I was with a friend the other day and we got to talking about the changing relationship we have to our work. When we were younger we were propelled by an unceasing desire to create, our every waking hour consumed with thoughts about the work. Though we were less skilled, we strove to create with a fervour that feels almost alien to us now. The ambition of youth.
I miss that feeling. I miss feeling like the show I was working on was the most important thing in the world, filling notebooks with thoughts about every detail, conceptual, practical, spiritual. I miss the un-boundaried need to message people at all hours of the day and night with revelations. I miss being stuck with a problem so difficult that it roiled around in my gut until some eureka moment days later. I think the work feeling this important also made me feel important, like climbing Mount Everest.
I think that’s the key thing actually. The quest for greatness, the importance of the work, attached to me. I couldn’t conceptualise artistic endeavour outside of it having great importance. Because in so doing it maybe made me important, worth loving or worthy of admiration. My last show with Dirty Rascals explored that idea explicitly. I don’t feel the same anymore, or at least not the same intensity.
But I think that’s okay. I don’t think it means I’ve given up. I think it means that I’m more at peace with myself. I also don’t think it means that when I was younger I was wrong either. Where I am now is the result of where I was then, I’m grateful for the grappling of my younger self (new tongue twister for you there).
I’m enjoying being a bit more settled, and a bit more pluralistic. I just don’t quite feel the same need to tie the work to my sense of self-worth. I can take a walk with it, and leave it when I want to try something else. I don’t need to wrestle with it, to cover myself in oil, take a hold of the work and throw it to the ground yelling in it’s ear ‘Who am I!?’. I feel lighter, less tunnel visioned.
But a part of me does miss the oil thing.
This is interesting because I had a period where I thought I was in a similar place - almost that I had the perspective of age to make me less obsessed or enraptured with my work.
But I feel like in the last 6 months I've come back to this place. Definitely a highly stressed environment, and my biometrics stats aren't the greatest, but I'm really excited for every day at work, and I feel such a great sense of accomplishment when I solve a coding puzzle - bonus is that it saves people manual slog effort/ can be used indefinitely for others to create great new things.
I think the spark or feeling of excitement is a bit harder to find the older you get - largely because you know the contexts in which you produce your best work, so you don't have that 'hopefulness of youth' in the contexts that aren't conducive to great work. For me, the spark is found when I have a lot of control over a project that has diverse pieces, allows me to collaborate with others and get robust feedback, but then also allows me to go into a cave and tinker with things until I implement the feedback or do something even better. The variety of activities and modes of interacting with the world - but with one clear objective - really make me excited.