CROWDSOURCING JOY
EPISODE 015: CROWDSOURCING JOY
Does your creative work make you happy? Is it meant to? Are there more valuable emotional responses to our work, and would we, in the end, be (ironically) a lot happier if we stopped burdening our work with the need to make us happy? Have we been crowdsourcing our joy by looking to the likes and hearts and other forms of feedback instead of to the work itself? Let’s talk about it.
Prefer to Listen Elsewhere?
Listen on iTunes | Spotify | Google Play | Stitcher
Do me a favour? Would you take a moment and give this show a rating and review in iTunes.
Want More? A Beautiful Anarchy is published 3 out of 4 weeks. On those fourth weeks you can still get your fix through On The Make, my monthly missive about the creative life. Subscribe now and I’ll make sure you don’t miss a thing, and every month I’ll draw the name of one subscribed listener and send them a signed copy of my book, A Beautiful Anarchy.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Within 5 minutes on Google this morning I discovered that you can outsource or crowdsource just about anything. If your relationship has gone south by you don’t want to dump your partner yourself, there are people that will do that for you. In Japan you can outsource people to be friends and pretend to be family. You can outsource or crowdsource the making of reservations, researching a book, choosing a cover for your latest album, and just about any menial task you can imagine. But when, I wonder, did we start outsourcing our joy or crowdsourcing our sense of significance?
My friend Jeffery Saddoris asked a similar question recently when he said “who owns your happiness?” It’s a fair question, especially among those of us who tie so much of our emotional well-being to the work we create. This is episode 15 of A Beautiful Anarchy. Can your joy be crowdsourced? Let’s talk about it.
Music/intro
It’s probably fair to say that most people who engage in everyday creativity, at least those of us not prone to sociopathy or detachment disorders, feel something about our work, often feeling very deeply. And if my observations of friends and colleagues and the famous and now long-dead artists I’ve met through their biographies are anywhere close to accurate, most of us experience more than our fair share of emotional ups and downs connected to our work.
To be honest, I think it would all be so much easier if we didn’t care so much. But I don’t know anyone who does their creative work with that kind of detachment, we’re all too invested and I think that’s a good thing.
That investment comes because we pour ourselves into the work. Our work never comes without the risk and the need for courage and exploration, often exploration of ourselves. When we put our work out there we put a piece of ourselves into the world. I think our best work contains more of ourselves than the mediocre stuff that never quite makes it, mostly, I think, because the mediocre stuff doesn’t have enough of us in it.
Our work and our selves are often inseparably entangled. When the work goes well, we’re happy. When the work goes poorly, we’re not. But I have some questions about this, not the least of which is this: is happiness the most fulfilling emotional state we could be experiencing in our art-making? Is it the highest thing for which we can be reaching, or is there something better? And where do we find that better thing? Is it in the feedback? The final product? Or is it in the process itself, in the discovery and the fight to create?
I think these are important questions, not because I think we can avoid the highs and lows that come with the creative life, but because I think we can make the highs more consistent and predictable and the paralyzing lows a little less low, and a little less frequent. I think if we can do that, not to level it out completely so that the creative process is placid, a word that’s one letter away from flacid, which is never good, we can enjoy this all a little more and get sidelined a little less. And if we don’t enjoy it all the time we can, at very least, find something profound and good in it.
When Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence in 1776 he included the right to the pursuit of happiness, among other things: life and liberty. The word “happiness” is an unusually, uh, fluffy, word for so solemn a document. But it has come to be among our chief pursuits, no matter where you live. I just want to be happy. But is there something more than happy? And what does happy even mean?
Look it up and you’ll find all kinds of definitions for “happy”, most of them as fluffy around the edges as the word itself. Generally it’s about a good feeling derived from positive circumstances. It’s the positive circumstances part of that definition that makes this problematic. Life has this way of going sideways on us. It’s not all rainbows and unicorns. As the Dread Pirate Roberts said to Princess Buttercup, “Life is pain, Highness, anyone who says differently is selling something.” If we rely on circumstance to bring us happiness, most of the human race will spend our lives living the obverse: un-happiness.
But what if happiness is a smokescreen, a poor counterfeit for something deeper, something arguably harder but much more attainable. What if what we really long for is independent of circumstance, and can be experienced, sought, and found, when our work is going well and when it feels like it’s going poorly? What if there’s something beyond those bright, but relatively rare moments when it’s all fireworks and laughter? I think it’s not happiness that we’re after, but purpose. Meaning. And I think that, in part, because art tells us so.
When I wrote this episode I listened to Leonard Cohen’s last album, You Want it Darker, over and over on my turntable. On balance there’s very little happy about Cohen’s music. It can be dark. Melancholy, and brooding. But it’s rich in meaning. And if you spend a day in galleries around the world, you’ll find that, on balance, the art doesn’t make us happy.You don’t hear a lot of giggling in galleries, at least not from patrons over the age of 6 and looking at nudes. It’s something better. Something more. It helps us ask better questions, consider deeper things, and find pieces that, when they fit together, begin to give us a sense of who we are. Could it be we’re not looking for happiness at all but deeper, more meaningful experiences? Could it be that our art-making is about purpose rather the warm-fuzzies that pop-culture influencers glorify on their well-curated, overly-filtered, social feeds?
Happiness is temporary. It’s contingent on other things, almost all of them out of our control. If your happiness depends on other people, then you’re crowdsourcing it and the supply will be shallow and unpredictable. But meaning is self-determined. Meaning needs no one to react to the work you make. It needs no likes or comments. It doesn’t need the work to go well, though it rejoices when it does, and finds new direction there as much as it does in the failures and mis-steps. Meaning survives the melancholy, and often requires it.
Meaning pushes us forward. Sometimes into joy.
It would be wonderful if everything we made made us happy, in the same way that it would be great if we could always drink margaritas and eat birthday cake. But it doesn’t. And it really wouldn’t be. We long for something deeper. We long to make things that have impact. Sometimes, yes, that impact is, or leads to, happiness. I was a comedian for years. I’ve made thousands and thousands of people laugh, and there’s meaning in that, too. But it’s not everything. I’m not even sure it’s the best thing. Arguably, Love is the best thing, and it doesn’t always make us happy either.
I worry that current technologies, more specifically the way we use these tools, have encouraged us to favour the immediate pleasures of likes and the momentary feeling of dopamine-triggered happiness over a deeper sense of meaning and purpose. I worry that this well-meaning sabotage is getting in the way of people that could be making deeper, more substantially human work. And by that I don’t mean only art with a capital A, the serious, brooding stuff. We aren’t all called to be Leonard Cohen. But we are all called to be human, and to engage with real life and all its complexities. In your writing. In your painting. In your design work. In your coding. There is meaning there. Everyday creativity is profoundly human in activity and scope. It’s gritty, soulful stuff. Or it can be. It can make us feel, even be, more alive. There can be tremendous meaning in that. Meaning that transcends happiness. Meaning that’s found in the making itself, as we discover more about ourselves, our work, and the direction it’s leading.
There is another problem with the pursuit of happiness, and that’s the idea of diminishing returns. We’re insatiable in our pursuit. We always want more than we have, and so we say to ourselves, I’ll be happy when I finally wrap my mind around the idea for this project or book, but we get to that point and to our great surprise, we realize no, our happiness lies in finishing the book, which proves–again–to be a bit of a false summit, the true mountaintop experience awaiting us when the book is published, then when it’s well-received, then a best-seller, then when people stop writing negative Amazon reviews, then when we can just wrap our heads around this next project, and on and on, the carrot of happiness just out or reach. It’s great for motivation, as long as you’re OK with being miserable and never actually, "being happy” But look for meaning, enjoy the work itself and the years you spend doing the work won’t feel disappointing the way it feels to chase a carrot you can never have.
Over two thousand years ago the writer of the Bhagavad Gita suggested we have the right to do our work, but aren’t entitled to enjoy the fruits of our work; only the work itself. He tells us those who work for results alone will be miserable. I think there’s wisdom here, especially among those whose work is creative and so often ends differently than we hoped or expected. I think if we ask our work not only to carry the burden of becoming what it is but to make us happy in the end, we could spend a great deal of our time unhappy. Disappointed. Do that for long and most of us would just give up.
But if what we look for is more than happy, if we stop relying on the response of others, and on our hopes for the end product itself? If we find meaning in the struggle and the exploration, re-defining failure, and finding purpose, even joy, in the fight itself, I think we’ll be better off. Because if there’s one thing we can count on, it’s that most days have some fight in them, even when things are going well, and if it’s the journey itself, the fight, the art-making, whatever you want to call it, that you pursue, and in which you find meaning and purpose, you’re almost guaranteed to find it. Next to that, “happiness" is a consolation prize.
As always, thank you for joining me. If you’re enjoying A Beautiful Anarchy I’d be so grateful if you’d leave a review on iTunes or where you choose to listen.
If you’ve got comments or questions I’d love to hear them, you can get in touch by sending an email to talkback@abeautifulanarchy.com.
I publish A Beautiful Anarchy 3 weeks out of 4, but you can get your fix on those 4th weeks by subscribing to On The Make, a monthly kick in the creative pants sent straight to your inbox. You can subscribe by going to ABeatifulAnarchy.com, scrolling to the bottom of the page and telling me where to send it. I’ll also send you a copy of my short eBook, Escape Your Creative Rut, 5 Ways to Get Your Groove Back, and every month I’ll draw the name of one subscriber to whom I’ll send a signed copy of my book, A Beautiful Anarchy. Thanks so much for being part of this.
Until next time, go make something beautiful.
Music in this episode: Acid Jazz (Kevin Macleod) / CC BY-SA 3.0