Do it for you

I saw a video on tiktok in which Jacob Collier contradicted Rick Rubin. Rubin's point was that the audience comes last, which is a good one in that you shouldn't be audience chasing, and that you should pursue your own creative muse etc etc. This is all well and good, but Jacob's response was really eye opening for me.

He laid out the idea that Rubin's advice is good for people who aren't creative. That he'd started doing creative things purely for himself, and only latterly for others. That he could see the unblocking potential of Rubin's advice, but that it was useful only for those unable to get themselves working for fear of the judgement of others. This seems so obvious, and yet this distinction between doing it for yourself, for the process even, and for some final product or for some external audience is important.

कर्मण्येवाधिकारस्ते मा फलेषु कदाचन | मा कर्मफलहेतुर्भूर्मा ते सङ्गोऽस्त्वकर्मणि || 47 ||

"you have a right to perform your prescribed duties, but you are not entitled to the fruits of your actions. Never consider yourself to be the cause of the results of your activities, nor be attached to inaction."

Bhagavad Gita - more that 2000 years old.

I remember Jeff Buckley emphatically saying "The goal is in the process". I wrote it down, but I don't think I really understood what he was getting at. Perhaps I still don't.

I think David, my step father, does. He paints a lot, and spends countless hours on them, but he doesn't seem to care much about the paintings after he's finished them.

The video:

https://www.tiktok.com/@viralvideo.club/video/7343243256005725472

What irony that I've gone through the process of writing this out for myself, and as I've done it, I've been asking myself whether this should be a public blogpost rather than a private diary entry. Is there a right answer?

For my own purposes, here's why the above matters; I haven't been creating as much as I'd like to be, and this has been making me unhappy - feeling I'm not doing what I "should". Where that sense of obligation comes from is perhaps out of scope. Regardless, I haven't been doing it, and partly this is, I believe, due to not being happy with the results when I do. Why? Why am I not happy? Because I'm not playing. I'm not doing the work for its own sake. I'm obsessing over how it will be viewed by some amorphous, ill-defined third party, some judgemental audience.

It's that old problem of worrying what "they" think. The weird thing is, if you choose a specific scary, judgemental person- maybe a parent, or a colleague, friend, competitor - whatever, then your self worth will (I find) come to your defence. That is, you may feel embarrassed to publish or find out what they think, but you instinctively know it's crazy to let the opinion of person X prevent you from even attempting to do what's most important to your personal goals or development. This self defence only kicks in, it seems, against a concrete individual.

If you leave it as "they", then "they" win,

but you could go through this process with each individual and the result would be as above: "fuck what they think". If you leave it as "they", then "they" win, but there is no "they" there. "They" don't exist. It's in your head. Some shit in your own head is stopping you doing the art you feel driven to do, and get so much joy from. Time to get to work.