“Art washes away from the soul, the dust of everyday life.” - Pablo Picasso
What is worth spending your time on? Some things are non-negotiable: sleep, food, work (to make sure there is food for tomorrow). What about after that? 8 hours sleeping, 8 hours working, 3 hours eating. That leaves 5 hours. Accounting for all the extracurriculars and responsibilities, let’s say there is 1 hour left? Ok maybe 30 minutes? 10? What should you do with that margin?
What about a creative outlet?
Is it worth it to spend time painting, making music, or writing poems?
I had a history professor who would always say the hand plow was the most important invention of all time. Yes, improved farming practices have a huge impact on our ability to generate wealth and inspire humans to build civilization communally. But more importantly: improved farming practices mean less time spent actually farming. The hand plow was one of the earliest disruptive technologies. The disruption was giving humans more free time than ever before.
My professor’s argument was that more free time (or in other words, boredom) allows humans to spend time thinking about math and science and philosophy and poetry. Contemplating those things elevates our quality of life at a soul level. It’s how we can be awakened to beauty and transcendence. It allows for an emergence of a crucial aspect of the human experience. Having free time means not needing to spend your energy on survival alone; now you can think about how you should live. It’s the privilege to ask what kind of life you want to live, beyond just if you will live.
Boredom is the trailhead to transcendence; a creative outlet is the footwear to tackle the terrain; but free time is the car that got you to the mountains in the first place. The creative outlet has never been reserved for the rich or sophisticated or the “geniuses.” It is available to anyone who meets one prerequisite: having free time.
We’ve since solved the plow problem again and again in many forms. From using chat gpt to craft breakup texts to finding remote jobs that allow us to do laundry while on the clock, we have excelled at providing shortcuts to completing menial tasks; but somehow, it doesn’t feel like we have more margin at our disposal. Sure the old adage still applies: time is definitely money, and it’s definitely a currency that’s hoarded or sought after. Productivity hacks, anti-aging regimens, 5am wake ups - the list goes on and on. The message: Fight for as much time as possible, without thinking about how you are going to spend it. Unfortunately, time waits for no one. That margin is getting spent, whether you like it or not.
Whether you emphasize the hustle (use your time to accumulate wealth) or longevity (use your time to accumulate health and youthfulness), little thought is given into what happens next. What do you do with your time once you’re healthy and drinking from the fountain of youth? What do you do once you have accumulated all the wealth you could’ve dreamed of? Once time is no longer the limiting factor, what do you do with it? Once our bank accounts bloat to a certain extent, do we then start spending our time on other things? Once we are healthy ‘enough’, do we then start thinking about how to add vitality to our lives?
Our recent technological advancements have given us another way to spend our time - sedation entertainment. It’s become so easy to find entertainment, that being entertained is the default way our margin gets spent. We live in a world where boredom has become completely optional. This ancient experience that started on farms centuries ago, is now shooed away with the swipe of a thumb. We live in the era of iPad babies, standing-in-line-at-the-grocery-store doom scrolling, and “Are you still watching?” Netflix modals that have eliminated the inevitability of boredom. With entertainment at our fingertips, it’s no longer natural to find ourselves floating towards a creative outlet; now it only happens if we swim upstream.
We invented the hand plow, then grew so infatuated by our invention that we returned to our prior state of hyperactivity - we’ve given away our most precious gift, the margin.
The irony is that entertainment leaves you wanting. Time passively flies by, instead of being spent like the valuable currency it is. The worst part - it doesn’t speak to the ache; the longing for transcendence, the craving of the soul. It’s the equivalence of anesthesia induced sleep; cheap entertainment that allows for time to pass with no dreams to show for it. Humans aren’t robots, but animals. Ones that dance and cry and get embarrassed and are brought back to visceral memories by the sound of music. There are human aches that don’t go away with wealth, health, or doomscrolling. Creative outlets have always served as a life line, a method to communicate the unspeakable, to critique the untouchable, and to comfort the most depraved. It is the very language capable of communicating those certain questions and longings that no other language seems to have the right words for.
These soul aches are left untouched by passive entertainment. Passive entertainment is built around being accessible: entertainment without barriers. But barriers are what provoke creativity. You come home wounded from the day - tired and longing for true beauty - but instead of finding boredom, you get an instagram notification. Passive entertainment strikes again. Life pulls no punches, and sends you home covered in dust from the altercation. It doesn’t seem like there is too much being done about it either.
But what if Picasso was right? Maybe a creative outlet has the potential to wipe the day’s dust off your soul. Maybe the way you spend 10 minutes at the end of your day could flip the other 23 hours (and some change) on its head.
I mean, we all know time isn’t completely linear. 10 minutes here doesn’t always equal 10 minutes there. Definitely not in reflection. Think about your past year. If you’re anything like me, there are key moments that stick out: specific phone calls that you didn’t realize you would appreciate until months later, a concert that you couldn’t have imagined seeing a decade ago, a thanksgiving trip home with memories that come to mind weekly. All moments aren’t remembered equally. In the same way, every day lasts 24 hours but doesn’t carry the same weight.
The beauty of a creative outlet is in its potential to completely topple the weighing scale of your memory. Ten minutes spent today picking up the guitar, or drawing a picture, could very naturally end up as the highlight moment a week from now. It could be what gives you the language needed to communicate what you’ve been trying to say for years. Any increment of time spent on a mystical and soul enriching experience like a creative outlet has the potential to restructure the way your memory organizes everything. It could literally change your life.
My favorite thing about margins is that we already have them. You don’t need to buy or work to find something that is far outside of yourself. You simply re-use your excess time; the part of your day that is already being neglected (hence it being on the margins). In the words of the modern poet, Joshua Luke Smith:
“The life you long for is hidden in the life you have.”
Maybe the solution isn’t a new job. Maybe it isn’t a stricter workout regiment, or a different romantic partner. Maybe spending the margins of your day on a creative outlet is what will add color to the rest of it.
I believe that the dust of everyday life can be washed away. The veil of the ‘insignificant day’ can be pierced. There are mysteries that live inside of you that can only be uncovered through the simple act of opening a notebook, grabbing a roll of film, or picking up a guitar.
So please, find a creative outlet if you don’t have one already. And spend as much time as you have on it. Your life depends on it.
Reclaim It! I have been looking for a foolproof way to have more energy in the margins. I tend to pour everything into whatever my mind if focused on throughout the day, sometimes by the end if the day when that margin clears and I to finally spend an hour writing or playing guitar or doodling I find myself exhausted or still in work mode answering emails. I am sure many people struggle with this same thing. Need to remind myself to reclaim this time as mine and take ownership of it.