Pat Carroll

Category: Paper

  • Stages of the Creative Process

    Something I believe isn’t discussed as much as it should be is how different composers think about the creative process. What do they actually do, or think to do, when they enter the studio with no idea and leave it with a finished piece?

    What happens in this gap?

    I remember talking about this with someone, discussing the case of a jazz trumpet improviser (I forgot who). He said something along the lines of: “we know what [so and so] ate for lunch before his show, and which trains he took to get there, but we have no idea about what he was thinking while playing—how he did what he did.” We know so little about their creative process, which I believe is a massive loss.

    An awareness of these stages of the creative process, I believe, allows for a particularly focused and oriented creative process, rather than more of a mindset of “I’ll just head in and see what happens” one. There’s nothing really wrong with these sorts of sessions, but I’ve found the former to be way more conducive to finishing works.

    I’d like to talk about how I consider mine: To me, it consists of four main stages or categories.

    1. Gathering Materials
    2. Organising/Arranging Materials
    3. Processing Materials
    4. Polishing Materials

    I’ve built this understanding by reading about composition workflows, talking with other composers, and of course doing composition myself. I’ll break them down.

    There may be sessions where I only carry out field recordings, sketch out ideas, play and experiment with instruments, and make recordings while I do. I think of this as gathering materials. Then, there are sessions where I only arrange these recordings into musical structures: organising/arranging materials. There are sessions where I focus on making the sounds more ‘interesting’ through applying effects: processing materials. There are sessions where I only edit and mix these resulting elements, or master the finished work: polishing materials.

    The way of using this understanding of the creative process is to have a clear idea of what stage I’m going to be working in at any given time in the studio. It’s common to feel stuck with a work or larger project. To remedy this, I’ve found it valuable to sit back and think: “OK, where am I at with this piece? Do I have materials? Yes. Are they arranged in structures? Yes. Are these structures interesting or logical? They could be better…”

    …and then away I go into the second stage of the process.

    During this session, I might think that the sounds need some more character, then I know I’ll need to move into the third stage. If I realise I have a section that could do with some contrasting material, I’ll move back to the first stage.

    This desire to build a mental model of the creative process came from me thinking about how modern DAW software facilitates a non-linear workflow, rather that coaxing the user through more of a linear one. At any given time you can jump between each of these stages of creation. This contrasts the more linear design of a piece of software like Da Vinci Resolve, which moves the user through the necessary workflow to create, edit, enhance, and export a piece of video through specific modules made for each stage of the workflows.

    This isn’t to say that non-linear workflows are bad—in fact, the freedom DAWs offer the composer in terms of workflow is their strength.

    But I do think that it’s beneficial to think—at least sometimes—in categorical terms when it comes to the creative process. Every composer has a toolkit they carry around in their heads and hard drives, and in their studios. It’s full of their techniques, materials and technologies they use to make their art. Knowing where in the workflow these are best used creates order, and answers, when it comes to the question of “What should I be doing right now?” Opening up a fresh DAW project, the composer can know which materials, technologies and techniques to use to begin gathering the materials for their work. At another point, they know which techniques and aspects of theory they need to apply when they are organising these materials into structures—what sorts of growth, decay or stability they lean towards, and how to portray these through editing or automation techniques, for example. And of course, wanting to make sounds interesting, the composer knows which tools and techniques to use to mould material into their desired shapes and textures. In other words, instead of knowing what their favourite tools are, it’s better to know what their favourite plugins and techniques are for specific stages of the creative process. This at least slims down the possible options for what the composer should open up to begin making materials, or apply to process existing materials.

    I don’t think it’s worthwhile though being dogmatic about sticking to the stages in sequence: the composer doesn’t need to move linearly from one to the next stage. If they want, they might create sounds and process them immediately afterwards, before organising them into a structure. In what order the composer moves through or around the stages is up to them.

    And of course every composer is going to have different stages in their understanding of the creative process.

    I just think it is worthwhile—and has been for me in the past—to have a form of mental representation of the creative process in mind, rather than considering it as a mystical, amorphous blob that we enter when we head into the studio.

  • Storytelling in song, research, listening and everywhere else

    This week marked the first week of teaching for the year. It was great to be back on campus and meeting a fresh batch of new students. One of the songwriting classes I’m teaching this trimester is about the relationship between music and storytelling—primarily through lyrics, but also how musical/compositional and production techniques all play a role in reinforcing a lyrical narrative.

    As a class we unpacked these lyrics of Pearl Jam’s Black:

    Sheets of empty canvas, untouched sheets of clay
    Were laid spread out before me, as her body once did
    All five horizons revolved around her soul as the Earth to the Sun
    Now, the air I tasted and breathe has taken a turn

    This unit especially comes at a useful time for me, as I’ve been working on a writing project that involves surprising similarities to this approach.

    I did quite a bit of research during my days at uni, but haven’t done heaps of it since, besides a couple of papers last year. This year however, I’m taking on a project that hopefully will eventuate in a published book. I’ve wanted to do this for a while, so it feels great to finally take the plunge. But doing this process has put me back in the mental spaces I enjoyed so much when I was studying and writing my research projects.

    I, like many others, have often seen ‘research’ as a bit of a dry exercise of reading charts (not sure why I always think of charts when thinking about researching the creative industries. I guess sometimes we look at listener statistics—sometimes). But this process is in fact a great, creative experience, with similarities to the storytelling methods in my songwriting class, and with my approach to composition in general.

    The process began with a question and some vague ideas. With these in mind, I read and listened and thought about the ideas of others, and links began to form. When you have a question in your mind, you often find answers in strange and unexpected places.

    It’s like the experience of bringing forth one aspect of what we see—honing in on it. I do this sometimes for fun: look around at your surroundings, and pick out a colour. Then tell your brain to find all things in your visual field in that colour. You get this interesting sensation of a filtering process going on.

    It’s been a great experience to have fragments of ideas and answers emerge in my day-to-day life, and in the things I’m actively reading.

    To me, this has always been the definition of creativity: of drawing links between things that are seemingly unrelated, allowing them to represent. We do this constantly in speech and writing—our fundamental semiotic sign systems—but also in others, like the musical and visual arts. Even in things that just surround us, not ‘captured’ in pieces of art. Trees come to mean something to us; the stars always mean something to us. This ability of the imagination is, to me, the engine of creative thinking and art itself—being a creator and an audience of it.

    It comes down to constructing meaning and narratives from things that often, at their essence, are unrelated. Or, they’re deeply related, but only through links we think up.

    This concept is central to the act of listening in music: not just hearing but the act of listening. A sound will mean something different from one person to another, based on what they bring to the experience, just as a quote or a picture will. It’s all part of the same process of building connections between things, and allowing them to represent an idea of something.

    One of my favourite exercises for students in the songwriting class is to give them a set of unrelated words, and ask them to arrange them in ways to allow connections to emerge. As they do this, the students are actively making these unrelated things come to mean something. I love this exercise, and I think it is one that exercises creativity on a fundamental level. It’s the same process as arranging sounds on a screen to make them connect and work to create some gestalt meaning. It’s the same process as having a question and seeing fragments out in the world be able to be captured, arranged and formed into something that tells a story, answers a question, or perhaps asks another more fundamental question. This sort of “rabbit-holing”—of finding answers that lead to questions that lead to answers that lead to more questions—is what can be fulfilling, enriching, overwhelming, devastating, exhausting, and entrancing. To me it’s what pushes a creative person onwards, and allows their curiosity to guide them, but also itself become more complex as they follow it.

    To me, it’s central.

  • The Spectrum of Authorship

    Authorship and Collaboration with AI

    I’ve been thinking a lot lately about authorship when it comes to making creative work through collaboration with AI. I’ve been particularly interested in how authorship changes once we start relying more heavily on technology to make our work.

    There’s a spectrum, I think, that runs from one extreme to the other. On one end is the composer who creates something entirely from themselves; literally just their body and their voice, no technology involved. They might sing, clap, and stomp in a purely improvised performance, creating an original work that is entirely ‘human’. As we move along the spectrum, we start introducing tools and technologies that extend what the body can do.

    At these early ends of the spectrum, that might be the human–machine collaborations of a violin or a cello. The performer still feels like the author of the work, but their authorship is now distributed across their body and the instrument. The music is only possible through their interaction with that tool.

    Then we move into the world of recording. Technologies like microphones, tape machines, and DAWs allow us not only to capture sound but to shape and reorganise it. Here, authorship starts to spread out a little further. You might record fragments from synthesisers, field recordings, speech, or existing works, rearrange them, sculpt them, and construct a piece that exists mostly through the editing and transformation of material. The composition becomes a kind of organisation of material — structuring sound to give it some aesthetic meaning. In these contexts, the composer’s work entirely relies on the capabilities of modern technologies.

    Tools, Systems, and Co-Creation

    Things become more interesting when we get to technologies that don’t just record or process sound but actually start generating or influencing the musical material. MIDI effects in a DAW are a perfect example of this. They operate not on the level of concrete audio (as synthesisers and audio effects do), but on the level of abstract musical content — notes, rhythms, and chords. It’s possible to send a single note into a rack of MIDI effects, automate a range of parameters, and end up with a sophisticated chord sequence using inversions, borrowed chords, and extensions. The composer here is engaging in complex approaches to technology. But who is making the chords?

    Or consider an arpeggiator, which transforms a single chord into a patterned melody. It’s not just amplifying the human input; it’s creating new abstract musical content (the notes rather than the sound of those notes).

    The technology suggests material, and the composer reacts to it in a form of collaboration — approving it (keeping it in the work) or rejecting it (trying another set of parameters). The composer can unexpectedly stumble upon highly sophisticated ideas through these sorts of processes. They’re relying on the technology to produce their complexity. Is this any different from a composer sitting at a piano, and importantly, relying on the piano to find their complex harmonic sequences?

    These sorts of systems blur the line between tool and collaborator. We’re still inclined to say that the resulting piece belongs to, and is authored by, the composer, even though the technology is now contributing directly to the creation of the material itself.

    Further along the spectrum, we get to a stage where we start working with technologies that behave more like agents — systems that can generate musical ideas on their own, improvise, or respond to us in real time. These could be algorithmic improvisers, generative systems, or AI collaborators.

    At this point, the question of authorship starts to unravel further. Who is the author here? Is it the composer, who initiated and guided the process? Is it shared with the coder or designer who built the system? What about the AI itself, which is now capable of producing new abstract and concrete material? We could say that it’s still the composer’s work — another case of using technology to extend creative capacity — but it does feel slightly different. There’s an agency to the process that pushes back, that seems to create with the composer-performer rather than for them.

    Sampling, Assembly, and the Role of the Composer

    Running parallel to these sorts of approaches is the culture of sampling. You can make a track entirely out of material from Splice — a drum loop from one person, a chord progression from another, and a melody from someone else. In these scenarios, almost every building block of the music comes from other creators — not to mention the technologies that went into creating and shaping those materials. Yet the sense of authorship still rests with the one who assembles it.

    This kind of authorship is about reorganisation: curating, reframing, and recomposing pre-existing materials. It’s not unlike crate-digging or collage. Sure, the composer is not inventing the raw materials, but they’re reorganising them into new configurations, giving them new contexts and meanings, often drastically different from their origins. Authorship here becomes less about creating from nothing and more about the composer’s methods of moving things around — how they impose structure, taste, and intention.

    In these settings, the composer engages with technologies or the processing of sourced material to create the core ideas and sounds. But their authorship comes from the assembly of these into musical structures.

    Harvesting Authorship in the Ecosystem of Creativity

    At the furthest end of the spectrum is the artist who types a prompt into an AI model, waits a few seconds, and receives a fully formed track — a finished .wav file that they can release immediately. Here, the idea of authorship becomes extremely fragile. Who made it?

    It doesn’t quite make sense to call the human the ‘composer’ of the work. The creative labour has been abstracted away; the AI is the one producing the abstract and concrete musical materials and organising them into a musical structure. The human is left as the initiator, prompter, or commissioner.

    But even here, it’s not completely clear-cut. If the AI outputs something editable — an entire DAW project, a SuperCollider patch, or even a .wav file that is then split into stems — the human can intervene, reshape it, and make it their own, potentially clawing back some authorship. In other words, the artist begins to harvest authorship back from the system. They inject themselves into the material, react to it, transform it, and in doing so, reclaim a sense of ownership. The process becomes a dialogue: a push and pull between automation and intention.

    How is this process different from getting a sketch or full piece sent over from a collaborator, which the composer then pulls apart, edits, remixes, and makes ‘their own’? (I’m referring here to the differences concerning authorship, not the morals of replacing human collaboration of this kind with AI-human collaboration.)

    Harvesting authorship describes the act of taking something that wasn’t entirely yours to begin with and imprinting yourself upon it through labour, curation, and interpretation. The more you interact, the more you reclaim.

    Across this whole spectrum, from singing with your body to collaborating with generative systems, the underlying question doesn’t really change. Modern techniques of music-making have pushed us further away from that human-only end of the spectrum. But composition is still about how much of yourself you put into the process, and how much the system gives back. What shifts is where the creativity sits, and what forms it takes — in the body, in the workflow, in the code, or in the back-and-forth between the composer and their technology.

    It’s also not just technology that we interact with in the creative process. Consider the interplay between the composer and the spaces they compose with in mind, or the audience members themselves. What about the composer drawing inspiration from biophonic and geophonic sources — birdsong, thunder, waves? Music-making is thus never a single-creator scenario. There is no single, individual author. Authorship, in the sense of ‘who made this?’, is a question of a vast ecosystem of culture, environment, and technology.

    Maybe authorship isn’t about who made what from scratch, but about how creative intentions move through systems. It’s less about purity or originality, and more about interaction, orientation, and the ways we steer complexity into coherence — how an author of a creative work takes a set of inputs as material and shapes them into something aesthetically valuable.

    In that sense, using AI in the creative process isn’t the ‘end of authorship’. It’s a change, for sure, but it’s really just another point on a spectrum that composition has always existed on.

  • The Desire for Ownership in Creative Work

    What is it about building things through sound, words or code, that I’m drawn to? As I mentioned recently, I don’t have much experience with writing code, but I’ve always felt drawn towards the ideas. I’ve felt some deep enjoyment when working in platforms like MaxMSP or Bitwig’s The Grid to make musical systems. Why do I like these things? I think it’s the creativity it offers — the ability to make something that didn’t exist before. It has felt great to build my website recently, tweaking it until it feels like my own. I find that it’s similar to my music making: There’s a satisfaction in seeing my ideas materialise, an aesthetic that feels personal, that reflects some combination of discipline and taste.

    But I’ve been wondering lately: is this feeling of desiring ownership, of uniqueness healthy? Where does it come from? And why is it so central to how I/we think about creativity and self-expression today?

    The Self as Property

    To answer this, it helps to go back a few centuries, to some origins of liberal thought. The 17th-century philosopher John Locke proposed that every person “owns” themselves: their body, labour, and by extension, whatever they create through that labour. This simple notion that selfhood and property are intertwined became the bedrock of modern liberalism and capitalism.

    When I write music, words, or build a website, I’m effectively performing a Lockean ritual: I’m mixing my labour with raw digital material, and the result feels mine. This logic is so deeply ingrained that it feels natural rather than cultural. The creative act becomes not just an act of making but of claiming. In a world that often leaves us feeling interchangeable (as users, customers, citizens), the ability to make something that bears our imprint is attractive.

    But this Lockean inheritance also shapes the morals, values and emotional register of creativity itself. In other words, it reshapes the purpose of creativity. It teaches us that to create is to possess, and that possession is the proof of individuality. Even in immaterial digital spaces, that same grammar of ownership persists: files, repositories of knowledge, music collections, usernames, intellectual property. The “I” and the “mine” are inseparable.

    The Romantic Individual Artist

    Locke gave us the legal language of ownership, but the Romantics provided the emotional one. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, artists and writers began to describe creativity not as skilled craft, but as a form of inner revelation. The artist, in this new perspective, was a solitary figure channelling something authentic from within. They became a genius rather than a tradesperson.

    I feel that this Romantic idea still haunts every creative field today, from music and painting to programming and design. When I make something which (I believe) “only I could have made,” I’m invoking this Romantic lineage. The thrill of creativity comes from the belief that I’ve distilled an ephemeral piece of self into form — that the work bears a trace of my personality that can’t be replicated.

    But it’s worth remembering that this somewhat egotistical, borderline narcissistic notion of the unique, ‘authentic’ creator is historically specific. It emerged alongside and in revolt against aspects of industrial capitalism, as standardised production began to threaten the very idea of the individual. The Romantic artist was, in some sense, a protest figure — a defence of human uniqueness against the machine.

    But doesn’t that same myth now fuel the culture of ‘personal brands’ and individual distinction that capitalism depends on?

    Marketing this Self

    In our time, creativity and ownership have fused into something subtler. We no longer merely own things; we curate and display them as expressions of identity. The personal website, playlist, or socials feed functions less as a possession and more as a performance of taste. Platforms promise self-expression, but within templates designed for comparison, data extraction, and profit.

    In these contexts, the language of “authenticity” that pervades social media is no longer opposed to capitalism: it’s one of its operating systems. To be “authentic” online is to express individuality through consumption and production. The result is a paradox: the more we try to assert our uniqueness, the more we participate in the machinery that standardises it.

    This is perhaps why the act of building a website has felt different to me. To build something that lives and functions outside the algorithmic feeds has felt like a reclaiming of agency. If I have to update a post because I spot an error, I don’t have to worry about being ‘downgraded’ by the algorithm. I don’t have to operate within the specified templates of socials platforms. Building the site itself brings the pleasure of building infrastructure for your own meaning, not just content within someone else’s frame. Sure, there are still some boundaries on a platform like WordPress, but nowhere near as much as on Instagram or TikTok.

    Yet even in the context of a personal website, the logic of ownership shadows the joy: the pride in saying “I made this,” the anxiety of imitation, the impulse to protect one’s creative space from dilution.

    The Commons

    There is, of course, another story: the open-source tradition, which treats things like code as a shared commons. In this world, creativity isn’t defined by possession but by contribution. The act of making is collaborative, cumulative, and porous. A line of code written by one person may become the seed for another’s idea halfway across the world.

    This model challenges the Lockean and Romantic assumptions that creativity belongs to the solitary individual. It reframes authorship as participation rather than expression. The concept of “Musicking” runs parallel, understanding music as a communal, social practice, rather than the product of the individual in their isolated studio.

    While the “commons” can become, paradoxically, another frontier of extraction (the language of community and sharing is often co-opted by tech companies that profit from collective labour without redistributing ownership) there’s something profoundly humane in the idea that creativity can be distributed. It suggests that meaning doesn’t have to originate from within a single self: it emerges between selves, through systems and interactions. In a way, this vision aligns more closely with how art, language, and culture have always worked: as collective enterprises, shaped by traditions, tools, and shared histories.

    Making, Being

    So when I find joy in making a piece of music, building a website, or creating a piece of generative art, what am I really responding to? Part of it is the tactile pleasure of shaping something from nothing, the same satisfaction that a potter might feel. But part of it, I think, is ideological: the sense that my creation is a declaration of selfhood in a world that constantly fragments it.

    That feeling of “this is mine” is both personal and political. It reassures me that I exist as a free individual, that I can leave a mark that’s not immediately absorbed into the collective stream. Yet it also ties me into a long historical chain of ideas about selfhood, property, and authenticity. These ideas are not neutral, but deeply shaped by the economic and cultural systems that produced them.

    Perhaps the healthiest relationship to creativity lies somewhere between possession and participation. Between the Lockean claim and the open-source contribution. To make something that feels truly yours without imagining that its meaning begins or ends with you.

    The Meaning of Making

    In the end, the act of creation, whether through sound, words, or code, returns to something that is perhaps pre-ideological: the quiet joy of bringing something into being. When I shape a sound, I’m engaged in dialogue with the material world. We deem this a powerful trait: the gods are the “creators”, and some of our deepest stories are creation myths. But that dialogue doesn’t have to serve ownership or identity. It can simply be a way of experiencing the world through making, by engaging in some of reality’s most fundamental features, like pressure, harmonics, logic, and structure.

    The modern myth of authenticity tells us that creativity reveals who we are. But perhaps it does something subtler: it shows us that we are — that existence can take form, that meaning can be assembled, however temporarily, from the raw materials of thought, bits, and sound.

    To create, then, is not only to proclaim “this is mine!”, but also to question, “what am I part of?”

  • AI Collaboration to Build an Album Art Generator

    I used AI in some interesting ways over the past couple of days to do two main tasks: edit writing I had done, and build a website for making generative graphics for album art. The former is probably not so interesting anymore (which is crazy to think, given how novel these workflows are), but the latter definitely was. Both of these collaborations have been interesting in exploring the spectrum between non-use and overuse of AI.

    Non-Use and Overuse of AI

    Non-use, to me, feels a little short-sighted in some settings, as it denies the possibility for augmenting my skill set to do new things. There are absolutely times for non-use, but I personally definitely want to avoid total Luddism. Overuse, on the other hand, is basically getting the AI to make the entire thing for you — the article, the image, the song, the code script. AI can be overused in these ways, and then you can pass the products off as your own. But even though the AI created the thing, isn’t it still ‘your own’? Or do you have to create the thing entirely yourself in order to say it is, in fact, ‘your own’? These sorts of questions relate to areas outside of AI, such as the use of audio samples from platforms like Splice, or stock images on Unsplash.

    I should say that this is not an exercise in proving overuse to be outright Bad — like most things, there’s nuance to be emphasised. Instead, I’m simply exploring my experience of different uses of the technology — what does it feel like to not use it at all? Is it still rewarding to use AI to entirely create the thing? How can there be a balance of getting the reward of creating something while still leveraging the capabilities of the AI?

    Collaborating with AI

    • Writing

    What I was exploring in my two uses of AI yesterday was using it in an assistive way. For the written work, I wrote the draft, and the AI went through it and pointed out possible ways of editing the writing, fixing errors, and identified wrong information (in my case, I got the author of a book wrong). In this instance, the AI was acting in the same way that a human editor acts. I went through a very similar process when I wrote my PhD: passing the draft I had written to the editor, waiting a month, and then receiving a document full of suggestions and fixes. The downsides of this process are that it took a long time, and there were some errors that the editor had made in their suggestions (something to do with the reference style, from memory). The pros, however, were that I gave someone a job — the work employed them, and gave them money for their labour. And, while I said it was a con before, I actually enjoyed that time off and away from the thesis to gather my thoughts about it, and to approach it again with fresh eyes and ideas. By using an AI to edit the document, I am effectively avoiding getting a human editor to do a job.

    If I were to get the AI to write the entire article myself, I would not develop any of my writing or thinking skills. Through using AI in more of an assistive way, I am engaging abilities through the act of writing the draft and editing it, constantly practising my writing and thinking skills.

    It comes down to this core question: do I want the thing done, or do I want to do the thing?

    In using AI, I am trading some work off to it, but, importantly, I’m able to manage how much of this outsourcing I am doing.

    • Programming

    The other way I was using AI was by building a small program for creating generative visual art pieces for album covers, using the traditional generative art concepts/techniques. In generative art, the artist creates a set of rules and processes which then execute to produce the final art piece, rather than creating the finished piece directly. Each run yields a unique piece, generated within the constraints of the rules laid out in the system. These sorts of systems can be built using code, but I have no experience writing code, so I decided to talk ChatGPT through my ideas for the program, and see how it went. The very first program it created worked very well, generating images exactly like what I was after. The program had a few sliders to adjust parameters like Density and Stroke Weight, and allowed me to select which types of shapes it would use. An element of randomness was implemented, and pressing the ‘Regenerate’ button produced a new image each time, under the same core rules. This allows me to generate a cohesive set of images that share similar characteristics but are individually unique:

    Two main issues arose from my minimal coding experience. Firstly, I could not easily edit or debug the generated program myself. When I prompted ChatGPT for fixes, its accuracy was sometimes inconsistent, often leaving me unable to add or alter elements. This collaborative process, however, became a learning experience. ChatGPT responded to me as if I was a beginner, rather than a completely clueless coder. This pushed me slightly beyond my capabilities, developing some of my understandings of how code works. I did, however, struggle at times to find where to paste the new code, so I asked ChatGPT to tell me what the old code looked like so that I could find it and replace it with the new code.

    I obviously didn’t feel like I had created the program myself. Sure — the artworks it produced felt sort of like mine, but the program itself didn’t. If I had coded that program, I would feel far more rewarded every time it produced an artwork.

    Reward in the Creative Process; Ownership

    But is this much different to, say, a person who works in woodworking, doing most things by hand, but then acquiring a particular machine that allows them to do so much more? It’s still creative work, but now the person is relying on a machine to do some of the work that they originally wouldn’t have been able to do themselves. Is there much of a difference here?

    (Something I did observe was that it did drive me to really want to learn to code. I’ve been interested in other forms of programming using objects in platforms like MaxMSP and Bitwig’s The Grid, but I’ve never fully taken the plunge with learning to code. That could be a side project I undertake this summer.)

    Again, it comes back to the core question: do I want to have the thing done, or do I want to do the thing?

    Do I want to learn the techniques, put them to use, fail, succeed, learn and feel ownership over my creations? For sure. But is there also a bit of joy in having this program in front of me that has been made specifically for me, based off my ideas? Absolutely.

    I don’t think it’s black or white. Having the AI simply produce the generative art images itself, and then calling them my own… that feels far more empty. In the same way, getting the AI to write the entire article, or getting it to produce an entire piece of music, seems like too much outsourcing to feel much reward in, and connection to, what has been created. There’s very little creative joy in those types of processes.

    There is something that feels good about being able to do things ourselves. Sure, we can store information in a personal knowledge management program like Obsidian or Notion, building a large collection of notes about our interest. Or we can just say, ‘Hey, it’s on the internet; what’s the need to remember these things?’. But it feels good to know the things yourself: to hold the ideas in your head, and be able to merge them and explore the connections yourself. There’s a self-sufficiency that comes from that. It feels good to learn new things, and be able to do new capabilities and skills. It feels good to be very good at something. As a software update for a phone makes it a more capable device, going through skill- or knowledge-development processes feels good and deeply rewarding. Gaining new capabilities is one of the things we praise in our culture: development, growth, maturity, advancement. Think of Neo in The Matrix gaining the capabilities of Kung Fu fighting. Think of the montages of characters in sports films, training hard, struggling, falling, getting up again, training, training, training, and eventually getting very good at what they struggled with before. These sorts of stories permeate in our culture because they align with a core element of modern experience: development and expanding capabilities.

    AI Augmenting Capabilities

    A major part of this is that I can use AI to help me do things I can’t do on my own, rather than getting it to do things that I can and want to do, such as writing out my ideas. It’s important to be aware that whatever I get ChatGPT to do, I won’t get practice in. If I get it to write out my ideas (for example, brainstorm something, or write out an entire article), then I won’t get practice in thinking and converting ideas to written words, which I see as an extremely valuable ability. If I get it to edit my writing, however, I will get practice in writing the ideas and some editing, but I won’t get practice in the proper fine-toothed-comb editing of writing. But this would be the same case as if I worked with an editor. If I get it to write code for programs based on my ideas, I won’t get practice coding. However, I do feel like I learnt a bit about code yesterday by working alongside the AI, copying and pasting chunks of code and looking around the script. I didn’t learn anywhere near the amount I would have if I had written the script myself, but that would take me a very long time to be able to do so. This isn’t a bad thing — learning is supposed that takes time. But this was a different experience to traditional approaches to learning: I could immediately create things of higher complexity, while learning how code works in the process.

    But the counter to all of this hyper-optimism is that these positive outcomes will only occur if users are aware of AI’s potential to do the exact opposite: to limit our capabilities, expressive capacities and creativity, to cut us off from opportunities, and to raise new barriers. Over-reliance on the technology will stop us from doing the things that allow for these positive outcomes, and will stunt our growth in developing our own skills and capabilities. Over-reliance will reduce users’ knowledge and mental capabilities, causing all sorts of issues in navigating the world due to under-education.

    Just like many past tools and technologies, AI is both a gift and a burden; it can both extend us, and hinder us. Which one of these it falls towards depends on the users’ modes of use.

  • Patience and Long Projects

    Last year, I read Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. It is a wonderful, realistic perspective on time and time management. One thing that resonated with me was his chapter on patience and the loss of the ability to carry out longer projects — to really stick with them for the time they need to come into being.

    I have personally found it difficult at times to sustain a project, or to continue feeling engaged with what I am doing if it is a longer commitment. Part of this difficulty is that my primary motivation for being in the studio has been to transform a work in progress into a completed track, rather than solely focusing on the process of writing music. In other words, the purpose of being in the studio is to attain something in the future, as opposed to finding a fulfilling experience in the present moment.

    This relates to notions of mindfulness, internal motivation, flow states, and delayed gratification, and I believe the ability to carry out fulfilling work lies in finding a balance between these factors. This would entail doing creative work that is still working towards a future goal, but is also engaging in the present moment, and ticks all the boxes for facilitating states of flow.

    I remember a while back seeing a post somewhere on social media of yet another piece of software being hailed as the thing that will give producers the ability to pump out full tracks in minutes, or something along the lines of this. What I do remember clearly, though, is the top comment on it: “What’s the rush?” I found this perfectly summed up an issue with how music production is marketed, but also how creativity itself is marketed or valued. There is such a focus on the quantity of work, rather than the quality of work.

    I believe that what is more important is for composers, producers, and anyone else involved in creative work to cultivate the patience required to allow projects to come into fruition. Sometimes pieces of music need to be sat with or shelved for weeks, months, or even years before their issues and potential ways to elevate them reveal themselves. If producers only aim to create many, many tracks as fast as possible, they lose sight of the importance of the ability to slowly chip away at a project.

    I have felt this with my own creative work, but I have also seen it in the context of my education. Sometimes it has taken me weeks to fully grasp a concept I have been studying. I always feel that there is no way that the process could have been sped up: it often simply needs to take weeks or months. The idea that I could learn something and it will immediately click is unrealistic — it needs to circulate in my thoughts, my subconscious, and coalesce with my prior knowledge before reaching the point when it locks in and I understand it. It simply needs to take time and cannot be rushed. This is why I’ve always been against book summaries and ‘gists’; ideas require time and immersion to properly take root, something a book can provide, but a quick summary cannot.

    This points to two perspectives of the goals of studio work: should the goal be to spend 3 hours in the studio, or to complete a project? Of course, it should be something in between these: probably to spend 3 hours on the project. The point is to consider whether there is too much of an emphasis on leaving the studio with a finished product, or simply to have spent the time on creative work.

    The results of these considerations concern the deadlines imposed on a piece. “Spend three hours on the project” is a goal that doesn’t yet set an arbitrary deadline. If the goal is to come out of the studio with a full track, this sets a deadline of 3 hours on the piece. This will inevitably limit the scope of the piece. I believe that deadlines are extremely useful, but should not be applied to a project until its possible end shape is clear to the composer. In this way, the composer knows what the product could look like as a finished product, judges how long it might take to get it to that level, then creates the deadline.

    I have tried various creative challenges aimed at these two approaches: write for 3 hours every day for two weeks, and write a piece of music a day for two weeks. Personally, I enjoyed the former the most, as the required goal was a fixed time commitment. I couldn’t make those three hours shorter or longer—it was just a three-hour block that I worked within. On the other hand, ‘a piece of music’ could be anything, and I found myself a few days just getting in the studio, recording a little improvisation on the synth, and calling it a day. In the three-hour block, that improvisation would have gotten more layers added to it, been edited, further processed; more work was required due to the nature of the challenge. On some days, the three hours flew by, but on others, it felt like a slog, but I did find it easier to get interested in what I was doing, as I had no choice but to keep writing for the three-hour block, whereas on the track-oriented challenge, I could make the day’s session finish anytime I wanted by calling the track I was working on ‘done’.

    I personally get much of my creative inspiration from authors who create giant series of books — especially fantasy and science fiction epics. The writer’s ability to sit down and chip away at a book is something I find admirable, as it demands the author to acknowledge the fact that this thing they’re working on isn’t going to be finished until well into the future, which means that the gratification from writing “The End” isn’t coming anytime soon.

    So where do they get the gratification from? The act of writing itself—the time spent on the creative task, in the creative process. This highlights internal motivation, a key theme in Daniel Pink’s book, Drive, where motivation is derived from doing the act itself, as opposed to an external reward such as a salary or, say, income from the sales of a book.

    In the field of music, I feel that we see this less often today. There are definitely still plenty of artists who spend a lot of time on longer projects, slowly inching towards a finished record of intricate music. But there tends to be a focus on immediacy of output — of staying relevant on people’s feeds.

    We see the ‘long game’ approach to creative works in classical music. The best example is Wagner’s Ring Cycle — a massive cycle of operas spanning 15 hours of music, which took the composer 26 years to write.

    To me, this type of prolonged creative process requires patience, internal motivation, and regular creative work, while also keeping an eye on the broader picture: working on the trees (the daily work in the studio) without losing sight of the forest (the broader body of work you’re creating, and the reason why you’re creating the work). I often wonder if relevance worth sacrificing in order to create truly creative work? And I often lean towards yes.

  • Balancing Structure and Variation in the Creative Process

    Desired Output vs. Conventional Structure

    When I’ve recently sat down to write music, I’ve been more drawn towards ambient, experimental, and spatial work. It’s difficult for me to pin down exactly the type of music I’d like to be writing, but I have found that I’ve been avoiding dance music, and popular music approaches recently — trending styles with conventional popular structures. To me, this music is often about trying to match something that has come before. I’ve found myself interested in exploring approaches to music that are new and haven’t been explored before, and I often want to actively avoid conventions where possible.

    I remember Daniel Avery mentioning how he is confused to hear people talk about wanting to create sounds that reflect natural sounds and sonic behaviours, as he wants to explore sounds that are impossible, new, and haven’t been heard before. I definitely resonate with this feeling.

    But right now, my creative process feels like it’s in a bit of disarray. Every time I’ve recently sat down, I seem to want to approach composition in a new way. This does align with wanting to push music into new territory, but it also leaves me feeling fairly untethered. There’s huge value in having a process down pat that you can use to make new, wildly variable music, using the same set of tools. I believe it comes from having a process that is rigid enough to offer security, but flexible enough to facilitate a diverse and experimental output.

    The Creative Tension

    I think that’s part of the tension: I’m always trying to find the balance of established structure in the creative process, and abandoning conventions in the music itself.

    An established structure acts as a foundation. If I ever get lost, I can fall back on it and use it for guidance. I know which synths to use for certain applications, or which plugins to use for specific processing methods. I’d really like that: having, say, a single plugin for a distortion pedal, or a single plugin for a tape emulation. That way, whenever I want distortion or tape emulation, I know exactly where to go. At the same time, this bank of equipment (and creative techniques) must have the potential to create experimental music, absent of conventional structures.

    Defining the Creative Process

    What actually is the creative process? To me, it’s a collection of procedures, techniques, and equipment/technologies.

    Procedures are linear processes I move through to fulfil certain tasks. Techniques are the creative, often signature ways of carrying out those procedures. And finally, equipment/technologies are the tools (DAWs, specific plugins, modulators) required to execute them.

    The creative process is almost fractal in nature: micro-techniques nested within macro-procedures. Take, for example, creating a layer of interesting glitchy material. I go through an overarching procedure: setting up the material, routing it to an auxiliary channel, loading a complex processing chain, recording the output, chopping up the resulting recording, isolating the parts that resonate with me, and then further processing them through pitch shifting and time stretching. That whole sequence is a procedure, but the specific choices I make define my technique. Another composer would have an entirely different set of techniques — and use a set of different tools — to carry out their procedure of creating a layer of interesting glitchy material. A single piece might have a hundred of these procedures embedded within it, from long, extensive sequences of actions to concise procedures for things such as isolating transients in a sound.

    Rigidity; Avoiding Dogmatism

    It’s worth considering the results of rigidity in the creative process. If it’s very rigid, and the composer knows exactly what to do step-by-step — which rhythms to use, which synths to use — the composer will feel secure, but the piece will sound similar to their last one. But if the process is completely unstructured, the composer may feel lost, and each piece will sound wildly different.

    The essential task is finding that balance: the process should have enough rigidity to allow the composer to feel somewhat secure and have options for what to do next, but not so much rigidity that the resulting works are predictable. Variation — and its ability to create unexpected outcomes — can be applied to technologies, techniques, and procedures alike.

    To me, it’s similar to the move of certain DAWs to create ‘ranges’ in parameters, rather than fixed values. In Live, you can fix a velocity range that each note will play at each time it is triggered, creating a subtle sense of randomness in the sound. In Bitwig, you can create a range that an automated parameter will sit at, rather than a fixed value. This ability of establishing ranges rather than fixed values allows for some structure, but offers the possibility for variation each time the track is played. Applying this to the creative process, there is structure and security, but the possibility for variation each time the creative process is undertaken.

    My ideal process is one that results in works that do not align with conventional structures. If you make music based on techniques you’ve heard artists use, your music may align with their sound. This is completely fine early on in a career, as you develop your skill set, but at a certain point, departing from these conventions allow for a unique, personal voice to emerge. You have to allow yourself to develop and evolve the techniques you learn and mimic, to embed them in your own process — to adapt them; to break them into their fundamental components and vary these. Techniques can be built upon others, merging to create entirely new ones, akin to how technologies evolve. I believe it’s worth being aware of the true nature of techniques, and how adapting them can open us up to entirely new ways of working and entirely new types of creative outcomes. I think we’re all aware of techniques, and can talk about them well, but it’s interesting to really unpack them and get to their essence — understanding how they’re similar to technologies; how they relate to craftsmanship; how they construct our own unique ways of doing things.

  • Reading x like a text

    Something I’ve been interested in for a while is the ways that we interpret our inputs; the way we make sense of what we’re observing and experiencing. This is very connected to semiotics and representation. Perhaps my interest in it is a result of being educated in a creative arts institution like the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, and tending to have a fairly ‘artistic’ lens. I don’t mean that as a brag — I’m merely pointing out that I have tended to see the world as, or in terms of, art and representation.

    Representation to me is the core of the arts. It’s the way that certain pieces of art and creative media represent certain meanings that we apply to our own lives and experiences. Certain characters within texts resonate with us differently than the next audience member, because we relate to them differently; we might have gone through similar experiences to what they’re going through, and we’re intuitively comparing what they’re doing to what we did or would do. For another audience member, that character’s experience might be completely foreign, and there’s far less of a way to relate to them. We see a tree in the world, but to some, a tree represents concepts like growth, branching, and lineage. A tree is really just a tree, but to the beholder, it can mean more. A painting of a tree is just a series of lines, shapes, textures and colours. But that painting represents a real-world tree, which in turn represents growth, branching, and lineage. This is the fundamental experience of experiencing art.

    The world and everything around it can similarly be read like a text. So-called ordinary things come to represent something for us. This is the domain of semiotics, where images, sounds, words, stand in for and link to other things, either real-world objects, or abstract concepts. For example, the word ‘dog’, consisting of the squiggles ‘d’, ‘o’, and ‘g’, represents to English-speaking people our furry little animal friends. But simultaneously, that furry friend can represent play, joy, vitality, curiosity, or companionship, depending on its behaviours. This is the same experience as above, of observing a piece of art. But the same processes exist outside of the world of art — we do them all day long, and it’s at the core of human creativity.

    We can apply this to broader phenomena. What does the gradual move towards isolating technologies such as noise-cancelling headphones say about us? That we don’t enjoy the company of strangers? What about the efforts of tech giants to build social media platforms that pit us against each other, causing massive engagement, increasing revenue from advertisements? That the powerful in our culture prioritise revenue over the wellbeing and cohesion of the social fabric?

    The same applies for reading historical artistic movements. In the late 40s, composer-engineer, Pierre Schaeffer pioneered Musique Concrète, a new compositional method based entirely on recorded sounds — fragments of everyday life, musical instruments — manipulated through tape editing and playback. Around the same period, in Cologne, German composers such as Herbert Eimert and Karlheinz Stockhausen developed Elektronische Musik, built exclusively from electronically generated tones. What do these approaches mean? The two schools represent contrasting philosophies of sound: the empirical and phenomenological (building from the concrete) versus the rational and synthetic (building from the abstract). In 1956, Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge united the two approaches, combining a boy’s recorded voice with electronic tones in a single composition. What does this mean? The fusion can be read as a collapse of mid-century dogmatism — an early sign of the move toward pluralism and post-modern openness in the arts, where boundaries between methods and materials were no longer seen as absolute.

    This process of drawing conclusions about events — of ‘reading’ history in particular ways, and using history as evidence for certain conclusions — is a difficult skill to develop. However, I believe it’s fundamentally creative work. Perhaps more precisely, it’s a combination of creativity and critical thinking. It entails making connections between disparate phenomena and justifying the conclusions critically. Reading historical events like a text and drawing creative conclusions, is a very similar — if not the same — process as drawing interpretations of pieces of art. It all involves considering what things mean; what can be made of them; what they represent.

    It’s the process for any interpretation of data. Researchers go through it when analysing interview responses or quantitative statistical data. It’s all ‘read’; it’s the researcher’s role to make meaning of these forms of data, in the same way that it’s the audience member’s task to make meaning of the art they observe. (Of course, I’m referring here to the more active approach to cultural consumption, rather than the passive ‘lean back’ consumption that is encouraged by streaming platforms.)

    ***

    This process is one I teach my students. Consider these two images that represent disabled people in our society. These are universal symbols these days, and you find them in most public settings. In my Cultural Studies class, I get the students to compare the two images, looking at what they mean.

    Figure 1 – the passive disability icon

    Figure 2 – the active disability icon

    In my Cultural Studies class, I get the students to compare the two images, looking at what they mean. Compared to the first image, the second is far more active; it pairs disabled people with a representation of agency. Once the meanings of the images have been established, I ask what it means that people in our society designed this second image. Perhaps it means that parts of our society value the wellbeing of disabled people, and would like to recognise their agency. Perhaps it means that parts of our society want to break the stigma of disabled people as entirely incapable. What does this mean? Perhaps it highlights that our society values inclusion and the wellbeing of members of society, representing a streak of altruism.

    ***

    Getting students to really see the world around them and think about what it all means, in my opinion, is a crucial part of their education. While the above example relates to social justice, these sorts of exercises develop the students’ capacity more broadly for creative and critical thinking. It really brings them to the question, ‘What does it all mean?’ I think the more we can strive to answer that question, the less confusion will be in society, and the more connection we will have with the world around us, and the people living within it.

  • Fitness Trackers Separate Us From Our Bodies

    My Time and Issues With Fitness Trackers

    I recently ditched my fitness trackers – my Garmin watch and an Oura ring. They started to feel a little toxic, and were bringing me down quite a bit. Towards the end of their use, I began to think about whether the devices were acting as the carrot or the stick. Most of the platforms are set up to be carrots – “motivating” the user to complete challenges, compete with friends, and meet goals for step counts, sleep scores, and stress levels. For some, these might be great incentives to achieve these things, and any failures of them aren’t really dwelt upon. For others, and I am putting myself in this group, they can act as standards that must be met each day. If I fail to meet them, I can feel like I’ve somehow let someone down (I’m not sure if it’s myself or the fitness tracker platform). This constant striving to meet these goals can feel exhausting. Chasing the carrot begins to feel like being hit with the stick; a desperate shuffling along to tick off all the requirements in order to say I’ve had a ‘successful’ or ‘healthy’ day.

    I think the strangest and most ironic outcome of fitness trackers is the stress they cause around sleeping. The devices measure your sleep and often give you a score out of 100. I was usually hitting around 80+ most nights – often in the 90s. But any time I didn’t land in that ballpark, I felt like I’d somehow done something bad – like I’d really screwed up. The outcome of this would simply be moved to the following night, where I would need to make up for the terrible sleep score. On these nights, I would really aim for 90+. But how do you actually make yourself have a good sleep? Consecutive sub-80 scores would compound a feeling of dread, as I thought about the severe damage I must be doing, or the way that I won’t be ‘functioning at my peak level’. What this would accumulate to is the ridiculous situation of lying awake in bed, feeling stressed about not being able to fall asleep, fearing that I would wake up with a low sleep score. I can’t fall asleep because of the stress of not being able to fall asleep. My low sleep score is caused by my fear of getting a low sleep score.

    So, I thought about ways to ‘healthily’ work with these fitness trackers. I tried committing to only checking it once a day. I tried committing to not checking it when I woke up. I thought about only checking it every 3 months to see longer trends rather than a day-by-day increase or decrease of my fitness levels and various scores. I then finally resorted to deleting the apps altogether, and to just have the data uploaded to the platforms through Wi-Fi. But then I thought, why on Earth am I even wearing the device if I’m not actually going to look at the data? So I’ve resorted to taking off the devices altogether and instead wear a normal dumbwatch.

    Fitness Trackers and Our Bodies

    Fitness trackers have a way of separating us from our own bodies. They tell us narratives about our bodies and our health that can contradict our own feelings we have from within them. There have been times when I wake up feeling refreshed, but check the sleep score and see, say, 70/100. I then start to think “you know what, I do actually feel pretty drowsy and unrefreshed”. The opposite is also true; I wake up feeling drowsy and unrefreshed, only to see a sleep score of 90, making me consider whether in fact I do feel refreshed and well slept. These technologies make us second guess our own sense of our bodies. They make our bodies something to be read and analysed, rather than felt from within. They cause a strange sensory dissonance, separating us from how we feel, and what a device tells us about ourselves. I’m not necessarily saying that the fitness trackers are inaccurate in their readings – in fact, I believe their accuracy is beside the point. In other words, I’m not saying there is a discrepancy between what is actually the case, and what is represented in the data. Instead, I’m drawing attention to the separation between what is felt from within the body and what is read from the analysis of the body. And, importantly, I feel that often, what is read and analysed is seen as more accurate, or a more authoritative source of information about our own bodies.

    TV Buddha, 1976 – Nam June Paik

    These sorts of strange, redundant cycles, catastrophes and feedback loops are a common feature of modern existence. These technologies are sold to us as ‘essential’; in order to reach ‘maximum potential’, or to enrich existence in some way, we must adopt them. But after sustained use, we find that in fact, they are part of, or the very cause of, the problem. This is the case for social media, being framed as the great connector while actually driving us apart. It’s the case for fitness trackers promising good health but instead causing obsession and higher stress. These are two examples of technologies of alienation – alienation from others, and alienation from ourselves.

    Technology companies often present their products as a form of ‘help’ – whether by promising to keep us social, improve our health, or, in the case of financial services, make purchases more convenient. However, can these outcomes truly be considered ‘help’? Making it easier for someone to spend their money isn’t really helping them; it’s helping companies get into the pockets of their customers. I think it’s important to remain critical of the technologies we use, questioning their promises and the real consequences of their adoption.

    Leaving the fitness trackers behind led me to rely on my own sense of my body to get an idea of how I was feeling, how I slept, how stressed I was, how active I’ve been. It turns out I don’t need a device to tell me how ready I am for the day; I can feel that pretty well by myself. Who would have thought!? (My partner, who has been saying this for over a year now while I’ve been complaining about the trackers, rolls her eyes.)

  • The “Right” Way to Approach Education

    What is the right way to approach education?

    This question might be approached by another question, “What is a well-trained person?” In today’s culture, we ask a person to think about what they want to do as their future career, get educated within that particular field, and mostly disregard everything else. The outcome of this is the person is fairly specialised and competitive in the job market. It is interesting to note the difference between this approach and that of a liberal education, or a liberal arts degree. This approach to education aims to cultivate a more well-rounded understanding of the world, culture, art, history, politics and philosophy. These things might not set the graduate up to be the most ‘valuable’ person in the job market, unless they ‘use it’ to produce some profitable product like a bestselling book. But it will give the student a better understanding of the world. They’ll have far less tunnel-vision on one particular area.

    In today’s society there is more value placed on someone who is specialised in a field attached to a profitable industry – resulting in an emphasis on science, engineering and technical training – than someone who has a well-rounded liberal education. Which is “better”? Well, it depends who you ask, which means what is the “right” way to do education is subjective. An interesting thing to bring into this exploration is how the dominant, ruling class are able to influence public perception out of their self-interest. While being an entirely separate discussion, it’s important to note that “power” is wielded here not through physical force, but through the ability to establish what is “right” in the public mind, or even just how things simply are. So what is the “right” way to be educated will be deemed by the most powerful portion of our society. In the 21st century, these are the contemporary leading capitalists of our time. This class wields the power to deem what is the “right” way of doing things – including the approach to education.

    Valuable Degrees

    How about a liberal education? Students who have done or are doing these sorts of degrees may have faced the question, “What will you do with that?” This stems from the value of utility and efficiency in our modern society: everything that has been achieved through an intense amount of work must be put to some use – it must play a part of a broader plan, otherwise it is wasted work. And sure, I think this makes some sense, but I think what is important is that we realise that there are different perspectives of “use”. On one hand, some believe a graduate should “use” their degree to make themselves more competitive in the job market. In this way, if the degree doesn’t facilitate getting the graduate a job, it was a waste of time. On the other hand, another graduate can use their degree every day by understanding the world around them and its people to a greater degree than most others, regardless of whether they use the degree to get a job.

    To many, the point of education is not to build an understanding of the world, themselves, those around them, or to teach them how to think independently and critically. Instead, it is to prime them for the next, most important stage of their life: their career. Why is this stage of our lives seen as the most important, that requires such intense training to prepare for? Some might think ‘of course it is the most important stage’. But really think about that for a second: We are wise monkeys, on a floating rock in the vast nothingness. We are surrounded by other wise monkeys, warmed each day by an enormous, ever-burning space ball. We can roam this incredible planet with its many landscapes, climates, mountains, and other natural phenomena. We can explore others, ourselves, the world we live on, and beyond. And yet the thing that we prioritise the most, out of all of this incredible chaos, is that monolithic cultural construct: our professional career.

    The Career and Leisure

    Whoever made this part of our lives the most important? Again, look to the capitalist ruling class. Why would they ever want us thinking otherwise? If the masses felt that life should be entirely about leisure – not in the sense of just constant partying and holidaying (though, why not?), but of contemplation, exploration, debate and reflection – the first thing to collapse would be the economy – the lifeblood of capitalists’ power.

    The ruling class have changed the way that we see leisure in society. Leisure is seen as ‘lazy’, the actions of a ‘dropkick’, ‘slobbish’, and (look deeply at this word) ‘unproductive’. Leisure is not seen as a time of inner reflection, contemplation, getting to ‘know thyself’, the synthesis of wisdom, connection with others and the sharing of ideas, as it was in Ancient Greece. We now sometimes phrase leisure as “time off”. But this defines it by what it is not: time on. If instead leisure was considered as time on, the world as we know it would cease to exist; the economies, on their current foundations, would collapse.

    If leisure was forced onto us, however, we could get a glimpse of this. This sort of happened in 2020 – 2021, during the COVID lockdowns. I personally experienced something interesting during this time (and I do recognise the privilege of experiencing this). Because the world was put on hold, the fundamental thing I felt was a lack of competition. It was as though I had been running in a race my entire life, and suddenly every competitor had been given a break. The break was nice, but the feeling like we weren’t all racing each other was nicer. Of course, this experience was far from universal – while some found respite, others faced increased economic insecurity, job loss, and isolation. The pandemic exposed deep inequalities in how we experience ‘time off,’ revealing that for many, stepping out of competition was not beneficial, but in fact another layer of the crisis. But, the isolation felt by most during this time was an outcome of not being able to have contact with others. And so instead of this situation, we must consider what a world would be like if the isolation component of lockdown didn’t exist, where people were economically secure, but this unending competition didn’t exist. What if our society valued leisure in the same way that we value work, if not more? Oliver Burkeman describes the idea of the “productivity debt” that some of us feel we wake up to each day – having to do a certain amount of things that day in order to justify our existence. Why can’t we just be? Why are we instead woken into this original sin that we then have to claw our way out of by the end of the day, lest we feel we have been “unproductive”, that we didn’t contribute anything.

    The engine of all of this is the messages we see in our culture and have internalised within us. One fundamental narrative of our culture is that of ambition; of “fulfilling our true potential”. Some of our most popular media tell this story, of a character with vast amounts of ambition, a sense that they are capable of more than they are able to produce. (Again, take note of the core words of that theme: “more” and “produce”). We may improve – in fact, we will improve – if we follow the path ahead to master some skill. But the core issue is that we feel that we must follow that path, and not following the path is a “waste” of our potential – an inefficient use of our potential interests and talents. In other forms of media, we see the detrimental effects of this ambition – notably in The Bear and Whiplash – where important features of our lives can fall apart in our quest to be the best in our field, to fulfil our potential, to ‘make it’. Our relationships with ourselves, those who love us, and the world around us, all become neglected and are pushed to the side. Those very things that make us human, that may be studied in a liberal arts degree, are deemed as unsubstantial, unnecessary, put on the back-burner, in order to pursue excellence in our specialty.

    The Reality

    I’m now 32, and I have a very different perspective of those undertaking a literature, philosophy or humanities degree than I used to have. I find I am very jealous.

    Though, I do remember the time after completing my degrees when I was struggling to find a job in my field (music), and feeling like I had utterly wasted my time studying: nine years of my life. The message I felt at this time was “Your degree isn’t able to get you a job; it must have been a waste of time”. This thought and its associated feeling was so horrifying to me. I felt embarrassed to tell people that I had received a degree in music of all things. Not only that, but I couldn’t even say I studied an instrument – I had studied composition.

    For someone in their 20s, who has just finished their degree, facing that situation of being unable to get a job with their degree, it’s understandable that it can feel like it was a waste, like you’ve made the wrong decision to do that degree. It’s easy for me to say to you that “Your job is not the most important thing – what’s important is that you’ve cultivated an awareness of the world and our civilisation that plenty of others will never have”. But that will do little to tame the feeling of inadequacy. This inadequacy, though, may come from within yourself, it may come from your parents or teachers. But someone gave it to you, them, and everyone else. It stems from the messages that permeate through our society, and that bind our culture. These messages come from those who wield the most power in our society. Those who have the ability to say what is “right”; what degrees are “best”, what degrees are “a waste of time”, what professions (and thus, which people in society) are “valuable”, and what lifestyles are “lazy”. It is the ideology we wade through every day – that web of understandings and messages about what is simply the way things are. Once you understand these things, once you step outside of the cave, your awareness of them gives you power over them.

    The most ironic thing of all, is that the people most equipped to be aware of this state of things are those with a liberal education.