beyond consume vs create

December 10, 2023 2:13 PM

Are there any writings / videos / perspectives you’d recommend showing alternatives to “consume or create” as a binary? E.g. the value of maintenance and care work; weaving and connecting; etc.

I’ve been stuck in a mental rut that looks like this:
* I don’t like endless consumption, the atomization and individualization inherent in capitalism, etc. I really value creative communities and I want to find a way to make and participate!
* ack! I don’t like what I’m creating, nor do I feel good creating it. I’m failing as a creator of things.
* I guess I’ll read and watch and play instead of make things - except now I feel a little worse about myself doing it.

I know this is silly. I know that what I’m seeing as the “opposite” of consumption is in a sense created by this very dynamic. But I’d like to explore more ways to approach this issue. What I’ve found useful so far:
* Deleuze’s philosophy. It always makes me feel better about co-creating possibilities.
* The weaver role in Deepa Iyer’s Social Change Ecosystem framework. I encountered this from a colleague. It rules. I’d love to explore weaving more expansively.
* The Maintainers , a project and network that represents various kinds of maintenance-as-care work, from public spaces to infrastructure.

I suppose another way to put this project is, I’m messily coming to understand myself as someone who wants to foster and take care of communities and spaces rather than someone who should be Striving to Author Impactful Stuff, and I would love any narrative / theoretical inspiration from others who have embraced that kind of role (and successfully unlearned whatever toxic Artist Productivity is the Only Route to Self-Actualization stuff while NOT falling back into consumerism.)

Thanks for hearing out my muddled plea <3

posted by elephantsvanish to Society & Culture (6 answers total)

Best answer: So... you're looking for more media that you can consume in solitude?

Seriously, the best way to learn about community-connection work is to go out and do it. You can put fancy terms like "experiential learning" on this if you like. The key is that you are doing it in interaction with other people, not as a solitary atomized individual.

The "consume or create" dichotomy is rooted in individualism, and can only be escaped by "co-creating" or "weaving" with other people. Reading about philosophies or social change ecosystem frameworks is still an individualistic (consumptive) pursuit until you actually go out and do stuff.
posted by heatherlogan at 3:52 PM on December 10, 2023 [3 favorites]

Best answer: Ooh highly recommend Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing for this.
posted by rabbitbookworm at 3:54 PM on December 10, 2023 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: @heatherlogan, very well put! I *am* doing some of that in-the-world community work, but find myself sort of stuck on these ideas nonetheless from a rumination / anxiety perspective. But, you’re right in that I asked for a solitary solution - open to other approaches, and other answers like this one.
posted by elephantsvanish at 4:08 PM on December 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Another perspective: consumerism and the drive to be productive (or creative) can be seen as two sides of the same coin. No need to buy into either one. Along the same lines as How to Do Nothing, you might find the book Rest is Resistnce helpful. Haven’t read it, but it was highly recommended to me.
posted by reren at 4:57 AM on December 11, 2023 [2 favorites]

It might help to explore why you think this is a binary in the first place? There are plenty of things in life that don't fall into either of those categories - for example, moving your body in ways you find enjoyable, talking with a friend, watching a sunrise or listening to the birds sing, teaching someone a skill or fact that you know, learning a new skill or fact yourself, taking care of a loved one or pet, etc etc.

It sounds a bit like you're lumping everything that isn't "actively producing a thing" into the consumption category, associating it with capitalism and hostility to creativity and all sorts of other nasty things, and then feeling bad about it, which isn't a very helpful or accurate perspective at all. Learning why you started doing that in the first place might help you reverse it. Some people might say that it's a binary and that creativity is what we all need to be doing most of the time, but people say all sorts of silly things that aren't true. Even if you make the categories very very broad and call them passive vs. active interaction with the world, it still doesn't follow that passive interaction is a negative thing. Trying to actively create or do things all the time and never stopping to enjoy anything sounds exhausting and miserable, and also deprives your creative side of the inspiration and rest it needs to create beautiful things.
posted by randomnity at 7:24 AM on December 11, 2023 [2 favorites]

I resonate with this pretty strongly - perhaps for different reasons, so my recommendation may be off the mark. As a cishet white guy, I'm feeling a lot these days like the world doesn't need a lot of hunger for attention from our demographic. I don't feel particularly left out by this - never been one for the spotlight, though I certainly had a lot of ego attached to the work I was doing in my 20s.

Any time that ego voice of "credit resentment"/"importance of accomplishment" took up space in my head, I found listening to Martin Luther King's "Drum Major Instinct" speech always helped me re-center on doing things I already knew were important. Reframing leadership through service felt very subversive to me when I first heard it. The term "servant leader" is ubiquitous now, but it's still not a very mainstream value.
posted by SoundInhabitant at 12:21 PM on December 11, 2023 [2 favorites]