The memory of the sounds your radiator made might be more important than the warmth it once provided.
Ten years from now, will you have any memory of whatever you encountered in your daily doom scroll? You might still recall that birthday party when you were seven and the hired magician cracked an egg in your hands. Perhaps you can conjure the clattering iron radiator in your first apartment after college. But will you ever care about last week’s meme that pinged from one social network to another? The flow of daily irrelevance flooding your phone washes away real, unretrievable hours like an unstoppable stream filling an infinitely wide basin. Memories of the sounds from your first apartment may not be the most important thing in your life, but they are impressions collected from your actual life. That radiator literally radiated heat into the place you lived. When you recall those formative days you’re recalling stories. Stories—and the sensations that infuse their lived-in experiences—are the raw materials for creative invention.
In the mid-21st century it feels like the gravitational tethers to stories of our own lives have been loosened. We live in exceedingly disconnected times. With much of our days spent in increasingly virtual spaces, the mass of actual experience feels more ephemeral. Whenever we’re bored or tired or pumped up or beaten down, we often turn out attention to sensations that somebody else captured, a vicarious dopamine tweak that supplants the effort of actually doing something. The irony here is that while so many people are now outsourcing their sensations to somebody else’s recordings, we’ve not only given up agency for experiencing things ourselves, but we’re less likely to remember these vicarious things, too. We remember the noisy radiator because we lived with it, and if we wanted to stay warm in the wintertime, we needed it. It supplied a thermal and sonic background to our daily life. If there’s one thing good creative work demands, its specificity. Real experiences shape future creative choices. How that radiator sounded helps define the reality of our lives.
Virtual experiences have none of the tangible qualities of lived-in experience. That’s why one has to wonder if thousands of hours of virtual, vicarious experience may be the acid that dissolves the mortar that holds us all together. Every single day feels like civil, economic, and moral certainty teeters on tenterhooks, yet most people are content to slouch on the couch, slack-jawed while they thumb hand-held glass slabs like the one you’re probably looking at right now. (Not shaming. Just calling it like it is.) Much of the contemporary creative world has abandoned existential themes in favor of the simplest forms of pure entertainment. Huge audiences listen to music that isn’t even real music. In fact, even the word “entertainment” is probably incorrect here. A more accurate word is distraction.
It would be a mistake to think that we have ever lived in deeply introspective times. Was there ever a time when mainstream masses placed substantial value on critical thinking? Probably not. But while most people can’t help but wonder about the eternally ponderable from time to time, some cultural eras presented more fertile ground for existential contemplation than others. Comparing our present to the years post-World War II just before boomers zoomed ahead, these days do not seem to be particularly contemplative. With millions of high school and college students apparently incapable of reading even a single book, ours is not an era propelled by deep thought.
This much is always true: most people spend their days locked in visceral pursuits—thinking about food, intent on escaping the rain or snow, looking for a soft surface where they can sit. Who can blame them? At any time in history, day-to-day pressures rarely let up. The clock always registers another relentless second, and it doesn’t take long for any of us to feel those seconds pile up and weigh us down. Regardless of station or status, people look for assurances where they can find them. People look for love. They look for paths through the daily thicket that might reveal a moment of pleasure. Pleasure certainly is not the same thing for all people, and as we all know, many short term sources of pleasure exact profound costs downstream.
The stories of our lives often begin and end with adversaries. We confront nameless health care gatekeepers. We battle faceless corporations for ordinary commodities. We grind against online dating marketplaces in hopes of finding someone who will be a partner for adventure and acceptance, often discovering to our dismay that the effort is like trying to scoop a very specific cup of water from the ocean.
As the saying goes, there’s no bad day for a writer because every day offers good material. The role of creatives is to mine relevant specificity from our days and turn it into something worth sharing. If your creative life consists of pumping out social media stuff, fine--I get it. I’m not here to judge. But I am here to say that creative work people remember is the stuff that reminds them of real life. You only get a few fleeting moments on Earth to strut your stuff, find your rhythm, or beat your drum, and we must all accept that no matter how we get there, we’re ultimately all headed to the same place.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Novels and symphonies and even three line haiku have beginnings, middles, and ends. As creatives, the structure we impose on time mirrors the structure that time has already imposed on us. It’s inescapable, perhaps, but if harnessed, it’s a means to find focus and make something meaningful. Our works might not last forever, but they might last longer than the time it takes for a brief swipe on a phone. They might, that is, if we determine to experience more of our lives in the real world rather than the virtual one. If we do that, we’re more likely to create things based on more substantive specificity, rather than rehashed simulacrums we pretend we’re experiencing as we scroll past them on our screens.
Come back next month for Part II of this essay. Where today’s segment concerns specificity in order to create something lasting, Part II considers how to turn something lasting into something meaningful. They’re related, but they’re not the same, and if you care about the work you do, it’s worth exploring the real forces driving you in the first place.