002: Your work doesn’t need to be useful
Art was never meant to save anyone but the artist
A reflection on letting go of the pressure to be profound.
The train is where I do my most reflective writing. It’s something about the buzzing of bodies, each tuned into its own world, that makes my mind move at rapid speed. I then tune in to myself. Music thumping. A song that I’ve never heard, but words that I’ve always felt. Words I wish I’d written myself.
I want to make things that have meaning. Things that have gravity. Things that hold weight. Not in a way that leaves you heavy when digested, but grounded and rooted in reality, life, truth.
When I started writing, my biggest fear and strongest setback was being seen as “fake deep”. The last thing I wanted was for my writing to sound like an advice column or, worse, be read in the same cadence as the stereotypical influencer voice. At first it was. I was trying too hard, and I knew it. I just wanted to move people and make them feel inspired. I wanted to be viewed, shared, and most importantly — liked.
So I did what others did. I spoke their language and adopted their voice. She writes like poetry — I must write like poetry. She opens her soul for the world to see — I must bear my mess. But I didn’t want to write like poetry. I didn’t want to share half-truths about lies I was comfortable living. I just wanted to get the words out of my brain, onto the page, and into the world.
But I’m not. And that bothers me.
It bothers me that I optimize my subject lines to increase open rates. I shift my cadence because my beloved em dash, Oxford comma, and triplet have been compromised thanks to ChatGPT. It bothers me that it takes weeks to write ideas that took seconds, only to never share them because they feel too raw and honest.
But do I really need to leave you with five tips on how to be confident even though I’m not? Do you really care how I plan to be more optimistic this season, even though I’m about as pessimistic about the state of the world as they come? Do I really give a damn if you find my words prophetic?
(Okay, maybe I do care a little bit about that last point.)
Nonetheless, as I come up for air from being deep in writer’s block, I’ve been sitting with the perceived value or usefulness of my work. I’ve spent hours re-strategizing my thesis, infusing meaning into every sentence, stressing every detail, worried that it wouldn’t be of use to anybody. Eventually, all that stressing led me to a simple but liberating thought:
My work doesn’t need to be useful.
My words don’t have to strike a chord every time, or anytime at all, for that matter.
Who cares if I can string together complex phrases that convey the depths of my lexicon? Who cares if I can make my words dance and jump off the page like whimsical schoolchildren?
They’re just words.
But then, you might ask, what’s the point? Why write if not to make an impact? Why do this if it’s not meant to inspire or uplift others? Honestly, I don’t know.
I do know that we make too big a deal of the imprint we want to leave on this earth.
We have a narcissistic fixation with how we want history to see us as individuals. We believe that our version of a thing won’t just make a ripple in time; it’ll be the ripple that shifts the entire paradigm. We’re doing it for the spotlight. We’re doing it to appease a part of our ego. We’re doing it for the wrong reasons.
And I fear we’ve lost the plot.
In the grand scheme of things, your work might mean absolutely nothing to the history of the world. But it means everything to you right now.
Art was never meant to save anyone but the artist.
So create. Create because it comes as naturally as an exhale. Make things that can be felt deeply, honestly. Make things because you need them to exist, not because the world needs to receive them.
Create for truth, not for usefulness.
The world has enough content, but it’ll never have enough you.