Consumption vs Creation

For many years, I was a passive consumer of content. Art, music, literature, and engineering. If something seemed good to me, worthy of my curiosity, I immediately engaged with it.

First, by content, I mean any medium of communication that can be assimilated by the intellect. It can be a book, a movie, a series, a YouTube video, or a song. Artistic or intellectual expressions practiced by others, especially found on the internet.

The idea of being able to perform these activities myself has always occurred to me. The desire to write, to produce music, to make a video. However, something that is evident in the age of the internet is the avalanche of content. The proliferation of content everywhere competing for our attention. In an infinite procession, content after content drains our soul, providing in return an alienation from reality. I wouldn’t even say it’s some sort of pleasure, but rather a simple, temporary escape from reality and its mundane pains.

Creating Requires Courage

Finding the willingness and, more than anything, the courage to create my own content is an immense challenge for someone who has always been taught to consume. To listen to teachers, to contemplate what others did. This has generated in me a superficial understanding of what can be good, seeing in what others did their qualities, their successes. But consuming myriad sources does not guarantee that I will be able to generate anything good. To write, to create music, or to communicate something worthwhile.

It is practice that enables this to happen. And it needs to go hand in hand with passive consumption. Being a creator is doing something for myself. It is condensing what has already been seen. It is fixing in time what matters. Our memory loses information over the years. Consuming serves no purpose in this context. What good does it do to understand something, to grasp its nuances, if it will soon be forgotten?