Consuming Vs Creating
A blank piece of paper is God’s way of telling us how hard it is to be God.
— Sidney Sheldon
Okay so it’s the weekend, and you have lots of free time on your hands (on a side, it’s funny how many of my blogs are inspired by having shit loads of free time lol), and you’re thinking what to do with all this time. You want to watch that new episode of <insert the anime you’re binging currently>(one piece) or <insert latest episode of the latest podcast you’re following>(How I built this) or read the <insert latest book you’re reading>(A promised Land) or read the <insert latest research paper you are interested in>(None lol), you get this gist, just consume, consume, consume! new and interesting stuff.
But wait, you can also spend your time writing a blog, or sketching, or learning guitar, or brainstorming a solution to some coding problem, creating a video (for your almost dead YT channel :P), basically creating something new into existence (or atleast recreating your version of a previously existing thing).
Well all this sounds good, and in an ideal world where we had infinite time, I could have consumed all I wanted, and created whatever I felt like, but alas we have limited time in this world and thus whenever I have any amount of free time, I’m constantly put in this dilemma of whether I should use it to consume or create. And yes, this sounds totally, totally like a first world problem, but okay, I don’t really have third world problems, and we need problems in our life to give meaning to it (all hail Victor Frankl for explaining the meaning of life to me), so why not create some first world problems for ourselves, shall we?
Creativity is allowing oneself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.
— Scott Adams, The Dilbert Principle
Now while at first thought, it might feel like I should spend most of my time on creating stuff, since it’s me actually producing something new in the world, using my own skills, and not just consuming stuff created by someone else, but let’s keep hold of the judgement cat inside us and give consuming a second thought.
I feel that just like eating healthy and nutritious stuff is good for our body, and stuffing pizzas into our system is detrimental to our health, so is consuming good content a sort of mental food for our brain, to get new material for thinking, and for expanding our imagination. Whereas scrolling through Instagram reels, and mindlessly consuming endless memes, well, makes us mentally obese.
A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies . . . The man who never reads lives only one.
— George R.R. Martin
Reading books for example is a great way to increase our knowledge of the world via non-fiction, live multiple lives in one by reading through memoirs and biographies, and broadening our imagination of what is possible, and what might be possible through fiction (Fiction is soooooo underrated in its importance, that I’m planning to write an entire article about it someday, soon enough).
Whereas listening to podcasts, not only helps you gain knowledge about the world (or about serial killers, if you’re into that sort of stuff lol), but the long form of conversation also reveals the human part of the guests, and gives you an insight into how the greatest people on the planet are in reality, how they react to questions, how they think, respond, and most importantly how they are also on this never ending process of sharing and consuming knowledge (okay, I’m talking more about interview styled podcasts, like my favourite The Lex Friedman show, How I built this etc, and I know podcasts don’t necessarily have to be like this, and can only be hosted by the host, but this is my blog, so fuck it).
Also, as a technical person, I need to spend a fair amount of time, consuming technical articles, lectures, books and stuff either to learn something entirely new, or even stay updated with the latest happening in the familiar, but at the same time never boring, AI world. Now there’s an argument to be made here, that just consuming technical content doesn’t make you an expert or really improve your skills, and while I know there’s a lot of truth to that, personally, I enjoy reading about technical stuff that is no where even related to my day to day work, and it introduces me to a lot of new thinking patterns about how people approach problems in a different field, and also I feel it improves my meta learning, or my ability to learn new things, faster. (Huh, this also feels like something I should blog about someday, lets pin that to my notion list consisting of blog ideas that may or may not see the light of day ever lol).
We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.
— Anaïs Nin
But okay, we have limited time, so why not spend it in creating new stuff, like writing this blog, which helps me do a brain dump, clear my head and also structure my thoughts a bit. Or maybe sketching, which well, just lets me focus for some time without any interruption, just with my sketchbook and my pencils (okay, also with the tutorial playing on my tablet 🙈). I think this is a think which is definitely better about creating and missing from consuming is the ability to focus on a task, like just sit down and use your brain to do something and create something and get that magical feeling of getting into the zone.
Anyway, while creating does feel good, I don’t think there’s a problem with consuming good stuff, its just that we need to maintain a balance between the two, the time-management noob inside me, tried dividing the activities I do into consuming and creating, and scheduling time accordingly, failing speactacularly in the process, so I guess we just need to make sure we are just aware of this, and see how time unfolds.
Until the next one, so long!
