Category: Technology

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From the Ashes: On Creativity, Writing & The Internet

‘Fire’ by Maerten de Vos, Adriaen Collaert, 1580-4

I’ve been stuck in a creative rut for 5 years now.

From 2013 to 2019, I was actively working on screenplays. I created this website to house those screenplays online, and to do some blogging with my brother Sean on topics we were interested in. Towards the end of 2018, I got a manager for my spec pilot, LSD/88. We worked on fine tuning a draft and then he brought it to some actual networks and producers! It didn’t go anywhere, which was deflating but not surprising. It’s a hard business to break into. But I was proud to have gotten to that point at all.

Then 2020 came and the pandemic hit, and I lapsed into not writing much at all. I still journaled, I still took lots of notes on ideas, lines of dialogue, characters, anything I found interesting (and I still do all that as a practice, thankfully). But I haven’t found a real way to return to writing with the intention of sharing my work. I haven’t finished a screenplay in years, though I’ve started some. I lost my routine, discipline, and maybe even the will to tackle large writing projects.

I’ve also been a poor blogger. I haven’t posted here in almost 2 years. But I’d like to try again, for a number of reasons. I think the internet of it all ties into my creativity, or lack thereof, in crucial ways. The state of the internet is horrible. The main drivers, social media, are owned by awful oligarchs, who’ve actively made their products shittier over the years, not to mention the (dis)information and manipulation that has real world ramifications. I don’t want to support that if I can avoid it. I finally deactivated my Twitter. I’m blocking Instagram for a month as a trial before getting rid of it completely. I’m trying to reform my relationship with the internet towards the interesting, curiosity driven place it can be, away from the dopamine slot machines and information overload that has plagued it.

I’ve had this in my drafts for awhile now, and funnily enough, finding out J. Cole has started a blog of his own was the reminder I needed to publish this. He says: “This is just a place for me to share. I been wanting a lil blog for years. Somewhere to post random shit I fuck with where the audience is way smaller than it is on the social media platforms.” I can’t think of a better, more succinct way to put it. My other main inspiration is Austin Kleon’s blog. He’s long advocated for owning your own space on the internet and I’ve always appreciated his writings on art and creativity. He’s the author of Steal Like an Artist, and I do indeed intend to steal plenty from his blog for my own.

I want this space to be fun, loose, unstructured and interesting. Sometimes I’ll share writings of mine, sometimes I might just post some cool pictures, or point towards a song or movie I love. But above all, I want to use this space as a tool that will allow me to enjoy the internet in a healthier way and start to flex my stagnant creative muscles again. Here’s to giving it another shot.

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Airplane Mode

Tech and social media continue to worm into every crevice of our lives, for good and increasingly bad. One of the things I consider bad is the incessant pull to check our phones, with no real purpose, just an unconscious (and addicting) desire to occupy our mind with something at all times. In an effort to fight off the bad, and to maintain some peace in the mornings, I started tweaking my routine.

First, I moved my phone charger from my bedside table to the desk across the room. This way I couldn’t just pick it up whenever I wanted and disturb my sleep with a glowing rectangle. It also forces me to get out of bed to turn the alarm off and start my day. Then I began putting my phone on Sleep mode before bed. No vibrations to wake me up or tempt me. I also wanted to stop checking my phone in the mornings so I could start my day off on the right foot with some peace of mind. But I’d usually wake up to some text or notification that I ended up checking, and then I’d check another app, and then that peace was gone. So, when I heard Tim Ferriss puts his phone on Airplane mode before bed, that seemed like the logical next step. And it’s surprising how effective it is, and how much nicer my mornings have been. I don’t see any texts, I don’t know what’s happened in the news overnight, and I  have no temptation to check anything. That’s the key I think. Just by blacking out my phones network capabilities, I remove the temptation and the pull to check it. My mornings have been a lot more peaceful, and I can flick on the world in my phone whenever I’m ready.

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The Shitstream

The more time you spend in the shit stream, the stupider and more boring and just like everyone else you will be. – Tim Kreider

I love Tim Kreider’s book, We Learn Nothing, but I believe I first saw this quote from Austin Kleon. I know Austin frequently mentions how Twitter itself is the purest embodiment of the never ending, slimy, oozing shitstream we cannot escape.

Except we can. It’s fucking hard, but within our power. More on that in a bit.

The original quote comes from an AdviceToWriters interview with Kreider: “The more time you spend immersed in the shitstream of TV/internet/social media the stupider and more boring and just like everyone else you will be. Hang out in real life having good conversations with brilliant and hilarious people, so you can steal their ideas and all the clever things they say. Spend a lot of time alone so you can think up some original thoughts of your own. Have adventures. Get paid.”

He’s speaking in terms of being the best writer you can be, but I think in our world today, avoiding the shitstream is fundamental if you want to become the best person you can be.

What is the shitstream? It can take many forms. It’s checking your phone the second you wake up. It’s the seventeen BREAKING NEWS notifications waiting for you there. It’s refreshing Twitter every few seconds even when you know there’s nothing new, let alone anything that will have the slightest impact on your life. The shitstream of yesterday were billboards and infomercials, but now they’re attached to us, screaming from our pockets. The shitstream can be so many things, because we are increasingly inundated with new garbage ready for us the second we’re bored. The shitstream is what you pay attention to when you don’t want to face ______. It’s what you pull up to distract yourself when you want to avoid something, whether it’s that tough conversation you need to have, the exam you should be studying for, or even just being alone with your thoughts for more than a few minutes straight.

In order to be original, creative, fresh thinkers, we need to pull our heads out of what everyone else is consuming. But in order to keep our sanity, to maintain our well-being, to be healthy, happy individuals, we MUST pull our heads out of the shitstream to breathe in the air and just fucking be.

The internet has always had this pull, but it became crystal clear how explosive and harmful it could be with the 2016 election and beyond. From that point on it’s kept us glued to a screen, itching to hear the next fresh horror. I know this is terrible for me yet have felt helpless trying to battle it back. I’ve blocked Twitter from my computer only to find that the Mobile version is somehow unblockable on my work desktop. There goes that barrier, and with a click there goes my attention. I’ve tried to set self-imposed windows to peek at the news without it swallowing me up, only to pull myself out of the wreckage an hour later, furious at what the head of the EPA is doing, and even more furious at myself for knowing what the fucking head of the EPA is doing. The addicting nature of the internet, purposeful and by design, has overpowered our willpower and discipline. But there are potential solutions worth trying out that we’ll get to. Because we must try. We must try to eliminate the shitstream from our lives as much as we can, so that we can have the freedom to spend time doing the things that we love, that interest us, that make us happy. It’s an ongoing process, filled with proud advances and frustrating backslides. But that’s life.

I don’t want to spend too much time expounding this. I do want to give it a proper introduction though, because I’m going to periodically post examples of the SHITSTREAM and the harm it’s causing us, along with examples of the ANTI-SHITSTREAM, showcasing the tools we can use to help ourselves become free of it, and the people who recognize it and are doing something about it in their own way. Let’s start by looking at two of my favorite comedians: Aziz Ansari and Louis CK.

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