Photograph by Rinko Kawauchi
I watched a YouTube video the other day where a guy was commenting on being a vlogger. "It's embarrassing when you start. You're justifying to everyone that you matter more than they do, but you don't have the clout to back it up."
That's how I feel about creating in public. To put it bluntly, it feels dumb. It's like I’m shouting, screaming in everyone's face about my importance. That my thoughts are valuable and you just have to read them. Perhaps it's not as cringe-inducing as holding a bulky vlog camera in front of my face day-in and day-out (mad respect to those people, that takes confidence), but it still requires some level of mental gymnastics to come to terms with broadcasting my thoughts out into the world for the soul who stumbles across them. It’s strange because aside from this newsletter, I've grown distant from sharing myself online. I'm used to compressing both appearance and opinions into a box that I push into a corner as I whittle away with self-deprecation until there's none of me left. Even now that mode of thought still lingers. Moments before I hit the publish button, I get a spectre of doubt haunting the back of my mind: no one cares.
There's a lot of people out there commenting on the benefits of making stuff and delivering it on a silver platter to the digital world, but I feel like there's not as many people talking about how awkward it feels when you start. When you have zero subscribers or an Instagram following that consists of bot accounts, what keeps you going? Doesn't the world have enough stuff? Do we really need another person who's taking up bandwidth to post more platitudes on the internet?
From Jerry Seinfeld:
"The real problem of stand-up, of course, is that you must constantly justify why you are the only one talking while a room full of people sit quietly."
Creation is a form of self-assurance. Every time you make something and put it out, you are staring deep into yourself and forcing yourself to believe that what you're creating is valuable — no matter how minuscule the undertaking. Sending my words into digital space at the current state of this newsletter or blog (or whatever experiment this is) jabs a constant reminder at me: it's a pointless endeavor. There will never be a satisfying climax. Despite this, I do my best to find a level of comfort in carving out a tiny, tiny space for myself on the internet and having my own candid room to string together some amalgamation of thoughts. If no one's around, at least I have these open conversations with myself to keep me company.
I like Rick Rubin's take on this:
"Be the audience. Make the thing, for you, the audience. You can't make art with someone else in mind, it can't be good."
If you’re the only person who holds that faint glimmer of hope or satisfaction or amusement in what you do, that should be the only reason you need to keep doing it. And that's with all forms of self-direction in life. I get asked by friends if they should make some career switch they've been debating, or produce that song they’ve left unfinished in Logic. I ask the same question every time: are you doing it for yourself? These days it gets hard to distinguish between if we're just maintaining social reality and appearances, or if we're doing it as an extension of our vital inner world. A litmus test: if you would do it alone in a room without any external or digital presence, it's something you should be doing.
I get some occasional feedback on my writing (which I am immensely grateful for, thank you to y'all who are out there) that gives me the dopamine hit of damn, people actually read my stuff. But at the end of that rush I have to remind myself I liked reading/writing on beds, on trains, in cars, while hungover, while sad, at parties, at the gym, on scraps of paper, in iPhone notes, in any possible context much before whatever fleeting catalyst slapped me across the face to start thinking in public. At times I feel like I'm beaming a searchlight through a dark room to remember my own simple reasons. It's for myself. For no payoff at all.