Make Something Today
We've become a culture of consumers of other people's creativity. The antidote is small and daily: make something, anything, today.
We've become a culture of consumers of other people's creativity. The antidote is small and daily: make something, anything, today.
Consumers of everyone else's work
Add up the hours. Most of us spend a staggering amount of our lives consuming what other people made — songs, shows, posts, videos, games, an endless scroll of other humans' creativity — and almost none making anything of our own. This is historically bizarre. For most of human existence, ordinary people sang, told stories, carved, drew, built and played as a normal part of life. Making things wasn't a special talent reserved for professionals; it was just something people did. We've quietly outsourced nearly all of it and become an audience.
There's nothing wrong with enjoying what others create — it's one of the great pleasures of being alive. But a life that's all consumption and no creation is subtly impoverished in a way that's easy to miss, because consuming is pleasant enough to disguise the lack. Consuming fills the time. Creating fills you. They are not the same, and a person who only ever does the first can go years feeling vaguely empty without quite knowing why.
The desire to create is one of the deepest yearnings of the human soul.
Why making changes the maker
Something happens when you make rather than consume. Time changes texture — the anxious, scattered feeling of scrolling gives way to the absorbed, slightly timeless state of being lost in making a thing. Psychologists call versions of it flow, and it's one of the most reliable sources of genuine wellbeing we know of. You don't get it from watching. You only get it from doing — from being the one whose hands and mind are shaping something that wasn't there a minute ago.
And the thing you make doesn't have to be good, or shared, or impressive. The benefit is in the act, not the output. A clumsy song, a bad sketch, a pot of soup invented on the fly, a few sentences in a notebook nobody will read — each does something for you that consuming the world's most polished content never will. The smallest act of creation tips you, even briefly, from audience back into participant in your own life.
Lower the bar to the floor
The thing that stops people isn't lack of time — we clearly have hours; we're spending them scrolling. It's the bar. We imagine 'making something' means a finished, worthy, shareable creation, and the gap between that and a free Tuesday evening feels too wide to cross, so we reach for the phone instead. The fix is to lower the bar until it's lying on the floor. Don't set out to write a novel. Write a sentence. Don't record an album. Hum a tune into your phone. Don't paint a masterpiece. Doodle.
Make it tiny, make it daily, make it impossible to fail. The point isn't to become an artist or to produce anything anyone else ever sees. The point is to spend a few minutes each day on the right side of the line between making and consuming — because that line, more than almost any other, marks the difference between feeling like a spectator of life and a participant in it.
To practice any art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow.
So make something
You will consume plenty today without trying — the world will see to that. The thing that won't happen unless you choose it is the making. So choose it, in the smallest possible way. Write the sentence, sing the tune, sketch the thing, cook the experiment. It'll take ten minutes and leave you feeling unaccountably better than the ten minutes before it.
Consuming fills the time. Creating fills you. Make something today — anything — and feel, for yourself, the difference between watching a life and living one.
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