Tue Jun 26 18
In creative pursuits it's easy to get bogged down by considerations of market value. We spend most of our lives and most of our days and hours on the pursuit of value. Creating value for a company means you get mad bank. Creating value for customers means they keep your business alive. Creating value for your parents or teachers means you get good grades. We get used to a crazy dopameme cycle of value => rewards, except that the feeling of rewards decreases over time until we end up just repetitively creating value for no reward at all. Creation without value is what society calls "art".
The stress of value creation can be draining. You often wonder if what you're doing is actually value or really has any purpose at all. Art (in its most pretentious iteration) gives you the same feeling without the promise of creating any value at all to anybody. Many famous artists and composers found that their life's work was only valuable post-humously. Thus it was of no value to them personally.
I imagine when I play the piano, that a little David Attenborough is telling the narrative of my life : "And here we see a software developer. He's gotten a bit confused and he's trying to code a musical instrument. These noises that he's making are known as 'music'."
The truth is of course there's no reason to create market value with absolutely everyhting you do. You can just as easily get away with doing something for fun and hoping someone will pay you for it. It's hard though to recognise what's "fun" and what's valuable, and when you should scrutinize your "fun" to make it look like it has some worth, as opposed to just being there to say "I made this". Most of this website falls under the category of "fun", but is that just an excuse I'm using so I don't have to make it any good? Who knows.