thinking about the cult of the amateur lately. again. i think amateur generated content is only a legitimate threat to workers in an industry that meets these two criteria:

1.  the act of generating is fun, interesting or automatically rewards ego and vanity (film making, photography, et al)
2. the initial curve to “reasonably okay” artifacts is either shallow or readily accessible technology can make it shallow. meaning: easy and quick to get up to “okay” level of quality (fancy $300 cameras anyone?)

i think it would be astoundingly rare to see amateur plumbers begin to threaten the plumbing industry, or how about ditch digging? also, it’s unlikely your mom will take up brain surgery any time soon.

and it seems the people most offended by amateur content are the same people who came to a particular field out of an interest but without formal training and put in the work to beat the curve and elevate themselves. writer’s are offended by bloggers, photographers by nearly everyone with a camera-phone, and film makers by all these innovative indy kids wanting to make shorts with their iphone.

these three professions, as examples are all relatively fun to be involved. they are creative industries. the amateur mortician seems an unlikely combination of interest + vocation.

it seems to me that if the men and women gaining financially are interested in their industries for legitimate interests in things like film, or photography, or writing they should welcome the growth. they should feel excited by the addition of so many new viewpoints and people unconstrained by tired conventions (because they’ve yet to learn them).

admittedly much of the things created by amateurs will be dreck (much like this blog post you’re reading) but floating in that sea of dreck are rare finds of innovation and uniqueness that can alter a given field for ever.

take nan goldin for example. amatuer who defined an entire medium of photography.

or take the many bloggers who’ve rose through originality and passion to give clear new voices on important human issues.

to feel otherwise suggests not only a selfishness, but a clear failing of logic. if bean counts are what you’re really concerned with (ie. money, and the loss of revenue streams to less qualified individuals) one would think you’d focus on an industry with more concrete commodity definitions. ala making toliet paper, supply, demand and no frilly subjective elements.

you want your cake and you want to eat it too. that’s fair. we all do. however, the generation of “professionals” who came before you regarded you as under-qualified, brash, industry destroying bastard children of the modern age and yet you somehow found a way to become a part of the established field.

the creme as they say rises to the top. this is true in all functions of skill, talent and expertise.

i once played a set of 9 ball against a much greater opponent (he was a world renowned money player who i won’t name here) and i was on, he was off. I got to the hill (3 games a piece with him) and he ultimately won. but i felt at the time i could have taken that set. only a couple years into focused pool and i was very close to taking a set off a very well established, trained and experienced player.

however, what you learn in tournament play is that on a short curve luck and momentum are powerful tools to use against an superior opponent. you may take 3 games of a seven game set but play a race to 21 and you’ll get destroyed.

because it’s in the long term that these minor disruptions of luck and momentum are hammered out and the real factors of skill, experience, and craft become deciding factors.

and i think this seemingly unrelated lesson applies to the above mentioned issue of amateur created content. industries will lose the low hanging fruit to be sure. stock photographers are learning this. if any trained monkey can create the shot, then that means any enthusiastic amateur can too.

and they will lose some mid-game opportunities, as many wedding photographers are learning. the power of an unqualified customer base plus cut throat amateurs is going to slice a mainstay of photographic revenue right out of the picture.

but on the long haul—the public will become educated and truly skilled people will still have customers. you won’t see vanity fair turning over it’s green issue to some kid of flickr any time soon. the vector for real profit in any industry is creativity + talent + experience.

if you are living off any jobs that could be performed by any two of those you’re going to lose a lot of work. but if you find the spot in an industry, that respects those three qualities and understands their value you will be in a unique position where the flood of the amateur changing the industry and infusing it with life, new ideas, new constructs only improves your work—without threatening your income.

you cannot fight the amateur directly. they are too many and too willing to win the fight of attrition through numbers and dumb passion. better to position yourself to take advantage of what they bring, and insulate yourself from them by understanding the larger picture.

cannery row (c) 2004-2010 i.m. ruzz (night exposure)

life would be immeasurably better for me if i was able to connect to the things i see everyone else connecting to.

it feels the purpose of exploring life, and earnestly trying to develop a philosophy that can withstand the pressures of a depressive mind—without pharmaceuticals, or institutional vacations—that i have dislodged myself from the warm center of shared goals and feeling in-step with my peers, and my culture.

the irony of that might not be obvious but consider for a moment the value of peers, and friends, and relationships in relation to your satisfaction in life.

with each iteration of my understanding, and each shedding, or each adoption i watch the chasm grow. i feel isolated by language and the symbols we use to express conceptual constructs. I physically feel frustration trying to find creative ways to explain my take on things to most people. we use a common language but our symbols table is drawn from different places. often, I just give up.

the slow removal of the shared aspirations of wealth, goods, power, reputation, the soul, ambition and sometimes love from my goals has left me without a way to make any sense to most of the people i share time with.

and sensing another shift building by watching my experience, my reading, and what i am moving towards I’m debating the entire process of growth or learning.

i have no true goal in my life. no touchstone to focus me back to what’s important. i learn by doing. and you can’t unlearn something just because you don’t like how what you learnt changed your life.

the last 4 months or more have been quite hard. winter is always hard but life throws a lot at you from time to time and as i weather this winter i’m compelled to ask some questions about how i’m living, where my energy is given, and what i can change to find more satisfaction.

it’s a bit like trying to get somewhere with no map and only knowing you’re there when you’re there and go, oh, this is where i wanted to be. only emotionally.

there is a uniting goal it seems we all share. ourselves.

i feel myself coming untied from that idea.

the people i know who are most self-focused are the most fractured. they are largely unhappy, insecure, manic and dissatisfied.

there is a way of life that exists entirely because we cannot take our eyes off our own emotions, needs, and wants long enough to detect it, or take steps to correct it. this self focused way of life is riddled with discontent, stress, insecurity, fear, or denial.

we’re the most neurotic, stressed out, unhappy people to ever walk the planet despite all our growth and production. half my friends are on anti-depressants. the other half are using drugs, booze, or more culturally acceptable ways to self medicate like work. many mix all three.

there are only a few remaining unassailable ideas left to modern people. ideas that are so deeply ingrained in our lives, language and stories that they are entirely beyond question.

love, happiness and growth (often meant as more production of some sort).

and by narrowing the discussion to these three ideas we’ve crafted a world that speaks only in their terms. a monoculture of thought. allowing disease to specialize. allowing diversity to whither and die.

every other idea or thought must lead to one of those three things to be valuable to us.

every action, expression, and moment must be spent towards one of those three things or we feel shame, guilt, or insecurity.

there is no room for exploration. no time for play or experimentation. no real learning (only filtering knowledge towards those goals). and it seems there is no satisfaction, contentment, peace.

when growth/production are on the table as a main course by virtue of its nature contentment is out. acceptance is the enemy. and satisfaction is a moving target that can only be attained in measurement to how much.

everything becomes about more. more virtures, more knowledge, more stuff, more friends, more reputation, more ______ insert whatever matters to you ______ but it always boils down to more.

as a photographer i’m meant to want to grow my name. to establish myself as “someone” through works. books, exhibits, print sales, high end clients and the like. the theory holds that the logical end of my work is, without question, to have my photos seen. the more who see my work, the more it means. the more value it has and by extension the more value i have. it becomes a feedback loop. if the world thinks you’re great, you’re great. if the world doesn’t adore you, throw money at you, throw options at you; you’re not anything and neither is your work.

as a secondary pursuit to the above, i’m meant to constantly be one upping my own work somehow. more technical perfection. more elaborate or sophisticate artifacts. more attractive subjects, settings, compositions. more, more more.

and all of this is meant to make me happy.

but it doesn’t.

what makes me happy is appreciating beauty. not creating it. participating in beauty, not accumulating it. experiencing it, not evaluating it. i only began recording it because it felt like i should. i felt it was somehow wasted if i didn’t capture, document, describe, express it.

and i wanted to see more naked girls. up close. who took orders well.

i’m only accidentally a photographer. i was only interested in beauty.

which now ties me back to the self-focused topic and my desire to disengage from it. being self-focused i had to commodify the beauty i experienced to show the world how unique and wonderful i was because i could see it where others might not be able to. and probably, somewhere in there i hoped showing this would make me lovable. and hopefully being loved would make me happy.

and you could argue my life represents exactly that pattern. the beautiful creature that shares my bed met me through this pursuit. a goodly part of her attraction and interest probably originally stemmed from ideas she got about me from my work and my view of beauty. and when she kisses my cheeks softly, i am about as happy as anyone could be. so this model must work.

except it doesn’t. unless i can give everything else up and live my life being face-kissed full time i still must find meaning, satisfaction and happiness in other places in my life.

and in this effort i want to change the discussion from creation to appreciation. from producing to experiencing. from self, to other. from ego, to whatever alternative there may be to ego. is there one? do we have a word for it?

as a direct result of this i hope to tear some stuff down in my life and replace them with more time, space, and peace.

it seems logical to begin with my photography. but follows that many other things must change. including finding a way to survive in a money centered world without giving over all my energy, and time to producing products of other people’s ambitions.

wanting less, accepting more, appreciating more and disengaging from the machine that lives off human insecurity, human fear, and our need to feel like we’re the center of the universe will probably lead me further down the path of isolation. further from the security my mother worries about for my aged years, but my hope is it may bring me closer to the life i’m actually having right now.

Short Answer:
I certainly hope so.

Long Answer:
recently a minor tweetbate (see how i mixed twitter and debate? see?) brought on by two seemingly random events. Aenux posting a link to a video about some guy questioning if our school system kills creativity and my fundamental inability to let these sorts of things slip by without comment.

in all fairness to aenux, who unknowingly has been drinking the liberal kool-aid, the matter extends beyond the localized question of do they or don’t they and into larger issues—though i’m sure as a mother she feels there’s no larger issue than her child’s upbringing—and while i feel her intent is clear, her ideals on target, her response is unflatteringly knee jerk.

the question extends to some core liberal ideals and in a larger sense the mechanics of civilized life. I’d like to briefly challenge those two fronts before packing my creativity away for the day and being a productive worker. so here goes.

We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.

tyler durden - fight club

on the first front is the liberal ideal that we can all be special, dynamic, game changers. that every child born after 1960 has in them the kernel of some possibly great *insert descriptive terms* inside them. An idea we become very attached to when speaking about our own child without even realizing we’ve become so attached but lets compare this much flaunted thought to how the world works in reality for a second.

Do we really need creative janitors? waitresses, long haul truck drivers, dog catchers, meth addicts, seven eleven workers, hotel concierges, cab drivers, baggage handlers, drywallers, CPAs, receptionists, couriers, line cooks, mailmen, cable installers, clerks, grocery baggers, canadian senators, backhoe operators, security guards, et al?

you can disregard the reality of modern civilization but it’s built on the backs of people who if asked to list their greatest strengths, creativity would very likely never come up in discussion. However, many of the things “soul-deadening” schools imbue their charges with play a central role in keeping our lights on everyday.

the ability to show up at a set time whether you want to or not. the ability to do repeated tasks with some competency. respect for some form of authority and the acceptance of passed on goals and requirements as desirable objectives.

does the guy sitting in a parking lot pay-booth need to figure out more creative ways to count change back to me? no. He needs to turn up for work, watch over our cars and handle simple cash transactions. and he needs to do it reliably.

and it smacks of naivete and arrogance to sit in a warm home, living off the avails of a generation of non-creatives discipline, hard work, and reliability and complain that very system that created the comfort you now enjoy is somehow failing you or your child by continuing to do what it needs to do.

I challenge you all to consider for a moment what the world might look like if liberal ideals actually translated into reality and every single person got to be an artist. I’ll save you some time. A brief swell of utterly meaningless creativity followed by famine, war and the loss of the largest part of the worlds population via attrition.

the success of modern schools in socializing relatively wild humans into productive workers is answered quite effectively by the fact that in a world where a large percentage of the population is still seeking clean water and daily bread we have pockets of people who’ve moved up the ladder of needs to desire things such as creativity. this is positive, but to want that for everyone is to destroy the conditions that allowed room for any creatives in the first place.

All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.

picasso

The next question worth looking at, which i think too often just gets accepted without much thought at all, is how important is creativity as a function of granting humans a life they more or less are satisfied with after completing it?

As a person whose now spent what is likely the better half of my expected life on this planet, trying to work out the problems that accompany life my initial answer is creativity is borderline irrelevant to happiness, satisfaction and a life well lived.

while it may be shouted from the liberal rooftops as a panacea for solving the woes of the “soul” and promises to make your teeth whiter, and sex better the facts, for me at least, suggest this is a lie.

a lie like wealth, or power, or fame is a lie.

while a certain amount of creativity is valuable to us as a species, predictably creative problem solving—like how to undo our fundamental reliance on finite resources, or how to solve the problems of food distribution—and the creation of new ways to find meaning in a meaningless world, creativity in it’s whole moves us no closer to solving the challenges we all face from day to day.

moreover, holding something like creativity as a high ideal in our minds we distract ourselves from more substantial and attainable goals. we expend massive amounts of energy in pursuit of the creative ideal, at the expense of developing real life skills that will bring us happiness, contentment, or a sense of place.

we do this for all the same reasons we do everything else, i suppose. the romantic image of the creative. the panty removing power of the artist, or the respect inspiring reaction of somehow shifting the game through our creativity ( see steve jobs ). But I think, historically, if you look the lives of the most creative people you will find a lot of discontent and unhappiness.

the traditional roles of creatives as painters, writers, and specialists in the other plastic arts rarely if ever shows us a blueprint of a human who worked out how to feel their time here was well spent. most creatives lives are trainwrecks. coated in addiction(s) to booze, drugs, sex, suffering, and melancholy.

while these people may appear to be getting more out of their life than the local junior high school’s janitor there’s a strong argument to be made which suggests that even the most meanial jobs can and often do—due to their structure—provide many of the key elements required for humans to feel engaged in life.

read more about the concept of flow in humans to get an idea what those elements might be.

moreover, engagement is only part of the puzzle. humans thrive when they feel they have a place in the world. well defined and ideally one they like. we find the most meaning and most vital experiences to come from our relationships with other humans. we find, inexplicably, that whether we like it or not, we feel more satisfied on the whole when we are productive—though which terms we evaluate that productivity varies greatly—and despite our protestations to the different there are volumes written throughout human history that acceptance, and engagement trump accomplishment and ambition.

and what is creativity if not ambition in a pretty dress.

however ironic it might seem as a psuedo-creative myself to be bashing creativity it’s apt. I chased that skirt a good portion of my life only to find, after long periods, looking back that creativity, and it’s place in my life—despite having developed in accordance with the energy i’ve put out for that goal—has yet to return half of what a good relationship has for me. or ever granted me a sense of satisfaction nearing that of my deeply under-developed skills for accepting my life, its limitations, it’s blessings and it’s gifts.

in the end, the question is not Do Schools kill creativity, it’s does creativity impact society at large, and individual human experience in the ways we’ve been promised it does? and if not, does it even matter if schools kill some of it in exchange for other values?

I don’t think creativity passes muster, and like so many other misguided surface level ideals our counter culture expounds it’s a distraction from learning skills and tools to get to the real meat of human life.

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