Recently I’ve been mulling over how I’d like to run this blog going forward. Sometimes I have stern words with myself and say: “Get yourself together, you need to write something every other week if you want people to keep subscribing”.
But the truth is, there just isn’t enough new or interesting – or plain well thought-through – stuff I can say that often. I sure think a lot about a lot of things – all the time – but it takes time to read up, and to digest, and to connect the dots in the way I most enjoy – and in the way that seems to resonate the most with people who read what I write.
I also don’t want to keep saying the same stuff over and over again (for example, I went to write a post about my changing definition of success and then realised I already wrote about that last year, and not much has really changed since then; same goes for this post about creative burnout and doing nothing). I don’t want to just churn out content for the sake of it. I don’t want to add to the endless onslaught of already existing information just for the sake of staying top of mind. I don’t want to bring social media mentality into this space, too.
I’m so done with breaking news and hot takes.
If you really think about it, our obsession with content creation is capitalist in its nature. Capitalism makes us believe that we have to produce and accumulate endlessly, even when there’s no real value-add involved (do you really need the tenth pair of shoes or an endless variation of a latte, or yet another police/cooking/travel show on Netflix that follows basically the same script?). That we have to keep producing – something, anything – even when this overproduction becomes harmful to life itself – or, in the case of content creation, harmful to our mental health.
Just think of multiple YouTubers – like Lilly Singh or Emma Chamberlain – who quit or took extended breaks citing mental health struggles due to unsustainable pressures to keep producing content to make a living. And on the other end of the spectrum, YouTubers like Oversimplified upload at best twice a year, but their videos get watched and rewatched by millions of people – and although I cannot be sure I bet they have a much better relationship with their mental health (why do I know so much about YouTube you ask? Because I am a parent to a teenager).
And of course the endless stream of content is harmful not only for creators but for us content consumers (see what I did there? we are no longer readers – we are homo consumericus of words), making us addicted and our brains needing more and more new (or old and repackaged) content to get that dopamine hit, to distract ourselves from reality itself. I notice that I struggle to read longer pieces now, my hand uncontrollably reaching for my phone after a few pages of a book, or refreshing a social media feed in another tab – and I am fed up with it, and actively working on retraining my brain back to what I know it can do.
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I have been diving into post-photography and multimedia work recently, experimenting with collaging and embroidery, combining my own existing photographs with found ones, being inspired by artists that take what already exists and make new meaning with it.
Take Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin and their creation Holy Bible (2013). They didn’t make a single new photograph or wrote a single new word for this work, simply taking the most famous book of all and adding to it existing photographs from the Archive of Modern Conflict, creating work that is challenging and thought-provoking and creates new meaning through the way they combined existing works together.
And then there’s Julie Cockburn who finds “unloved and forgotten” photographs on eBay and creates new art with them by cutting them up or adding embroidery, essentially reinventing them, or Julia Borissova who for her project Running to the Edge (2012) worked with old black and white photographs found at a flea market and added flower petals to them to create “an atmosphere of mourning for anonymous people” in the photographs that resonates so deeply with me. Or my friend Shaista Chishty who created beautiful cyanotypes with pages of Islamophobic books she collected for her research, thus “speaking back” to hate (you can listen to my conversation with Shaista here where we talk about this project, among other things).
I’m increasingly inspired by these approaches and over the last couple of months I started experimenting with a bunch of postcards I found at a charity shop by adding hand embroidery on top of them. Then I moved onto seeing if I can embroider on top of my own existing photographs (that seems harder, somehow). And then onto old books I found to see if I can make something with that. It’s a fun exercise, to see how you can build up on what’s already there instead of being pressured to always create something new.
It’s a slow process, much slower than my usual medium of documentary photography (one postcard takes me the best part of a day to conceptualise and embroider) and that is what I’m finding the most enjoyable right now: slower life, slower art, slower writing, slower business, slower everything, in opposition to the culture that tells us to move at breakneck speed towards the abyss.
I keep thinking it’s akin to what we all need to do in our everyday lives too, if we have any hope of halting the climate crisis: slowing down consumption, repairing instead of discarding, reusing instead of buying new, build on the work of others and collaborating with each other instead of thinking of ourselves as self-sufficient islands.
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And what does it mean for you, my subscribers? I honestly don’t know quite yet. I’m so thankful to all of you, and especially those of you who chose to become a paid subscriber. It means so much to me that you decided to support me and my work.
What I know is that I’ll likely keep experimenting – I can see many other authors and creatives on here doing the same, seeing what works and what doesn’t, all that amidst mass exodus from Instagram and Twitter. It’s liberating to admit you don’t have the answers. It’s fun to disrupt how things are “supposed” to be done.
What I know is that I will continue writing things on a variety of topics, just as I always intended. And knowing myself I suspect that just like London buses, you’ll sometimes won’t hear from me for ages and then you’ll get three of these in quick succession. And I will appreciate your patience while I am, to use Gen Z lingo, “cooking” in-between.
I am also becoming increasingly uncomfortable with putting paywalls up. I want to share the knowledge, inspiration and insights in these digital commons of ours, to have conversations and not gate keep them for no good reason. At the same time I do need to be paid in order to continue doing what I do, and that’s a dilemma I don’t have a solution to just yet (I am cooking a post about capitalism vs commerce and what it means to run an anticapitalist business, inspired by my recent readings about alternative economies and degrowth movement, but it’ll take some time).
If you have thoughts about any of this, I’d love to hear them – just shoot me an email.
And here’s to slowing down.