Relaxing by creating
Chris Lakin had this great post back in the day (archived here) about relaxing by creating instead of by consuming. I haven’t read it in a while, but it still lingers on account of both my bad habit of poor quality relaxation and my related media consumption addiction. I think back to the general principle of creating over consuming quite often—especially in its impact on morale , and now aim to convert a solid fraction of my remaining consumption1 into creation, in the form of note taking in this garden about whatever it is I’m learning about via the consumption.
This includes:
This creation primarily takes the form of writing. After reading even a paragraph or two of real writing, I am reminded that my writing is not within miles of “beautiful” or even “engaging” writing. At best, compliments can include “clear” and, ambitiously, “concise”. But I rarely practice reading beautiful or engaging writing, let alone practice writing in this manner, so I’ll chalk it up to needing repetition. If I’m lucky, these notes will serve as the practice I need.
Updates:
- Turns out that the “consume” circuit in my brain was still way more powerful than the “create” circuit, and I fell back into the usual pattern of consuming content rather than creating.
- The defense in depth approach described in productivity works to some extent, but still ends up getting broken through reasonably often.
- Part of the issue is that I haven’t done well enough to find actions that are genuinely good for rest, and have low enough activation energy that I do them.
Aliveness
I stumbled across this great post a little while back as well, and refer to it frequently. Creating is indeed better than consuming, but it’s even better when creating with others! So, one related idea is to simply make my default social contexts ones in which I’m compelled to create with others.
Brainstorming things I can do to create with others:
- pottery lessons
- karaoke
- make games like Payphone Go
- collaborate on an idea in this list of projects
- return to my roots and hang out in a makerspace
- writing club
- spontaneous excursions to go somewhere nice and create together there
- semi-frequent dérive with lots of conversation and intermittent creation inspired by the surroundings
- amateur attempts at all sorts of high-effort endeavors, e.g. make a short film. other short explorations into “how hard could it be?”
- cooking
- playing / reasoning about various games. e.g. strategies for (unilateral) fog-of-war chess
While brainstorming, I’m noticing this unfortunate difficulty in more “intellectual” or impactful co-creation activities, which feel like they require everyone involved to more-or-less be on the same page on a broad range of things, or be at roughly similar levels of knowledge about the topic. On the other hand, it seems feasible to, though perhaps a bit difficult, to
Footnotes
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Fingers crossed this doesn’t include any more binges of visual media other than Tintin ↩