The tale is old as time: the artist must find a way to eat and this of course introduces new obligations and sometimes even results in limiting parameters around what can be created. Michelangelo was vulnerable to the grace of the Medici family and that of the reigning popes. The first quarter of Patti Smith’s excellent autobiography Just Kids describes all of the various odd jobs she had upon moving to New York, very few of which had to do with her personal creative pursuits. The idea of separation between a job and artistic endeavors seems to have all but disappeared with millennials who look to work for both creative fulfillment and financial stability.
Richard Florida coined the term “the creative class” as a group of creative people gaining financial capital as a result of their labor in idea generation. The creative class he posits, gravitates towards cities with diverse populations and plenty of opportunity. New York Vice in the mid 2010s is an excellent example of this.
A bunch of recent grads land unpaid internships at a place that is considered to be so cool it’s basically a privilege to work there. The hot club where you can’t get on the list. They are telling stories that no one has been brave enough to tell before about topics that have been considered a taboo, hosts with tattoos and facial piercings take us with them to faraway places that are too dangerous to vacation. A new industry is born. We will pay you to make compelling content that you are inherently interested in and that gives you social clout amongst your peers. Dream job, anyone?
Millennials came of age in the content era. Everybody needed content. When I first started doing this I questionably had “content creator” on my resume and it was unclear to many hiring managers what that meant exactly. Now I frequently see job postings for content creators. It basically means that you’re a one band man that provides an inherent savings to the company because you can do it all yourself. You’re able to come up with the idea and execute it with little to no additional resources— a cost savvy solution for companies to generate lots and lots of content.
But what I am realizing after a decade working in “creative” roles is that corporate and creative don’t mix. Creativity is messy, unstructured, non-linear, fickle, filled with mistakes and failures. Corporate is structured, linear, and if you make too many mistakes you will be fired. Many of these younger millennial run and millennial focused companies claim to be start ups that don’t feel corporate but at the end of the day the most important thing is the bottom line and looking profitable for the IPO and what is more corporate than that? Just because I’m allowed to have tattoos and wear sweatpants to the office doesn’t mean that it isn’t a corporate space.
I have been pandering to the dream of getting paid to be creative as my North star. That will mean I have made it, that I have secured my standing as a creative person in the city. But when you apply all of the filters and boundaries within which your creativity must flourish— appeal to advertisers, insane client deadlines, content posting schedules of multiple times a day, the temperament of a boss who has a numbers person breathing down their neck, staying true to brand voice, don’t offend anyone, keep it clean, no budget… what is left for creativity? It certainly isn’t art, occasionally something may have some value in that it’s a good piece that feels relatable to its intended audience but you are far away from what you set out to do.
It is no wonder then that I end my days at work feeling unfulfilled, dissatisfied and without energy to work on my “side projects”. I have spent the day using many of the same muscles I would need to work on my book, write this newsletter, practice my screenwriting homework, but I don’t have the satisfaction of seeing any results that light me up. So the muscles are fatigued without results and yet they aren’t even sharpened in the process because speed and quantity take precedent over quality.
The biggest learning for me is in not conflating the two things— being an artist and being a creative professional— to have the same value and meaning within the larger picture of my life. My art can be my art and it doesn’t need to make money. I can show up to work with my most tender artist parts protected under jargon like circling back, touching base and finding efficiencies. But where I think I and so many others have gone wrong is in thinking that because the word creative exists in our corporate title, that should be fulfilling the art itch somehow.
David Lynch was famously a security guard for his day job (when he still needed one) because it allowed him time to sit and think. We place so much value on our careers and our titles so that other people will perceive us as interesting and cool that we lose sight of the fact that the things that fulfill us often happen in the quiet, unacknowledged hours of solitude that nobody will ever see. I am wondering if the “dream” I’ve been in search of for all of these years in getting paid to be creative is actually much further away from what I truly want than I had thought. Maybe I want the job I am paid to do to be simple, straightforward and require little from the parts of my brain that are needed to develop meaningful ideas.
I think it’s one of the biggest jokes we’ve been telling ourselves — that we get to be creative at our corporate jobs (yes, of course, there are exceptions!). And if you are satisfied in your corporate job, that is wonderful, I am happy for you. As always this is simply my opinion.