Create, don’t consume
Post Take Aways
Consumption is death
We are all creators
Anything can be a creative act
You are not creating enough
This is the reason you don't really know yourself or you’re always failing to be yourself.
The idea is simple: if you change your daily mode-of-operation from consumption to creation, you will inexorably become your true Self. It’s so fundamental, so core to how your brain works, that I would consider it a law of the human mind. Call it “Self-Creation Convergence”: where through enough acts of creation, a person eventually only creates for themselves, and through that creation converges into their true Self, thus bringing it into being. Truly authoring the play of life. Not being consigned as an extra.
Creation is everything. It’s you. It’s me. It’s all of life.
Of course you can’t be creating 100% of the time, but if you begin to notice all the things that are, at their heart, creative acts or can be transformed into creative acts, you’ll be surprised how much of your day can be spent in active creation. I’d say at least 90% and you’ll see why later.
Consumption
I fucking hate the phrase “doom scrolling”, but it’s appropriate for what the majority of people nowadays do with their lives. It’s depressing to think about. People scrolling endlessly, getting a fix that will never satisfy them. Even worse is how homogenizing it is. There seems to be a small, rotating collection of ideas, thoughts, and memes out in the world that the majority of people flock around. And the gravity of those memes is so strong, that it’s very difficult to avoid getting sucked into even when you actively evade.
This leads me to “Death by Consumption”: where your whole identity is (subconsciously) propped up on a handful of themes you passively have been consuming every day and your mind is so saturated, that it never actually has the space and freedom to be, do, or feel the way you actually are. Your true Self is being suffocated by layers of information you didn’t create. You become the veritable NPC.
You rationalize this consumption by seeing every post as “facts”, when in reality your brain won’t even truly accept them as facts unless you arrive at them yourself or through your own experiences. I’m talking a gun-to-your-head-you-die-if-this-fact-isn’t-true situation. You would begin to realize the non-zero probability of the “fact” being bullshit or completely unverifiable. Even if there’s actual good facts you’re consuming, to what end are you consuming them?
If your honest intention with consumption is to be “informed” then the amount you consume should be at such smaller volumes, considerably more focused, and much less frequently, so that the real signal is being consumed instead of the noise.
Sometimes, you’ll notice your body even fighting back against this consumption during moments of complete and utter bordem. In what some call “The Flood”: where your brain overflows with thoughts and ideas that it hasn’t had time to process during those prolonged periods of consumption. If you’re Flooding, just know that your true Self is drowning.
Ultimately, you should only consume things which service Creation. I call this “Creative Consumption”: where what you consume is only that which increases your creative momentum, contributes to a creation, or masturbatorily, is one of your own creations. Further, you use creative techniques to bind what you’re consuming to the lattice of your knowledge. This is the only healthy form of consumption. In future writings, I’ll attempt to show you how to do this.
Creation
First, let’s define Creation. Abstractly: Creation is a process where forms are transformed, through composition or destruction, into conceptually different forms.
By “forms” I am really referring to Platonic forms, but I don’t want this to divulge into a philosophical discussion. So let me make my definition a little more practical:
Creation is a process where things are composed or destroyed to form conceptually different things
By this definition, we can see that Creation really boils down to things being composed or destroyed. These things can be anything: actions, words, lines, atoms, bricks, thoughts, genes, movements, experiences. Really, the number of things that exist which can compose or be destroyed approaches infinity. Which means if you break down everything you do, think, or feel into these things, you realize you’re literally creating your life as it unfolds. Consciousness itself is Creation.
You can’t avoid it. You are a creator whether you like it or not. It’s likely your creative machinery has been hijacked by producing poor regurgitations of things you’ve consumed, but the machinery is still there, nonetheless. In future writings, I’ll go into how language and the language center of our brain prove you have an inner creator. In fact, all communication is creation. For now though, it’s enough to know that your brain can’t help but create. Let’s try to take back control.
Creative acts
How do you transform your daily consumption activities into creative activities? The first step is simple, avoid all consumption that isn’t Creative Consumption. Second, replace that saved time with tangential acts of Creation in any number of forms and use random seeds to help prompt those tangents. Third, interleave Creation into obligatory tasks as much as possible. Fourth and finally, let your inner creator guide you; it holds the map to your destiny. This sounds like a lot, but it can easily become second-nature and one of the most fun and freeing operating procedures. I will continually expand on each of these throughout future writings.
So what are some examples of daily, creative acts? When you’re really good, Creation will just pop up for you in everything. And though the best creative acts are those which allow for the most spontaneity in the moment, some creations take much longer to reap than others.
An example of a non-obvious creative act is memorizing something. You can simply do it by brute force or rote methods, but transforming it into a creative act by using mnemonics, the method of loci, or memory palace techniques flexes your imagination muscle and more optimally encodes the information in your brain. If you consume by adding to your memory palace in an elaborately encoded way, you’re performing Creative Consumption.
Another example of an approach that can be either creative or consumptive is in math or physics. Students usually approach solving a problem in these subjects in one of two ways: 1) starting from first principles to derive the characteristic equations of the solution or 2) memorizing order of operations and equations they’ve seen in their textbooks. The first way is creative, the second is consumptive. By starting from first principles and setting axiom systems for your problem, you’re forced to create the universe of which the solution equation(s) characterize. You create the laws. You create the constraints. You arrive at the solution by merely walking through your newly created world and probing it for explicit values. It’s quite a beautiful experience.
Rote, repetitive acts contain the least creative potential. You can still make them creative by repeatedly re-stylizing the routine and environment in which you do them. But it’s better to use that time for what I call “The Flush”: resetting your emotional cache built up during periods of Creation. Flushing is of critical importance. It potentiates your future creative sessions and keeps the continuous creation process sustainable. This is where boredom becomes a valuable tool for Creation. In fact, sitting in and owning boredom is one of the best things you can do to Flush your system. In future writings, I’ll go deeper into Flushing techniques and examples of continuously making your life a creative one.
Recap
Consumption is the root of all evil when it comes to knowing your Self and identity, because it blocks Creation. Like a virus, it infects your brain and hijacks your creative Self, turning you into an NPC. Your defense is to perform Creative Consumption and ossify your true Self through active Creation in as many ways as possible every day of your life. Look, it’s impossible to be perfect around this every day. You will continually struggle to favor Creation over consumption, but endure. Creation is the lighthouse guiding your soul through its journey. Consumption banishes your soul to the bleachers.