The Importance Of Making Stuff, Of Making A Positive Contribution

What's the story peeps! Welcome to day 4. I'm still at it…alright it's only four days, let's see how things hold up at four months.

Yesterday I wrote about my high regard for people with integrity and energy for making things happen.

Nothing would ever be started or finished without people like this.

Without these people all the other moany bastards that take great joy in being miserable and small minded would rule the world.

Now that's a shitty contemplation altogether.

In fact now that I think of it, they wouldn't rule the world I would! Because I'd kill every last one of them.

Ok maybe I wouldn't. I'd give them a few slaps though.

Making stuff isn't about setting the world on fire or becoming the next Andy Warhol or Banksy or something.

It's about being integrated enough to do what lights your fire, what makes you happy regardless of the consequences.

Too many of us get up every day to work at stuff we don't like, to make money to pay bills, in the vain hope that we can gather enough spare cash to do stuff we do like.

The irony being we waste our best years wishing for stuff and never doing it. We'd rather watch the damn TV or scroll through our Facebook feed.

The Gray Faced People

I've told this story before but I'll tell it again because I think it's important.

About 5 or 6 years ago I was waiting in my van on the Grand Canal at Rathmines in Dublin before the premises I was working in opened, and I observed something striking.

At least it was for me.

I'm having a cup of coffee and I see these three guys walking down the left hand side of the road laughing and joking about something or other.

It was almost 09:00 and I thought they were on their way home still drunk from a good night out. Whether they were or not actually didn't really matter.

Next I see all these people rushing to work, tear-arsing down the street running across the road, breaking the lights, jumping in and out of traffic…

Like maniacs rushing to get to their desks and punch keys on a PC all day. It seemed crazy to me – really insane.

I hadn't noticed this so starkly before even though I was a part of it for long enough. It was going on all around me for years and I hadn't noticed it.

I watched their faces, heads down, blinkers on, gray faced people rushing to get to their workplace before 09:00.

The experience although simple, made my mind up for me that what I was doing was bollocks.

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A New Way To Work

Work by it's nature is designed to be a laborious exercise, designed to get the best out of us. It's like in order to be worthy of pay we have to suffer.

So we have a responsibility to ourselves to create the opposite. To do stuff we love even if it's only a hobby.

Mass produced crap is everywhere these days and it's the responsibility of creative people to bring balance.

Cheaper and cheaper it gets. More and more for less and less robs people of the experience of making or owning quality things.

Writing songs, making hand made furniture, producing independent film, drawing, writing, music, sweeping the street for crying out loud, whatever your art is you've got to keep doing it.

And if you're not doing it you've got to start.

You not only have a responsibility to yourself, but you have a responsibility to bring your talent into the world for others to experience.

Yes of course you fear that you won't get a warm reception or in fact you might die poor (which you don't have to btw), but that's not the point.

Create for the sake of creating, stay with that and forget about the reception. Chances are plenty of people won't get it and that should be fine.

Playing to the gallery is for chumps anyway.

Make stuff for today and keep doing that as often as possible.

If you've got a day job then keep doing it for as long as necessary, you'll eventually make an impact, then kick that job to the kerb.