The art of the day job
AKA the market economy doesn't care about your newsletter
“Creativity isn’t rare. It’s a basic human function. You can absolutely make something beautiful, right now, even. But that spark isn’t a business plan.”
[ credit. Inscripta ]
I’m a full-time (small w) writer. Words for commercial brands. Nothing too ‘strategic’ or ‘visionary’ (see also here). And yet.
For the last few months – actually, the last few years – I’ve spent far too much time expecting this Creative-Adjacent Day Job (CADJ™) to fulfill me creatively. To give me more than just the external validation of being an employable person with a monthly salary.
Of course, that expectation is/was an error. Even today, I’m constantly trying to pull my “I’m entitled to live off creative expression alone” ego back to baseline.
My reasoning went like this: I’m ‘writing’ and I’m being paid for it, so this CADJ™ can serve as a means and an end. As I write this now, I see the fallacy of that logic.
CADJ™ 's are confusing. They’re supposed to be fun. Or are they? Especially in today’s ROI-obsessed economy, not everyone’s laughing.
I didn’t over-analyse the invisible income streams and bohemian mythologies of the full-time artist. I didn’t care that many of the self-defined ones in my orbit were quite possibly living off wealth that didn’t spring from their creativity alone.
I’m not a landlord, a beneficiary, or (TY God) drowning in debt. But as the depths of delusion would have it, I’d come to think that my CADJ™ existed not because I needed money to live, but because I was some kind of loose-fit artist, and my role was simply a vehicle to express myself. It was a platform for my ideas to be articulated. My work, validated. Two birds. One stone.
Except that part was never in my contract. And now I’m not sure why I expected it to be.
Needs vs. wants
This isn’t an anti-CADJ™ diatribe – I’m privileged and grateful for mine, and know not everyone gets to choose. But more than ever, I’m trying to clarify the value of how I spend my time. The attention I give to getting what I need (money, security) vs. what I want (flow, good humour and relationships, mornings outdoors, creative transcendence, time for a nap).
Sparks fly from the friction of how many (productive) hours there are in a day to ‘show up’ at work, while delicately nurturing the creative inputs and outputs that nourish our souls.
Side projects make you less weird
A reminder,
“Our beloved algorithms and the market economy don’t really care how long you labored over that gorgeous string arrangement [or newsletter].”
And yet those off-brief side projects are life-giving hobbies of extrinsic value – they build both a broader perception of self and a well of future possibilities.
The capacity we have to put our own creativity out into the world is an issue of uninterrupted time to explore, chase, and consider. To be wrong without consequence. To demand the time and space to think of something other than your CADJ™.
I’m not an expert when it comes to commercial growth and scaling a product (plus, I sometimes struggle to give a shit). But I care about finding that time and space to exercise creativity as a basic human function. And I’ve come to understand that rather than expect creative fulfillment as a given, we can collectively make more informed choices for a life that brings us closer to it.
In 1989, American author Annie Dillard wrote, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” Our lives aren’t some abstract future, but the cumulative sum of every choice we make.
And that’s all to say, if you’ve got a CADJ™ (or even a sporadic DJ™) that pays a few bills, that’s good enough. But that one thing doesn’t have to be everything. Know that your own creative fulfillment won’t feature in the small print. You have to self-select for that.
You can absolutely choose to make something beautiful right now. Our most personal outputs – more than anything demanded by a brief or a contract – are, in fact, the ones that shape the entirety of our existence.