Authors lead odd lives. Most of what people know of us we control through blog posts and books. Behind the scenes things are different. As I wait for Wednesday’s launch of The Ghost of My Father, my sixth book, it’s a strange and taxing experience.
Psychologically this is the hardest time. I have years invested in this project, but before launch there are no rewards. Right now is the widest gap between the effort I put in and any response (which don’t exist yet). It’s also clear now how writing and marketing are different things, but a successful book demands strength in both.
If you wonder what authors do during this period here’s a list.
The 7 things authors do before their book launches:
Exchanging limbs / future offspring to journalists and bloggers in exchange for reviews of the book
Figuring out how to ask for marketing help from friends and colleagues without being “annoying author friend”
Making backup plans for changing identity via the Author Protection Program (APP), similar to the Witness Protection Program, but for writers of criminally bad works.
And the best, but hardest, answer: Start work on the next book. Nothing can ever really stop a writer from writing.
I hope that satisfies your curiosity. Ask a question and I’ll answer.
Are you an author? What did you do during this odd period of time? Leave a comment.
The best idea is to have a donation box for people to donate pairs of pants (and I’ll give them a free drink or a copy of the book).
Wanted: I’m hoping to find a volunteer from a local charity who can attend the party and man the donation box. It’d be nice exposure for your charity and of course you’re likely to leave with some nice pants to donate to your cause.
If you’re interested, or know someone who might be, leave a comment or contact me.
Note: this is changing quickly and the further you go into the future, the less stable things are. I’ll update this page as details finalize, including details for how to sign up to attend public lectures.
If you search on the term the future of work you find plenty of slop. There is no more well worn cliche in any field that people who slap “the future of <insert thing many people are interested in>” onto the end of something, hoping to trick more flies to their sour, uninspired honey. I put the phrase in the subtitle of my new book reluctantly, only after making sure I could justify its use in the book itself (something I explain in the introduction).
Think for a moment on just how many different kinds of work there are in the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd worlds on our planet. Work with hands. Work with danger. Work that has to be found every day. Wow.
At a grand scale you must admit the future of these diverse jobs must be different. Some will:
Grow in number
Shrink in number, or disappear completely
Will improve in quality
Will decline
This means whenever someone uses the singular, unframed, phrase “future of work” they really mean “the future of the kind of work I do or is done by people I know” which is a far narrower topic. It’s big business to sell things to the wealthiest kinds of workers, distorting impressions of what most work on planet earth looks like.
Now of course it’s hard to know how many of these vaguely categorized industry and service jobs involve sitting at a desk with a computer all day (anyone know a better data source?), but this gives a basic sense of how well divided the working world truly is. The latest software and gadgets mean little towards productivity for much of the working world.
While the trends in the U.S. are for many labor intensive jobs to move elsewhere (the number of globalized workers, or workers who do things for export, was 900 million in 2005, up 400% from 1980), those jobs still exist and those workers have a very different working future than the jobs that stay here.
Today is labor day: Take a second to think about all the different kinds of labor there are on earth and how grateful you should be about the kind you have, or that you have employment at all.
I’ve been waiting 3 years for The Year Without Pants to launch and I can’t wait any longer. For the next 17 days I’ll be posting at least once a day.
I have two four reasons.
Reason one: These sorts of stunts rarely excite me as a reader, but as a writer I can tell you one of the strangest parts of the entire enterprise of writing books with publishers is the waiting. And the waiting. And then after the waiting, the psychological challenge of staying excited about a book finished months earlier (and in this case about events that took place even longer ago). I can use a fun way to pass some time.
Reason two: One of the key themes of the book is about experiments and how important they are to just about anything we want to pursue as adults in life. I’ve never done a post-a-day stunt before (starting The Daily Post doesn’t count), and I figure why not. Lets see what happens.
Reason three: The way I blog I often have dozens of draft posts in different states of completion. It’s time to kick some of these clingy adolescent missives out into the world.
Reason four: Maybe you forgot who I am. I’m that Berkun guy? Who wrote that thing you loved and forwarded to you teammates and friends? Well I’m back with book #5!
For every book I do something different for PR and marketing. For The Year Without Pants (pre-order now), it’s a film. To help kick off our Sept. 17th book launch, we’re making a little movie.
I hired Stephan Gray of Gray Matter Productions, maker of music videos for Macklemore and others, to create a short promo film for the book. We came up with a few ideas, and came up with a story about the nightmare of cubicle life.
Here are some behind the scenes photos from the shoot last week.
He’s hard at work on finishing up the project and we’ll post it when it’s ready. Stay tuned.
Three magic words for people who create things are: don’t be precious.
Being precious means you’re behaving as if the draft, the sketch, the idea you’re working on is the most important thing in the history of the universe. It means you’ve lost perspective and can’t see the work objectively anymore. When you treat a work in progress too preciously, you trade your talents for fears. You become conservative, suppressing the courage required to make the tough choices that will resolve the work’s problems and let you finish. If you fear that your next decision will ruin the work, you are being precious.
When a young writer is struggling to finish a book, or a painter wrestling with an incomplete painting, wisdom would say “don’t be precious.” If you love your craft there are an infinity of projects in your future. There will be other chapters. There will be other canvases and other songs. Perfection is a prison and a self-made one. Whatever you’re making, it doesn’t have to be perfect. Perfection is an illusion.
Obsessing about every little choice is a sure fire way to prevent great work from happening. Try a bold choice. Put the beginning at the end, or the top at the bottom. Blow your work up into jagged pieces and put them back together. You might just find this opens doors you didn’t even know were there. If you’re too precious you miss the hundreds of big choices that might reveal the path to completion, or convince you the project is a puzzle that needs to be abandoned for a time. But if you spin your wheels faster and faster on smaller and smaller details, you’ll never move anywhere. You’ll never call anything finished, denying yourself the essential experience of looking back from a distance and learning from what you’ve already made.
Some Buddhist monks make mandalas, intricate paintings made from colored grains of sand. When completed the mandalas are destroyed. These monks make, and destroy, these wondrous works to remind themselves not to be too precious, and not only about their works of art, but about life itself. This isn’t an excuse not to work hard, or to not strive for greatness. Mandala’s take skill and patience to create. Instead it’s a recognition that while your work might mean everything to you in the moment, in the grand scheme of your career, your life, and the universe itself, it’s just another thing that will someday fade away.
Of course it is important to strive for greatness. You should care deeply about people and ideas that matter to you. To make good things requires intense effort and practice. There’s a long history of masters, from Michelangelo to Twyla Tharp to Kubrick (whose film 2001 is pictured above), who obsessed about the smallest details of their works and demanded the best from everyone who worked with them. In some ways they were very precious indeed. But they didn’t let those ambitions stop them from finishing their works: if they stayed stuck in their obsession for detail forever on a single project we wouldn’t know their names. Productive masters know how to be both intimate with and distant from their own work and we all need to learn the same flexibility.
Say “don’t be precious” to yourself when you’re stuck. Let your obsession go, or blow it up into fun sized pieces and let the chips fall where they may. Move on, learn, and repeat. You’re a creator, which means you can make nothing into something whenever you want. There are infinite possible projects ahead in your career, but only if you move past the one you are making far too precious now.
[I learned about not being precious from the artist, and my friend, Teresa Brazen]
Any tips for how a manager can “level the communication playing field” between technical and non-technical stakeholders within project teams so the team can better communicate and “get stuff done”?
It’s fun to get a project management question. Its been awhile. It used to be these were the only questions I ever got.
The existence of multiple people who hold the stakes (meaning money, not stakes that go in the ground , nor the ones that are tasty to eat) means every major decision is more complex, not less. Even if you love all of your stakeholders the addition of each one makes progress slower, not faster.
The specific rub in this scenario is translation. If one stakeholder spoke only German and the other only Esperanto it’d be obvious you need to find one person who can speak both fluently before you’d attempt anything. But with domain differences like technical or business knowledge, we presume basic English is sufficient. It isn’t.
Good project leaders, and consultants, are versed in many domains. They can translate between the designer, the engineer, the business analyst and the executive, each of which demands a different frame of thinking. They also see how tradeoffs between domains are required for the project to succeed. Perhaps most importantly they known their limitations: sometimes they need a better translation, or translator, and will pause the proceedings until one is found.
You need four things when dealing with diverse stakeholders:
A shared goal. It takes effort to translate. If all the stakeholders can’t see the goal they all share, they’ll defend their turf and their biases, tanking the project. At the beginning any project leader must spend time defining shared goals that everyone will benefit from achieving. Then when things get frustrating, you can remind everyone of the goals they share and why it’s worth the effort. If there is no single shared goal among stakeholders success is improbable.
Empathy means wanting to understand what the other person is trying to say and helping them clarify it, even if it’s inconvenient. It takes empathy to admit that simply because the other person know’s less than you about writing code or closing deals, it doesn’t mean they’re any less smart or their ideas are any worse. It’s up to the leader to demonstrate the value of all the different perspectives.
Patience is what you must offer, even to people who know less than you, about your expertise. In life, the smarter you are, the more time you will spend with people who know less than you, therefore it’s wise to develop patience. If you are a genius who is continually surprised by how stupid everyone is, how smart can you be? Often in a career you will work for people, bosses or clients, who know far less than you and how you deal with that gap will define your success or failure.
Prevention/Recovery from communication breakdowns. Good teams prevent and recover from communication mistakes. They avoid the temptations of wishful thinking, or pretending not to notice someone else’s wishful thinking. Get in the habit of asking clarifying questions like “I think you mean X. is that right? Or did you mean Y?” It’s a godsend. As is the companion of reflection: “I think I understand. Let me explain the whole thing and you tell me if I have it right.” In a room full of good communicators you’ll hear people clarifying and reflecting often. It’s a sign everyone sees the traps and wants everyone to avoid them.
Do you wrestle with many stakes, and their holders? What say you?
Examples – 2 lanes of checkout on a busy day. Automated parking systems that break down with no backup. Sitting in traffic for over an hour each way to get to work. It’s madness yet we accept it as the way things are.
The easy answer is we’re lazy. It takes energy to reject a system, especially if it’s a complex system you do not control. Sitting in traffic is not an active choice, it’s a passive decision that comes with the choices for where to live and work. Like waiting in a long line, it’s far simpler psychologically to plod along with your head down, than to challenge the dozens of people in front of you who may have no objections to lines at all, or worse, diverging ideas for what the alternatives might be. It takes courage to challenge a system and wisdom to improve it, a rare combination.
The depressing answer is some systems are difficult, or impossible, to change. Even if you were sufficiently motivated, problems like traffic operate on a large enough scale, with multiple conflicting objectives, that it might not be solvable. Certainly not without the cooperation of many other people, some of whom benefit from the inefficiencies you find frustrating (e.g. the land developers who profited by overpopulating an area).
For all frustrating systems ask: Who benefits (Cui Bono)? That is the first step to understanding how a system truly works. There are always people who benefit more from a system staying the way it is, and as long as they are in power nothing will change. Any hope of improving a system starts with understanding the reasons forces are actively protecting the status quo.
The stoic answer is that all systems are designed, and all designs are tradeoffs. They are good for some things and bad for others. There is no perfect system, and even if there were, as soon as the world changed in a significant way the same elements that made the system seem perfect would suddenly become a frustration. Gas powered cars seemed a wonderful idea in 1925, before anyone could imagine global warming, rush hour traffic, or fatalities from drivers distracted by text messages on their phones.
The relative answer is: bad compared to what? We naturally take good things for granted since there are evolutionary advantages to constantly seeking to improve one’s situation. But for any bad system, go back in time. What was that system like 10, 20, 50, 100, 500 years ago? In some ways things will seem better, but in many ways that older system will seem worse. It’s better to wait a few minutes in poorly managed checkout lines at the grocery store, than to hunt and gather all day long with little guarantee of having enough to eat.
The positive answer is that many people do reject bad systems. They make sacrifices to give themselves the power to avoid systems they find distasteful. With sufficient motivation and the willingness to make tradeoffs, many modern frustrations can be avoided or minimized. For deeper systems, they protest in public to draw attention to how a system is failing. They complain to representatives in the system and try to influence them to prioritize change.
What “bad” system bothers you the most? Leave a comment.
Finally a business book with something new to say. Generally I get sent a lot of books, skim through them, and say “sounds just like Tom Peters, or Guy Kawasaki, or Seth Godin, or or or…. The book didn’t disappoint. Scott’s first-person view gives us an insider look at how a modern startup works. Highly recommended.”
By converting myths into facts, you’ll improve your thinking about whether remote work is for you or not.
Not all remote work is the same. Some companies, like Automattic, are primarily distributed, meaning nearly all employees work remotely (here’s a list of primarily distributed companies). Most companies are primarily centralized, with most employees occupying the same central office space and a minority working remotely. There is a spectrum of distribution and you can find organizations with 50/50 or 25/75 or 75/25 splits of where people work. Each presents different challenges.
Remote work doesn’t necessarily mean working from home. Working from home is one kind of remote work. Many remote workers work in shared coworking spaces, replicating many of the social benefits of an office without the stressful commute. Others find productivity in coffee-shops or libraries. The powerful benefit of remote work is it empowers employees to find for themselves where and how to be most productive instead of presuming management knows best for every individual.
Some work is easier, or harder, to do remotely. You won’t find restaurants or construction crews that are 100% distributed: the physical nature of the work makes this impossible. The more autonomy workers have, and the clearer the goals of the work are, the easier it is for remote workers to perform well. Customer support work is a common remote work role at companies that don’t allow remote work generally, since the work is direct interaction with customers, not coworkers. But surprisingly, highly collaborative work like software development is a common type of remote work, and most of the primarily distributed companies I’ve found are software companies.
When you work primarily in email and web browsers, you’re nearly a remote worker. Consider how little of your time in a physical office is spent interacting with co-workers without a computer. Much of modern office work is is done through technology, which could be done from anywhere. In this light remote work isn’t so strange.
The primary challenges are cultural. Clearly some organizations have found success with remote work and others have struggled. The main challenges are 1) management culture’s willingness to delegate control over workplace choice to employees and 2) employees collective choice to take advantage of, and not to abuse, that granted power. The notion of Results Only Work, where employees are evaluated primarily on performance, should be indifferent to many superficial factors, including where the work was done. Why does it matter if you did your work down the hall, or from your basement, if the quality of the work was the same in every way? It shouldn’t.
But it’s clearly not for everyone. Work can never be one size fits all.Personal preference matters, and some people definitely see their morale decline if they’re not in the same physical space with coworkers (In my poll of 595 readers, most wanted to at least try remote work, but many had strong negative opinions). There are social and psychological advantages to being in the same physical space with the people you’re working with. But rarely will you see companies that promote remote work mandate it. The philosophy of many companies that allow remote workers is employees should be empowered to figure out for themselves how to be most productive, and to support them once they figure it out.
I’ve made my living as a writer in part because of of where I live. The city of Seattle has been an amazing place to be a maker of things, whether it’s books, software or just about anything. There are so many opportunities here and the culture is incredibly supportive of taking risks, making big gets and learning from each other.
It’s always been frustrating however that Seattle’s national reputation is dominated by two things: coffee and rain.
Other major cities like NYC, LA, and Portland have produced short films highlighting what they think makes them special. It’s time for Seattle to step up, and stand up, and express what makes th Emerald city such a great place for people with big ideas.
For the last few months I’ve been working with local filmmaker friends Bryan Zug and Dan McComb on We Make Seattle. As leaders in the creative community, they share my passion for the city, as well as the desire to use our abilities to craft something awesome as a gift back to Seattle itself.
Today we launched the kickstarter campaign for We Make Seattle. If you love Seattle I hope you’ll join in with your support and help us tell the story of our great creative city.
Later this year I’ll be visiting Tokyo for the first time. I’ve always wanted to go to Japan and finally I’ve lined things up for it to happen. Yay.
In doing research and reading up on the city I find, for the first time, I’m overwhelmed. I’m very well traveled, love cities and public transportation, but I’m struggling to figure out what neighborhood to stay in, as well as what to expect in terms of getting around without speaking any Japanese. I’m considering hiring a guide for the first day to accelerate getting over the basics of getting around and how things work.
I don’t need to stay in the center of nightlife, but do love being able to walk to interesting neighborhoods, streets, and restaurants.
If you’re a local or you’ve been there recently, any advice welcome. Thanks.
Here’s a common question about writing memoirs from the mailbag:
I just read a novel I loved and was inspired to start writing a book. And I actually did start.
The problem is the idea I have is very personal, about myself and my family. I think it is very interesting but I wonder what the best way to write about it is? Do I change the names and details to protect those closest to me, who when they read it will no doubt know it’s about them and freak out? Or do I publish under an anonymous name and not tell anyone about it until much later?
– Name withheld by request
It’s up to you as a writer to decide how you want to tell your story and what responsibility you want to take for it. Labeling a work fiction gives a writer the most latitude and the least risk. Labeling it as non-fiction gives a book more authority and has more appeal for some readers, but comes with higher expectations for how responsibly you tell the story. For my book The Ghost of My Father, I chose to stay with non-fiction (See How To Write A Memoir Q&A). I tell my story as I’d tell it to someone I met in person.
The best advice is to write a draft without worrying too much about these issues. Writing a draft is hard enough, and there are few risks if you keep what you write private and secure. You only need to worry about these decisions months from now when you have a complete draft that you think you might want to work towards publishing. At that point you can easily change names, drop or add details, or shape the book to fit whatever constraints you decide are appropriate, including calling the book a work of fiction. Many famous novels were heavily inspired by real life events experienced by their authors.
Here are some common considerations for books projects like yours:
Respect for people: Just because you want to tell the story doesn’t mean your family wants it told. Any relationship is based on trust and to write about personal matters, especially painful ones, and share them with the world is likely be hurtful to everyone involved (It’s easy to find ugly celebrity examples of memoir strife). This has nothing to do with the law, but how much respect you have for the feelings of people in your family. Consider this: you requested to be anonymous, which I honored. Would you offer the same to the people you’re writing about? Would that even be possible if you called it a memoir?
Writing about the past forces you take a side. In How memiorist’s mold the truth writer Acimen offers “Writing about the past is never neutral… What we want is a narrative, not a log; a tale, not a trial. This is why most people write memoirs using the conventions not of history, but of fiction. It’s their revenge against facts that won’t go away.” The desire to tell a good story can lead writers astray, embellishing or even betraying the truth to make for a better story. Creative non-fiction is the term for books that walk the line between journalism and creative storytelling.
The notion of truth is complicated in memoir, as it is in all writing, as we all have our own perspective and recollection of events. In telling a story it’s impossible to avoid amplifying some facts and diminishing others, including the skipping of details others might think important. Books that center on relationships can’t help but presume what other people’s thoughts or intentions were, which can’t possibly be objective. Memoirist’s like David Sedaris are known to take large liberties with the truth for comic and dramatic effect, which upsets some readers when they learn the hard truth.
Writing a draft is hard enough without worrying about these issues. As long as what you write is merely a private draft you can postpone these concerns. They only become relevant once you decide to share your work with others or publish your work to the world.
I recently watched Brad Frost’s interesting talk Death To Bullshit (slides). He takes strong positions about information overload and advertising, and with down to earth charm, explores the evidence he’s found.
Frost offered various statistics about the ridiculous amount of information we produce, like this one:
And these facts are always stunning.
What Frost overlooks is the existence of these photos doesn’t obligate me to look at any of them. On the day you were born there were already thousands of books in existence you will never hear the name of, much less read. Same for magazine articles, films or plays. Or whatever it is we’re supposed to be intimidated by.
My point is my brain, sitting here at my desk, consumes only information I put in front of it, or that happens to land within range of my senses. How much more there is in the universe is irrelevant.
And our brains primarily filter information out:
Our field of vision is about 140 degrees, meaning we’re blind to 220 degrees. We’re mostly blind.
Dogs, cats and most animals hear and smell a much wider range of information than we do.
We are information filtering machines. We automatically filter out far more than we could possibly consume, even when we consume more than we should. Even when we feel stressed and overwhelmed, our brains are filtering out far more than we take in.
2. Overload depends on what you consider information
Frost offers this scary chart. It’s accurate if you define information, as we commonly do, by only counting man made information.
But consider taking a walk in the park.
For most of us a walk in the park is relaxing. There’s is plenty of information in nature, but we don’t experience overload. Why? In part because we’re just visiting, but also because we’re ignorant of all the information there. If you were a botanist, arborist, or entomologist you’d find loads of data in every patch of grass, every tall tree, and every ant hill. Even a child with a magnifying glass can spend hours in a small patch of forest, examining the fascinating amounts of information in every strip of bark, spider web or pine cone.
There are amazing amounts of information everywhere depending on what you know, what you choose to look at, and how you choose to look at it. Overload then is a matter of your attitude towards the information. Does it scare you? Does it excite you? Does it fill you with stress, or with desire? Your information attitude matters more than the amount of information around you.
One popular theory about our universe is that there is a fixed amount of matter in it. All that changes over time is the state and position of particular atoms. For example, every molecule in you came from a star and has existed for millions of years. If you considered atoms as information, you could make a chart like this one below. The net information in the universe might be fixed:
This seems strange of course. And boring. It doesn’t make humans seem important, which is why we rarely think about information this way. But if you do, even for a moment, you realize our assumptions about what information is, and therefore, what overload means.
Neil Postman wrote “Information is a form of garbage” and I agree in a sense. It’s cheap. It’s everywhere. Information without knowledge or wisdom has little value, despite how often we’re sold on buying things because of the volumes of information they contain. We always have a surplus of information around us and we should be aggressive about ignoring it from sources we don’t trust.
We are compulsive information hoarders. We still pretend information is scarce. It isn’t. It never was. Even if you limit it to human produced information, for the last few centuries if you could read and had a nearby library, you had several lifetimes of information available to you.
3. There was information overload before our grandparents were born
As an author I’m constantly reminded of intimidating statistics on the competition. Tens of thousands of books are published in the U.S. every year, and as Frost pointed out, there are several hundred million books in the world.
But what’s overlooked is that on the day you were born, or your grandparents were born, there were already more books in print than you or they could possibly read, even if you or they dedicated your entire lives to reading books. The same is true for places on earth to visit, languages to learn, meals to try, dances to dance, and on it goes.
In this sense we are born “information overloaded.”
An obvious question then is: why the hell would we care, today, about information from ordinary dead people we’ll never meet? We shouldn’t. And the same goes for the millions of people we don’t know in the present who create these massive piles of information. The presumption of all information should be it’s unworthy noise. Frost references Sturgeon’s law, that 90% of everything is crap, and this should warrant a general lack of interest in the majority of information produced by anyone, anywhere.
Our true disorder is information insecurity: we are insecure about what we have and compulsively consume to fill a hole that doesn’t exist.
4. People’s capacity for bullshit is constant
The later half of Frost’s talk is critiques of bad design and advertising as examples of bullshit. He closes by offering two claims:
People’s capacity for bullshit is diminishing
It’s harder and harder to be an asshole
These are tough claims to support. They’d require their own presentations.
I don’t agree with either claim, but my position isn’t any easier to argue for. People’s capacity for bullshit is as high as it always has been, on average, across our species. Freedom of information in democracies has certainly improved access to and interest in “the truth”, but technology is great for bullshit. Twitter, Facebook and the web are filled with it, as media transmits lies just as effectively as truths. Tech progress is indifferent to bullshit. And of course one person’s bullshit might just be some other person’s wisdom.
Much of the bullshit we consume comes in soft, sugary chunks we’re all too happy to consume. We like to hear what we like to hear. We prefer comfort to discomfort, and well crafted bullshit goes down far easier than tough truths or complex realities. There’s great profit to be made from being the kinds of assholes that produce and sell bullshit and as long as that’s true, there will be plenty of people working in BS production.
5. The final truth is we control the off switch
It’s is righteous to criticize producers of garbage sold as wisdom. It’s good to share advice that helps with the challenges of finding signal in the noise.
But these problems are largely self-inflicted. We flip the on switch for every device we feel overloaded by. And we can flip them off too.
A fascinating exercise for complaints about overload: ask, can I turn this off?
Unsubscribe from that email list. Watch one less television show, subscribe to one less podcast. Prioritize time offline with people you like and love over other things. Often our first response to this suggestion is an impulsive, self-righteous defense for why we really really really need each and every thing we don’t have time to consume, even in multiple lifetimes. This should reveal our insane and self-inflicted habits of destruction. The first step is to acknowledge who really has the problem. It’s us, not them.
Each week I take the top voted question from readers and answer it (submit yours here). With 35 votes, this week’s winner was “Are Hospitals More Important Than Art?” submitted by awesome reader Sara Vermeylen.
Questions like this are fun, even if absurd. Like Street Smarts vs. Book Smarts, it’s a kind of false dichotomy. But like the game Zobmando where you must decide between two ridiculous choices, you can have great intellectual fun in crafting arguments for one side or the other (or both).
If survival is at stake, I’d choose hospitals. A hospital, assuming it comes with smart doctors and fancy equipment, keeps a popular healthy, lengthens lifespans, improves the survival odds of reproduction, and provides a core public service everyone needs. If everyone is sick and dying, art has limited value, and of course it’s harder for sick and dying artists to make art than healthy ones.
But art is a critical part of what it is to be human. As miserable as conditions were for our ancestors 30,000 years ago, they took time to make elaborate cave paintings. If art were meaningless, why did they bother way back then? The answer is we are both social creatures and tool makers. Central to our survival has been the ability to communicate ideas, and art is one tool for developing the ability to imagine, observe, record and communicate thoughts. Art is also a tool of expression, a way to capture ideas, feelings, memories and dreams for others to see. Art, in the form of tattoos, face-paint, and even flags, has helped us throughout history to define our identity and remind us of shared connections. Music, books, paintings and movies are forms of art we depend on to help us understand who we are and how we want to live. We are aspirational creatures and a primary way we define what is possible for ourselves is through the art our artists makes for us.
If survival is at stake, I’d choose hospitals. A hospital, assuming it comes with smart doctors and fancy equipment, keeps a popular healthy, lengthens lifespans, improves the survival odds of reproduction, and provides a core public service everyone needs. If everyone is sick and dying, art has limited value, and of course it’s harder for sick and dying artists to make art than healthy ones.