

If something works, just fucking let it work.

Because a good-quality, well-cooked piece of meat (or potato!) doesn’t need a carpet of condiment mayhem on top every time to work, and a clear sentence doesn’t need three backup clauses. A solid idea doesn’t need to wear a costume to get taken seriously, either.

So trust the thing. Create it. Then, for the love of God and your own body, stop touching it.

Learn the Difference Between Enhancement and Disguise

Butter melts beautifully into a dish and makes it better. And if freshly baked bread is involved at all, it sometimes even transforms it into poetry. A mayo canopy, on the other hand, sits on top of the whole thing like a big, slimy problem.

And that’s the difference. Enhancement highlights what’s already there. Disguise runs the risk of replacing it.

I find this same logic translates really well to the wide, wonderful world of writing, too. Because a good edit sharpens your voice. A bad edit turns you into a committee full of different voices that don’t harmonize well together. Useful feedback helps you refine something worthwhile, while the wrong feedback only convinces you to dilute it until nobody objects (or remembers it).

So, before you add more to something you’ve created — another sentence, another feature, another “improvement” — ask yourself a very simple question.

Is this making the original thing better, or is it turning it into some version of my high school friend’s nighmarish potato salad? If the answer leans toward the latter, put the spoon down before it’s too late.

Trust Your Internal “No” (Even When It Makes Things Awkward)

I knew I wasn’t eating that nasty-ass potato salad before it even hit the table. Not after thinking about it, and not after carefully weighing pros and cons, either. Immediately, and with the absolute certainty of every autistic person who has food aversions.

I wasn’t the target audience for such a dish, and my friend knew it, yet she tried to serve it to me anyway.

People love to argue with that kind of clarity, so they treat it like an opening bid instead of a final answer. They offer better versions, different angles, and emotional appeals. Before you know it, they’ve turned what ought to have been a simple personal boundary into a group project.

You do not need to participate in that song and dance.

Because that instinct you have — the one that says “this is absolutely not the right thing for me” — is a filter, as opposed to a personality flaw. Such instincts save you from needlessly wasting time, energy, and in some cases, your entire afternoon.

Now apply that to more than food.

If a project feels off, pause. And if something requires you to become a watered-down version of yourself to make it work, don’t take it as a challenge. Listen to yourself. You’re within your rights to say “no” to things without submitting a dissertation.

Let Things Be Specific Instead of Trying to Please Everyone

Food designed to please everyone usually tastes like nothing. (McDonald’s? I’m looking at you.) So does writing. So does branding, most social media posts, and a shocking number of “safe” career decisions.

Because when you aim for universal approval, you sand down every interesting edge involved until the final result slides straight past people without making any impression at all. Nobody hates it, but nobody loves it, either. So it just sits there and exists, like cold, gummy McDonald’s fries that have been sitting around all day.

Specificity, on the other hand, changes everything.

A strong voice absolutely turns some people off. Good! Those people weren’t your audience anyway. Likewise, a clear point of view or an off-color opinion creates friction. Excellent! That’s how you stand out, especially in a world that’s increasingly littered with digital noise.

You don’t need everyone to nod politely when they read your stuff to wind up with a hit on your hands. You just need the right people to lean in, so let your honest takes on whatever it is that you write about show. Let your voice sound like you, and definitely let your work reflect your lived experience and real point of view instead of the general consensus out there.

Know that if someone looks at it and goes, “That’s not for me,” you’re doing it right.

Build from the Source, Not the Surface

If you’re into cooking, then you already know that the best gravy comes from the pan you just used to sizzle up your steak, or your chicken, or your mixed veggies.

You take what’s already there — the juices, the seasoning, the bits that stuck to the bottom of the pan — and you build something uniquely wonderful that actually belongs with the rest of the meal. It deepens the flavor because it started with the flavor.

Compare that to grabbing some random bottle from the fridge and pouring it over every single dish every time in the hope that it will somehow “tie it all together” for everyone you’re serving it to. One approach builds. The other is usually about covering some kind of fuck-up.

This applies to everything creative.

Start with what you actually think, not what you think you should say. Use your own experiences, your own observations, and your own weird, specific way of seeing things. Develop from that delightfully flavorful place.

Don’t decorate your work with borrowed language and secondhand ideas instead and call it a masterpiece. Please. Trust me when I say people really can tell the difference, even if they can’t explain it.

They taste it.

Accept That Most People Will Keep Reaching for the Bottle

I know you want to be optimistic. But if 50 long years on this planet have taught me anything at this point, it’s that you will watch people cover good things with unnecessary layers for the rest of your life.

They will overcomplicate in whatever way they can. They will overexplain everything, and probably put you straight to sleep doing it. They will insist their version is better because it’s more familiar, more widely accepted, or easier to swallow.

Some of them will fill a spoon with whatever disgusting bullshit they want to feed you and shove it right the fuck in your face. You don’t have to go along with that (and I recommend that you don’t, because potato salad).

Instead, you can simply let them enjoy what they enjoy without signing up for the same experience to make them feel better. You can build your work, your life, and your choices around truths that make sense to you instead of covering them up to make them look better to the masses who just want the creative version of McDonald’s.

Find the people who recognize the difference. I promise, they’re out there, low-key doing the same thing you are — making things that taste and feel original and unique.

I Still Don’t Eat Potato Salad

That hasn’t changed, and will probably remain the case until the day I eventually take a dirt nap. What has changed is how often I see that same instinct play out everywhere else — the urge to smooth, soften, and effectively smother until nothing sharp or distinct remains of what was once an original idea with lots of potential.

I have zero interest in that anymore.

I’d far rather make something that stands out and stands on its own, even if it potentially makes people uncomfortable. I’d rather write something that sounds like me, even if it doesn’t appeal to everyone (or anyone). And I’d certainly rather cook, create, and live in a way that lets things be the best possible versions of what they already are.

No extraneous gloppy coatings, no disguises, and no apology involved. Ever.

Because if it’s good, it doesn’t need that kind of help. And if someone tries to force that spoon into my mouth anyway, I already know what I’m going to say.

I’m like a lot of people in that I have a long, sad history of declaring myself creatively blocked when I’m actually just consuming enough content for me to qualify as a full-time intake department all by myself.

I’m sure a lot of people reading this can relate.

In fact, most have probably read five essays, watched three videos, skimmed a thread, checked comments, opened a second tab for “research,” and somehow landed on the conclusion that their brain has nothing to offer, all within the last 20 minutes. Yet still they wonder why they feel super-stuck creatively with no end in sight.

At that point, the issue isn’t a lack of ideas anymore. It’s that the person in question hasn’t had a moment of quiet to finish a thought without someone else barging in mid-sentence.

Because I really do know this state well. It looks like curiosity on the surface, and it almost always feels like diligence when you’re in it. It certainly carries the faint scent of “I’m doing something productive here.” Meanwhile, your own ideas sit in the corner like introverted guests at a party where the music never stops, and no one lets them get a word in edgewise.

Calling that “stuck” gives it way more dignity than it deserves. What’s actually happening is much simpler. Straight-up overexposure.

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When Everything’s in Your Head, Nothing Has a Chance to Stick a Landing

Overexposure is great at disguising itself as normal behavior.

You scroll because you want to see what’s out there, you read because you care about your craft, and you watch because you enjoy learning how other people think. And none of that is inherently a problem in and of itself, but it becomes one when all of it stacks up without a break.

Your brain winds up clogged to hell and back with:

• Other people’s phrasing

• Other people’s structures

• Other people’s conclusions

• Your own half-formed ideas trying to survive in the same space

That’s the furthest thing from inspiration. That’s a fucking traffic jam, and I ought to know.

At some point, you eventually sit down to write, only to discover you’ve invited so many voices into the room that you can’t really hear your own anymore. You try to start a sentence and immediately second-guess it because you’ve already seen five versions of something similar, and at least one of them sounded way more polished.

So you pivot, tweak, hesitate, and second-guess. You consider a different angle, or maybe you just go right ahead and open another tab to check something “real quick.” Finally, you reread whatever you actually managed to write and decide it’s still not quite right.

Another hour passes. Nothing meaningful exists on the page. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Shocker, right?

Why This Feels Productive, Even When It Isn’t

Content consumption, especially in 2026, comes with the built-in illusion that you’re actually accomplishing something. You’re reading, watching, learning, absorbing. Your brain stays active, and you feel engaged, and all that comes with a sense of forward motion that makes it easy to confuse intake with some form of progress.

But the thing is, writing doesn’t always feel like that, nor should it. Writing asks you to sit still long enough to generate something from scratch. It also requires decisions from you, instead of just reactions.

Is it really any surprise that your brain reaches for the path that feels smoother?

Over time, this becomes a habit, and that habit rewires your sense of what “working” even looks like in the first place. Activity becomes the goal instead of output, and you eventually spend more time engaging with ideas than actually producing any of your own.

When you finally try to write, it feels harder than it should (or at least that’s always the case for me). My brain becomes accustomed to responding instead of initiating, and it eventually expects to be handed a prompt, a hook, or some other starting point from the outside. Every single time.

That’s how you end up thinking you’re stuck when you’ve actually just trained your brain to expect a solid onslaught of input before it does anything.

Real Creativity Doesn’t Thrive on Noise

Your brain actually has a mode for generating ideas that only activates when you stop force-feeding it all the time. Neuroscience calls it the default mode network, but I like to affectionately call it the part of your mind that finally does get that word in edgewise.

When external stimulation falls away, your brain can finally transition out of reaction mode and start connecting things internally. And the great thing is, you don’t even have to force it. You just have to stop interrupting it.

I mean… try thinking clearly while someone else talks over you sometime. That’s your brain under the pressure of constant input from the outside. Nobody’s brain was designed to function that way, so it’s no wonder it eventually loses the ability to spit out a full sentence.

But even a few minutes of quiet make it possible for all that chatter to finally settle down. Your thoughts start completing themselves again instead of getting cut off halfway through, and that’s where your work lives.

Not in the tenth article you skimmed for inspiration or somewhere in the third video explaining how to structure a paragraph. Actually in that space where your brain can finally function under its own power again.

How to Reduce Overexposure Without Becoming a Hermit

I know I’m not really one to talk about “not becoming a hermit,” but try to bear with me here anyway. I promise you don’t need to swear off the internet, burn your phone, or take up a life of silent contemplation in the woods to make overexposure a thing of the past.

You just need to stop blending input and output into one continuous stream all the time. A few simple changes go a long way. Here are a few of the ones that worked best for me.

1. Give your brain a clear runway before you write

Try starting a writing session without filling your head first. Skip the scrolling, and avoid the quick check-in “just to see what’s new.” Even thirty minutes of uninterrupted mental space changes how your thoughts take shape.

That first stretch of quiet will feel uncomfortable. Stick with it, though. Your brain will eventually settle down and get its ducks in a row if you don’t keep smacking it right the fuck in the face with new stimuli.

2. Separate consumption from creation

Reading and writing can and should coexist in your life, but hard experience has taught me that they don’t necessarily belong in the same block of time.

If you’re writing, write. And if you’re consuming, consume. Mixing the two leads to distraction at best and self-comparison at worst. Every new input becomes a potential detour, so escort those things into separate rooms. Finish what you’re doing in one before you walk into the next one.

3. Let rough ideas exist without interrogation

Overexposure convinces you that every idea needs to arrive fully formed and already validated against everything else that exists. And I think any creative person low-key knows deep down that’s not how ideas work.

Most of them start messy, incomplete, and slightly off-color. Give them a place to land anyway. There’s plenty of time to refine them later. The important part is getting them out of your head and onto the page before all that input accidentally smothers them.

4. Stop checking your work against the entire internet

You know perfectly well that you don’t need to know who has written something similar before you can sit down to write about that thing yourself. You don’t need to position your idea within a broader conversation before you’ve even expressed it, either, and you definitely don’t need to run a mental comparison against every piece of content you’ve consumed this week.

Your job is to write your version of the idea. Yours and only yours. Let the rest of the world exist without consulting it every five minutes. It’s not concerned with what you are or aren’t saying anyway.

What Changes When You Shut Off the Noise

Now, you’re not going to experience any lightning bolts when you do this. And nice as it would be, you won’t experience a sudden creative epiphany that solves everything at once, either.

But all that damn noise in your head will pipe down. Finally.

As a result, you’ll start writing sooner because you’re not waiting for the “perfect” angle to appear. Your thoughts will feel more direct because they aren’t competing with five other versions in your head. And decisions come your way faster because you’re not constantly cross-referencing them against a dozen external sources.

Your voice eventually becomes easier to recognize, too — not an easy feat these days, especially with AI dominating the chat everywhere you look.

That counts for more than people realize, because when you’re overexposed, your writing drifts off course without you even realizing it. It also picks up way too many traces of whatever you’ve been reading or watching.

Reducing the input helps you stop sounding like a composite of influences and start sounding like you again.

You Were Never Stuck

“Stuck” implies something is missing, when most of the time, the opposite is true. You have more than enough material to work with, right this second and wherever you happen to be right now. You just haven’t had the mental space to organize it into something coherent.

Overexposure scrambles processes that likely worked just fine for most of us before life was so damn noisy all the time. It fills every gap before you can do it yourself, and it convinces you that the solution lies in more input when the real fix involves less.

So the next time you sit down to write and feel that familiar resistance, don’t immediately assume you need more inspiration. Try something simpler instead.

Close the extra tabs, and give your brain a chance to finish a thought without interruption for a change. You might find that the very thing you’ve been waiting for was already there all along — buried under everything else you’ve been letting in through the side door.

Continuing the process of putting my childhood home back together, as well as making it better than it was before, has found me revisiting aspects of my past I haven’t so much as thought about in decades, let alone really considered.

I’ve since come to the conclusion that the real essence of childhood doesn’t necessarily show up as a neat, labeled package of “formative experiences.” Instead, it seeps in through background noise, cheap materials, and objects that had absolutely no business shaping anything. And yet…

No one consciously decides who they’re becoming at eight years old. They actually absorb it through random details like smells and awkward situations, through tiny, repetitive moments that feel like absolutely nothing until you realize they’ve been low-key serving as part of the foundation of your life this whole time.

Don’t worry. I’m not about to inflict a list of boring milestones or achievements that wouldn’t mean much to anyone but me on you. This is actually a list of random artifacts — weird, mundane, slightly cursed objects and experiences that leave all sorts of fingerprints on a person’s personality as they grow.

Maybe you can relate to a couple of these (or some similar ones).

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1. The Smell of a Vacuum Cleaner Overheating

That warm, dusty smell always kicked in right when cleaning stopped being just another casual part of a routine day and turned into a full-blown endurance event. Sometimes, that vacuum would start sounding (and smelling) like it was fully reconsidering its life choices.

That’s where I was taught that effort should look vaguely like training for an Olympic sport before it actually counted for anything. If nothing smells like it’s about to go tits up any second, are you even trying?

2. Off-Brand Cereal Mascots

Come on, you know the ones. They had the same big smiles, the same borderline unhinged cheerfulness, and absolutely none of the credibility. Some of them made you feel like they were one step away from asking you if you had games on your phone.

That’s where I learned to recognize the difference between “this is great” and “this is technically acceptable.” You eat your cereal, you nod, you move on with your little-kid day. But a part of you notes the downgrade and files it away for the future. This is the place where standards are born, for better or worse.

3. A Jacket That Made You Feel Like a Different Person

Maybe this is an autistic kid thing, but maybe not — that magic jacket you wore everywhere. You put it on, and suddenly you’re walking with a child’s version of purpose, direction, maybe even a movie-caliber plan. Then you take it off and go right back to being a sentient question mark.

I’ve had several versions of that jacket over the years. Each taught me that identity is at least 30 percent styling. Sometimes you borrow confidence before you actually grow into it, wear it around for a while, and hope no one checks the label.

4. Waiting Rooms with Outdated Magazines

You sit down, grab a magazine from three presidential administrations ago, and immediately understand that time isn’t even a thing here. It’s not moving, trying, or really even existing. (Pretty apropos for a dentist’s or doctor’s waiting room, honestly.)

Waiting rooms teach patience in the same way a cat teaches boundaries — through prolonged, uncomfortable exposure to the worst incarnations of it. You don’t get any choices in this particular corner of Limbo. You just sit there, aging slightly, while flipping through an article about “hot trends for 2009.”

5. Group Photos Where You Didn’t Know What to Do with Your Hands

Possibly another autistic thing, but possibly not. The camera comes out, and suddenly your hands feel like foreign objects you found lying on the ground behind a dumpster. You become especially aware of your elbows. (What even are joints?)

Photo time turns existence into a full-body acting exercise. Stand here and smile on cue. Pretend (to the best of your ability) that you didn’t just forget how to be a person. Really, it’s incredible that we ever look normal in pictures.

6. Stickers You Never Used Because They Were “Too Important”

If you’re anything like I was as a kid, you saved the cool stickers you collected like they were rare artifacts that needed to be preserved for future generations. You protected them and honored them. But you absolutely never used them.

My perfectly curated sticker drawer was where I learned to wait for that perfect moment that never shows up. Because those stickers taught commitment to an idea that reality doesn’t actually support very well. I use my stickers now, by the way. My laptop is living proof.

7. The Family Computer in Its Designated Spot

And always in a central location, too, like it needed ongoing supervision. Sure, you eventually got your turn, but you never got the kind of privacy most of us have these days when we’re on our phones or laptops. The screen practically announced, “anything you do here is a group project.”

I suppose that setup trained me early for life online. I learned how to exist while being potentially observed at any moment. Even Solitaire started feeling like it had stakes after a while.

8. Doors Had to Stay Open

This was never about airflow or anything sensible like that. My dad just plain didn’t believe children should ever have privacy, so closing your door for any reason other than the need to change your clothes was unacceptable.

An open door, on the other hand, sends a clear message. Yes, you have space, but you also accept the fact that you’re never to deliberately separate yourself from the rest of your family. So I compensated by heavily editing parts of myself and full-on hiding others. I also learned early that boundaries often come with terms and conditions.

9. The Hum of a Refrigerator Late at Night

Everything winds down for the day, and then there it is. That steady hum, just doing its job like a tiny, reliable night shift worker.

I always found it oddly comforting. That hum basically said, “rest if you want, but the system stays on.” Which, now that I think about it, might be the most accurate preview of adulthood anyone could have given me.

10. A Journal You Suspected Someone Might Read

Ah, my entry point to writing — journaling and diary-keeping. I’d sit down to write and immediately become my own editor, censor, and hypothetical publisher. Every sentence got a quick internal review before it hit the page, and I loved every second of it.

But remember. Privacy wasn’t a thing in my home growing up, so I kept journals, knowing full well someone (likely my mother or brother) would likely eventually decide to go right ahead and read what I wrote. So, I learned how to package my thoughts early, which left me oddly prepared for blogging and social media years later.

11. Rewinding a Cassette with a Pencil

Whenever one of my favorite tapes wouldn’t cooperate, I’d step in like a tiny engineer with a number two pencil and a lot of hope.

Mastering that little trick taught me that systems break, and sometimes you fix them yourself with whatever’s within reach. It’s scrappy, but it works. It also teaches you that you can figure just about anything out, given enough patience.

12. The Static Burst Between Radio Stations

My fellow Gen Xers remember this well, I know it. You’d land between stations and get blasted with noise. Then you’d adjust, miss it, and adjust again. Eventually, you’d hit something, but not before thoroughly looking at your life, looking at your choices.

That taught me determination, whether I was interested in that or not. You get super comfortable with almost, and learn it’s not the end of the world. Just keep turning the dial. Something good is in there somewhere.

13. The Sound of Distant Lawnmowers on a Summer Afternoon

I’d just be doing my own thing — probably reading in the bedroom window seat that made me feel like a wistful Victorian lass — and somewhere out there, someone would decide it was lawn day. You’d hear it, steady and committed, like the soundtrack to a life you’re not currently living. And you’d inhale the scent of sweet, sweet grass in distress and know that summer was truly here.

It was a reminder that the world keeps going in every direction at once. Other people have routines, plans, and quite possibly better lawn equipment. So, you catch the audio version, move on, and plan your next yard upkeep day.

14. The Moment a Streetlight Flicked on at Dusk

One second, it’s still technically daytime. But the next, a tangerine-orange light snaps on like someone somewhere just decided otherwise.

It tells you the day is over, whether you wrapped things up nicely or not, as well as that your mother expects you home pronto. But that’s time for you. It simply flips the switch and expects you to keep up. There’s always tomorrow, though.

Nobody ever explained to me what any of this randomness meant or why it might matter to me one day. These things just existed, repeated, and taught me the shape of a life in progress.

Over time, they also built a framework that helped me figure out how to wait, how to adapt, how to present myself, and how to read a situation without anyone spelling it out for me in big, red letters. Because the big, obvious moments always get all the credit, but these are the ones that handled a lot of the heavy lifting for me.

It’s a little ridiculous when I look at it now, but maybe that’s why I treasure these types of memories. Apparently, entire personalities can form out of a hodgepodge of overheated vacuums, questionable mascots, and the deep existential fear of wasting a really good sticker.

Explains a lot about me, actually.

So, a little while back, I answered a Quora question that prompted members to reflect on what they thought was the most overlooked ingredient in a long, fulfilling life. I basically said “wonder,” elaborated on what I meant, hit post, and went about my day.

The answer actually turned out to be one of those that takes off, with lots of engagement to show for it (for a change, as I normally feel like I’m just shouting into the void some more).

And a lot of the people who commented started by agreeing with me. Then they immediately repurposed wonder as something else entirely — travel, new social experiences, “getting out more.” One person even redefined it as sexual adventurousness out of East-Jesus nowhere.

A couple of Debbie Downers went straight to logistics, basically saying that they can’t “afford” wonder right now, as Debbie Downers tend to do. (Cool? Maybe get off my post, then, because you miss the point by a mile.)

It made me realize that most people don’t actually know what wonder is, even when someone spends 300 words or so explaining it to them. From where I sit, wonder is what they replaced with a bunch of social constructs and adult bullshit that’s just shinier, faster, and more expensive.

Not such a hot state of affairs if you’re trying to build any kind of creative life that lasts longer than a few initial bursts of motivation.

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Most People Think Wonder Is Something You Acquire

Seriously, ask around a little bit, and you’ll wind up with some version of the same noise now infesting the comment section of my Quora post. Wonder is what happens when you:

• Travel somewhere new

• Have some big, rare, life-changing experience

• Buy something interesting or expensive

• Become richer than God

• Shake up your routine in some visible, Instagram-friendly way

People treat it like a reward for finally having enough time, money, and energy to go out and buy moments, and I’m not denying that stuff like that can be fun or satisfying in its own way. But it also moves wonder out of reach for a lot of people (especially these days).

If wonder depends on access to a short list of society-approved resources that are drifting further out of reach every day, then you only get access to it when your life aligns with everyone else’s definition of success. Conveniently, that also means you can postpone experiencing it indefinitely.

You can just tell yourself you’ll feel that again when things calm down or when you have the emotional bandwidth to relax. Maybe you tell yourself you just need a change or scenery.

Suddenly, wonder is right up there on the same shelf as that weekend getaway you keep meaning to take, gathering dust in anticipation of “someday.”

Children Don’t Have Any of That, and They’re Full of Wonder

Think about it. Kids don’t control their schedules to any real degree, and they don’t have any disposable income to speak of, either. And yet, wonder is an absolute way of life for them.

They can become completely fascinated by something as simple as a cool bug on the sidewalk, the way light hits a wall, reruns of their favorite cartoons, or a random object they’ve seen a hundred times before. They don’t need novelty in the big, dramatic sense most adults seem to. Instead, they create it out of whatever’s already there.

Because if wonder truly depended on a person’s ability to travel, the amount of money they have in the bank, or the level of freedom they actually have in life, kids would be the least qualified demographic on the planet. Instead, they’re the gold standard.

So clearly, something else is going on.

Wonder Is a Way of Looking, Not a Way of Living

If life’s taught me anything at this point (and the hard way), it’s that wonder isn’t about what you eventually acquire and add to your life. It’s about how you engage with what’s already in it.

It shows up best when you:

• Notice and consider, instead of skim

• Linger (or even dilly-dally) instead of optimize

• Let something simply be interesting without immediately sorting it into some box and labeling it for convenience

It’s about how and when you pay attention, not a material change in circumstances.

And you likely already do this in other areas of your life. If you’re a movie buff, you might watch a film and catch patterns other people miss. You probably connect ideas across completely different domains at work or in your creative life. Sometimes, you sit with something a little longer than you normally would, and a lightbulb finally goes on over your head.

That’s wonder in motion. It just doesn’t always look or feel like it.

Because adults tend to train that out of themselves over time. Society wears us down and teaches us to filter everything through concepts like usefulness. If something doesn’t serve a clear purpose, it gets dismissed, ignored, or turned into consumable content as quickly as possible.

Once that happens, your life can be full of experiences while still feeling annoyingly flat.

Why Adults Lose It (and Why Creatives Can’t Afford To)

At some point, the whole dirty concept of living becomes transactional. Every experience requires you to ask what you’re getting from it, how you can use it, and whether it’s worth your time in the first place before you’re allowed to have it in the first place.

You’re not necessarily wrong to ask those questions, but they do tend to get in the way of wonder.

Add in constant distraction and pressure to produce, and you end up with a very efficient way of moving through your days that leaves very little room for curiosity. We’re assured that’s just how adulthood works, but for creatives? It’s nothing but a slow leak.

You can keep producing without wonder for a while. (Been there!) You can get pretty good at it, too, but you can’t operate that way forever. Eventually, you run out of steam and start chasing bigger inputs in an attempt to fix it — more content, more research, more “inspiration”— when input was never actually the issue in the first place.

You Need a Different Relationship With Attention, Not More “Resources”

So many people like those folks in my Quora comments claim they can’t access wonder because they’re too busy, too tired, or just not rich enough.

But who isn’t?

I don’t really have any resources to draw from, either. My bank account is in the same sorry state as everyone else’s, and I’m just as irritated as the next guy that the average cost of a pound of hamburger now well exceeds the federal minimum wage. I certainly can’t afford to travel the world or pack my things and move somewhere more exciting.

Hell, I really can’t even afford to eat out or go to the movies on a regular basis, so it’s probably for the best that I don’t particularly want to do those things.

I’m not even in what I’d call a good mood most of the time, and I’m perpetually frustrated with people and situations that are beyond my control. But I’m still able to find and experience wonder on a consistent basis. If I try, I can find it even:

• While doing something repetitive

• In familiar environments

• Hiding in five-minute windows between tasks

But that version is a much harder sell for most people, because it removes the external excuse. You can’t blame your schedule for something that happens inside your own sense of perception.

How to Actually Practice It (Without Turning It into Yet Another Project)

Wonder doesn’t really need a system, a routine, or a color-coded tracker (although those things can help you get the plane off the ground if you really struggle). It does benefit from a few small adjustments.

Give something your attention longer than you “need” to

Resist the urge to move on the moment you’ve “gotten the point.” Sometimes, there’s a second layer right behind the first, just waiting to be discovered and appreciated.

Follow one thought a little further than usual

When something catches your interest, give yourself permission to dive down a rabbit hole for a hot minute. See where it leads instead of cutting it off because it’s not immediately useful. Channel some of what you find out into something frivolous and fun.

Stop labeling everything as either useful or useless

Some of my most interesting ideas start out as complete nonsense by society’s standards. I’ve just learned to give them a minute before deciding they’re not worth my time because of it.

Allow interest without obligation

Every spark of inspiration doesn’t need to eventually segue into a project, a piece of content, or a future career path. Sometimes (maybe even most of the time) the experience itself is the whole point.

And really, I get it.

Big, flashy, noisy achievements feel good, impressive, and very adult. But that doesn’t make them wonderful, and they’re certainly not the missing secret to a long, happy, healthy life. (Trust me, I’ve checked.)

Wonder is a mindset — something you can embrace anytime and anywhere. Embracing it is also (thankfully) a learnable skill. Try it. It just might help you stay a little saner.

So yesterday, I got a Facebook message from an online acquaintance I hadn’t heard from in a while or really even seen around. You know the kind of message I mean.

It starts with a brief, “Hey, I’ve been thinking about you and hope you’re well.” A perfectly normal statement, but also one that’s just sort of floating there with suspicious politeness — so polite, you can almost hear it clearing its throat. Then hot on its heels comes the real reason you crossed the person’s mind.

“So I want to start this website,” followed by a lengthy, very detailed request for professional advice and practical creative assistance (AI guidance and image help, in this case).

All for free, of course, because we’re all friends here. (We are not friends.)

At first, I planned to do what I always do with asks that come out of the blue from non-clients and non-friends like that — ghost before moving on with my life. But then the dude just kept going, without even waiting for a response. More messages, each packed with more details and more requirements, like we were already midway through a collaboration I never agreed to.

And I just sat there blinking at the screen, like, oh. You think I still do this.

Because for a Long Time, I Actually Did Do This

I helped run a massive AI art group on Facebook a while back. And by “helped run,” I mean I eventually wound up stuck handling everything myself while the other members of the admin team randomly checked in when (and if) they felt like it.

Naturally, I spent a lot of time being helpful, available, encouraging, and generous with what I knew, whether I liked it or not. If people had questions, I answered them. If people wanted guidance, I gave it. It just came with the territory.

I became the person who explained things, smoothed things over, and made the space feel functional every day. For everyone, all the time. It didn’t matter if I was juggling three deadlines on a given day or woke up in a mood that would make a Victorian ghost look cheerful. It didn’t matter whether I low-key couldn’t stand whoever it was who reached out to me, either.

I showed up anyway and helped.

And I did that for a very long time, long enough that some people still remember me that way and only that way. But the thing is, I’m not naturally outgoing or helpful… just… as a person. In my non-public, non-professional life, I’m actually very private and extremely selective about who I give my time to.

When the moderator role went away, so did the obligation to continue performing faux niceness for everyone, and things have been that way for the better part of a year at this point. I’m used to having my sanity back by now, so I no longer take it very well when I open my Messenger inbox to find a bunch of entitled horseshit waiting for me.

Why People Assume Access (Especially Online)

Obviously, what I’m getting at isn’t just about one guy in my inbox. It’s part of a much larger pattern that the internet has quietly trained people into over the years.

The internet blurs the lines between visible and available

You post regularly. You share your work, discuss your life to whatever extent you’re comfortable, and interact in public spaces. Over time, people develop a sense of familiarity with you that can feel pretty darned real on their end.

Because they’ve seen your posts and read your thoughts. They’ve watched you exist in a space they also occupy. From there, it’s way too easy to go from “I know this person” to “I can reach out to this person” to “this person will respond when I do.”

People decide that because you’re visible, you’re also accessible (and should be happy to be so), and the gap between those two ideas keeps shrinking.

Expertise looks like a public resource from the outside

When someone sees that you’re good at something, their brain doesn’t immediately register that they’re probably looking at something that took years to build. It goes straight to, “How do I access that for my own benefit?”

There’s this special flavor of casual opportunism baked into the whole business. If knowledge exists and you appear to have it, the next step is to ask, extract, and apply.

Seriously, nothing makes a person friendlier or more social than the idea of co-opting someone else’s time.

Women wind up wearing a “helpful” label by default

If you happen to be a woman, then you’re also painfully aware of how we’re socialized (and expected) to be accommodating, responsive, and pleasant in ways that don’t always apply to our male counterparts. Because when a woman is knowledgeable or skilled, that expectation often translates to unlimited open access with consequences for not delivering:

• If she doesn’t respond, she thinks she’s “too good” for other people.

• If she says “no,” she’s difficult.

• If she blocks, she’s a bitch or “has an attitude.”

Nobody ever says any of that right out loud or anything, but it tends to show up in how comfortable people feel making these asks anyway.

Past access often feels permanent

And if you’ve ever been helpful in a public way, then you also know people who remember that will treat that as your default setting. Forever.

You answered questions once, so you must still answer them. You guided people before, so you must still be open to doing that. Access becomes something people expect to keep once they’ve got it, even when the context that necessitated it is long gone.

It’s like one of those memberships we all forget to cancel every so often, only someone else signed you up for it and refuses to allow you to adjust the account settings.

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What to Do When People Assume You’re This Available

If any of this feels familiar, allow me to share a little of what I’ve learned by quietly stepping out of that role (in this situation and others).

1. Don’t explain your boundaries to anyone

Most people (especially most women) experience a strong urge to soften what they say when they decline a request or disengage from someone. You naturally want to explain why you don’t have time, why the request is a lot, or why the timing isn’t great.

Don’t do that. That’s a great way to turn what should be a hard boundary into an irritating conversation you don’t really want to have.

Because the more context you give someone, the more room there is for someone to respond with, “Oh, no worries, this will only take a minute,” or “I totally understand, but…”

2. Silence works better than you think

Not every message requires a response, especially when the message itself assumes a level of access you never actually consented to.

Silence doesn’t usually escalate anything on its own (unless you’re dealing with a complete psycho, but that’s a whole other conversation). It simply leaves the request unanswered. A normal person will wait a reasonable amount of time for a response before realizing you’re not interested and moving on.

You only really run into problems when the other person treats your silence as a delay instead of a lack of interest, which brings us to the next point.

3. Pay attention to escalation

If someone keeps adding details, clarifying all the expectations they’ve already dumped in your lap, or building out the request before you’ve even responded, they’ve already decided for you that you’re participating.

That’s the perfect time to disengage completely or close the door more firmly, because you’re no longer dealing with a “quick question” at that point. You’re dealing with an assumption.

4. Separate being “nice” from being available

It’s taken me most of my 50-year life to truly understand this, but you can be a decent, thoughtful person and still choose not to engage with someone’s request. Because those two things get tangled up together easily, especially online, where many people see responsiveness as a measure of character.

You don’t become less kind because you didn’t feel like helping a random stranger execute some big idea they had. You become more selective with your time, which is a different skill entirely.

5. Notice who actually shows up for you

Actual online friends and acquaintances are usually pretty normal as far as how they exist in your orbit. They read your work, engage occasionally, and actually contribute something to the space you’re in. In other words, there’s a sense of mutual presence there.

Opportunists appear when they need something, completely forgetting you exist the rest of the time. They don’t actually ever interact or support anything you’re doing. And once you start noticing that pattern, it becomes hard to ignore. Some people don’t know you so much as they just know where to find you when they want something.

6. Let yourself outgrow old roles

It’s completely up to you how, when, and where you choose to show up for other people, especially people you don’t know. And you can choose to stop doing things you used to do well for any reason (or no reason) at all. You’re definitely allowed to disappoint people who preferred the version of you that was easier to access.

They’re not necessarily wrong about who you were, but they probably are working with badly outdated information.

7. Use the tools available to you

People tend to frame blocking as overkill, but I’m personally a big believer in it once certain patterns present themselves.

It removes the need for further interaction and prevents future assumptions. It keeps your space aligned with what you actually want it to feel like, too. And when it comes to some people, it’s really the only way to handle the situation.

You don’t have to make it your go-to or anything, but I recommend you do get comfortable doing it when it makes sense.

The Version of Me They Remember

This person who messaged me yesterday didn’t necessarily do anything wildly offensive. He didn’t insult me or act like a perv, the way a lot of people do.

He just rolled into my inbox, operating under a set of assumptions that no longer apply to me and haven’t for a very long time. He remembered a version of me that was helpful, available, and willing to guide people through things on demand. And that person technically existed once, playing the role well.

But I also came to resent having to be that person and was only too happy to move on once the opportunity presented itself last year. I certainly don’t feel any particular pull to step back into it for people who haven’t shown up for me in any meaningful way since.

Because this isn’t my responsibility anymore. It isn’t who I am by default, either.

So if you met me when I was still performing helpfulness for anyone and everyone because I felt I had no other choice, I understand the confusion. I also totally get just how much my customer service face can look like an actual personality from the outside looking in.

But it also had a beginning, it had an end, and I ultimately decided not to renew the contract.

Earlier, and I were having a conversation about creative processes and how they’ve changed over the course of our 50-plus years on the planet, especially as far as audience expectations go.

These days, people seem to expect creators to share everything about their process on demand, preferably for free, and presumably so they can duplicate every detail of it themselves. But we’re old-school, meaning we still attribute a lot of the magic of art to the fact that you don’t know everything about how it’s made.

At some point, we compared creative work (and the sharing of it online) to stage magic and illusion. Penn & Teller and their kind came up at some point, and with good reason.

In stage magic, something disappears and eventually reappears. Your brain briefly considers filing a complaint with physics, then shrugs and enjoys the ride.

What you don’t do is immediately pause the Penn & Teller video you’re probably watching on YouTube and rush to the comments to demand a breakdown of every move, preferably with a diagram attached.

Instead, you simply let the trick be a trick and enjoy it as such. If your sense of wonder is still intact, maybe you carry a little bit of that “how did they do that” energy with you for a while as you go about your business that day. Speaking as someone who loved illusionists growing up, I’ve always thought that was not only part of the fun but also the point of watching in the first place.

Creative work lives in that same space to a greater extent than most people like to admit.

A finished piece — a story, an image, even a single sentence that lands just right — usually works as well as it does because something about it resists breakdowns and forensic-level explanations. There’s timing in it and taste, too, maybe with a few decisions that can’t quite be reverse-engineered from the outside thrown in for good measure.

And yet, here we are in a world where the first response to seeing something interesting is often, “Explain yo’self.”

The Era of “Show Me Everything”

Spend five minutes in any creative space — writing, fingerpainting, music, AI art, you name it — and you’ll see people both sharing stuff like this and demanding that others do the same:

• “How I made this”

• “My exact process”

• “Every tool I use”

• “How long it took, down to the minute”

Some of it is genuinely helpful because people can learn and connect, which is always worthwhile. Hell, as we all know by now, entire careers get built on teaching others how to do what you do.

None of that is the problem. It’s the pressure that is the problem.

In 2026, any sort of creative sharing also comes alongside the expectation that if you make something good, you should also be willing to unpack it for people on demand. The assumption is that creators should always be limitlessly transparent, generous, accessible, and quick about all of it.

If you hesitate (or, God forbid, say no outright), you’re difficult, full of yourself, or maybe just gatekeeping something you’re “supposed to” hand over for the good of the internet.

Seriously, ask me how I know.

But we don’t sit down at a magic show and expect a tutorial the minute the applause dies down (or at least I don’t think we do). We don’t corner chefs and request the full recipe, technique breakdown, and grocery list involved in a finished dish the minute we sit down and enjoy a bite, either.

Creators online, though? If people actually like your work, it’s almost not considered complete until it’s been explained right, left, and diagonally, as well.

I went through this most recently in a massive AI art group I moderated on Facebook for a while, and I thought I was going to go insane, strangle someone, or both after a while.

When the Process Isn’t the Point

I’ve also noticed a lot of creative advice treats the creative process like a recipe. Do this, then this, then this, and you’ll get something similar on the other side. But sometimes that works, while a lot of the time, it doesn’t.

Really cool creative work of any kind is about more than just the steps you take to get there. It’s also about the judgment calls, including the difficult instinct to cut something that technically works but feels wrong. Sometimes it’s about the urge to lean into a weird idea that doesn’t really make sense (or that might even piss people off), yet still refuses to go away.

None of that translates very well into a clean, repeatable system:

• Step one — have good taste (whatever that means).

• Step two — know when something feels off. (Good luck with that.)

• Step three — fix it. (Yeah, right.)

I mean, that would be pretty convenient. And perfect, right? Everyone can be a creative genius now. (Don’t they wish.)

But the more you try to reduce creative work and the expression of ideas to only the practical mechanics involved, the more you strip away the part that actually makes it worth doing in the first place. You can hand someone the tools, but easily still leave out the thing that matters most — how you use them.

Illusionists Don’t Hand Out the Blueprint

Magicians could explain everything they do. Sometimes they even will, but usually only selectively, intentionally, and within the right context. What they don’t do is walk on stage and say, “Before we begin, here’s exactly how this works.”

A viewing experience that’s actually rewarding truly depends on that gap between what you see and what you understand. Creative work thrives in that same gap. You make something, and (hopefully) someone else encounters it. There’s a moment where it clicks (or almost does), and they sit with it for a second.

That space, where they’re engaging with the work instead of dissecting it, is where a lot of the magic lives. Overexplain it, and that space vaporizes into thin air. I think that’s a real shame.

It’s also probably why we don’t have “art” online anymore, so much as we really just have “content.”

Then There’s the Entitlement Layer

Back when I modded that AI group I mentioned earlier, my stuff was fairly popular and got a lot of attention from people who liked it and wanted to know how to make something like it. As a result, I had a ton of people asking for prompts or even one-on-one instruction.

And not always nicely, either.

Quite a few of these people felt completely entitled to whatever it was they were asking for and had no problem criticizing my character when or if I didn’t want to share. It sucked all the fun out of being part of a community full of people who were also curious about these tools, and it’s definitely one of the reasons I wasn’t really all that upset when Facebook eventually Zucked the group for reasons beyond my control.

Because a lot of people who ask about process are just curious. They want to learn, and that’s part of how they’re figuring out their own path. It’s the situations where questions become expectations that I have an issue with.

“Can you show me exactly how you did this so I can do it too?”

Not only does that assume your process is transferable in a neat, predictable way, like a set of IKEA instructions or something, but it also assumes you’re responsible for making it accessible to others, whether you want to or not.

That’s a lot to attach to someone else’s work.

Share The Writer in the Wild

How to Decide What to Share (and What to Keep to Yourself)

Ultimately, you and only you get to decide when that accessibility makes sense, what you want to reveal, and how much of your process you want to turn into something instructional.

Identify what actually makes the work work

What actually matters the most about whatever it is you’re putting out there? Is it the tools? The steps? Or is it the way you make decisions and work with ideas inside those steps? If sharing something would turn your work into a formula that completely misses the point, maybe don’t do that.

Share around the edges

You can give people a few helpful pointers without giving away the whole structure of whatever it is you do. So, talk about where ideas come from and what tools you’re experimenting with. Talk about the parts that surprised you or that maybe didn’t work at first.

People can still learn from that if they really do want to learn. They still get the window into your process that they said they wanted. You don’t have to hand them the whole-ass blueprint to the house you’re building in the name of being helpful.

Pay attention to how it feels

If explaining your process feels enjoyable, and it’s something you actually want to do? Go for it.

But if it makes you feel like you’re overexposing something, or turning something you genuinely enjoy into something exploitative or transactional? You’re within your rights not to go there at all. You don’t need anyone’s permission. It’s your creation, after all.

Let your work stand on its own

People should be able to appreciate what you make without being able to recreate it themselves. They can learn from you without following your exact steps. They can be inspired without receiving a complete illustrated how-to manual in exchange for their time and attention.

Like I said, I’m old-school. I’m more of a believer in letting other creators inspire you and funneling that inspiration into a process you ultimately figure out for yourself. That said, your only job as a creator is to make the work. Everything beyond that is a choice, not a requirement.

Leave some of the mystery intact

Mystery isn’t incompatible with generosity or openness. In fact, for a lot of creatives, it’s part of the experience.

When you leave some things unexplained, you give people the space to engage with whatever you made in their own way. They get to wonder, interpret, and fill in the gaps instead of tracing everything all the way back to its origin. Maybe they’ll appreciate that and recognize it for the gift that it is, and maybe they won’t.

You’re allowed to leave a few doors closed either way.

So Let Your Magic Tricks Stand on Their Own

The Penn & Teller moments you conjure up every time you create and share something really work best when people are invited to the show without necessarily also being handed the answer key to the whole thing at the door.

That way, people get to enjoy whatever it is and stay curious about it. If they’re lucky, they’ll also experience that brief, satisfying confusion where the human brain can’t quite catch up for a second or two.

Remember, as the creator, you get to decide how much of the mechanism behind the curtain you reveal. You don’t owe anyone a full breakdown just because they asked for one. Sometimes it’s better to just let the magic involved speak for itself.

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INTERNAL CORRESPONDENCE

Registry of Deferred Joy
Quarterly Status Report: “After Things Settle Down”
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Reviewed by: The Committee for Responsible Adulthood

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