On the Compulsion to Create Constantly, Compare, and Compete
So I give up my dignity. By this I mean that I post my résumé on LinkedIn.
Whenever I express that I’m worried that I’m not writing/creating/doing enough, someone will attempt to comfort me by assuring me that I’m already accomplished. I am not good at taking compliments, but this is one I’ve earned. I’ve spent my college years learning how to freelance and then perfecting it while most of my peers are focusing on schoolwork. I partake in Music Writer Twitter like it is my job. I send pitches every day. I write a lot. I have been doing this instead of making friends or joining clubs or going to parties.
I am accomplished. It can be quantified by looking at my Twitter followers, or the number of articles in my portfolio; it can be proved by my blue checkmark. Yet looking at this stuff does not comfort me. It just reminds me that I have to keep working to maintain my momentum, or else I will fall off.
I am starting my last semester of college in a couple of weeks. The fear that no one will hire me is uncomfortably similar to my fear that no one will ever love me. Is this all the world is? The constant fear of being unwanted?
Capitalism, I suppose, is designed to evoke these feelings. It wants me to hinge my self-worth on my job status. It wants me to get a dopamine rush from employers reaching out to me. It wants me to fall into a depression when I am faced with meaningless rejections. It wants me to take those rejections personally so I will work harder, though I don’t know if that is even possible at this point.
And then I see everyone else online, sharing their work, celebrating themselves, flaunting their job titles, and I don’t know why their success seems to minimize everything I’ve ever done. I scroll and see that everyone is accomplished. That I’m not special, I’m just doing the bare minimum. Not enough.
So I give up my dignity. By this I mean that I post my résumé on LinkedIn.
When I started writing about music, I was 16. I used a Wordpress blog to review shows. I wanted people to read me, but there was a certain pleasure in having an intimacy with my work, a special aloneness. I have the compulsion to share my work almost immediately with the world now that I have readers, which is ironic because I also can’t really handle criticism.
As I’m writing, I catch myself thinking about the audience rather than just letting the words flow naturally from my brain. As I’m writing, I catch myself rushing to finish faster so I can move onto the next thing rather than just taking my time to make sure it reaches its fullest potential. As I’m writing, I catch myself disengaged and dissatisfied and in a distracted haze. I can barely offer anything my full attention anymore.
Sometimes I wonder what the end goal is. Why am I writing? I used to write because I had to. It was an instinct. But something has changed. In Sylvia Plath’s journals, she asks herself: “Why am I obsessed with the idea I can justify myself by getting manuscripts published?” I know this is all a capitalism thing, but it’s also an artist thing. My friend, the genius writer Colette Bernheim, sent me an excerpt from a piece she’s working on, and I keep returning to this one line: “Revealing oneself to a whole world but to no avail is absolutely crushing.” She wrote this in the context of posting something online, but it very much sums up what sharing art can feel like. But what could possibly satisfy us? Fame? Legacy?
The idea of fame is becoming less desirable over time. Fame, now, is more ephemeral than it has ever been. It’s also kind of more menacing than ever: “Being famous today means being chastised, no matter what you do, in public, by an anonymous audience, which sounds like a form of torture,” said Natasha Stagg in an interview. I recently read her novel Surveys. It centers on a protagonist who gets famous pretty much overnight and then (spoiler, I guess) finds herself unhappy because her boyfriend cheats on her with someone named Lucinda. She checks Lucinda’s social media constantly; it’s a compulsive bad habit that she compares to smoking cigarettes. When she finds out that Lucinda is writing a book, she has a realization: “I was sure it would be bad, but that she was working on it, not constantly publishing it, was the type of thing that kept me up at night. People work on things for years. People work on one thing, every day, without an audience.”
This happens to be the kind of thing that also keeps me up at night. To achieve that patience is something I dream about, yet have taken no steps toward. Every day I bask in my instant gratification and let my brain rot. I need the external validation to know that what I am doing is not for nothing.
But what if it is for nothing? Or, a better question maybe: Is anything at all for nothing? Everything is for something, I think. I don’t know.
It is silly for me to be angry at everyone else online for sharing their work, celebrating themselves, and flaunting their job titles. I know that, whether I like it or not, a big reason why I want to be given work or a job title is so that I can do the same thing. I can receive my external validation and feel warm for a few minutes. I can feel legitimate. Justified. Accomplished. And then it fades and I get back to work.