📝 Why you must create →

A good reminder from The Culturist to spend more time creating new things than consuming from others.

Nowadays, it is frighteningly easy to spend the best part of a day consuming the creations of others: listening, streaming, scrolling. For most of us, the ratio of consumption to creation has never been more lopsided — and yet, the tools of creation are more accessible than ever.

Let us establish at the outset that consuming art is itself a worthy pursuit. But if this is all you do, what are you giving up?

G.K. Chesterton once wrote that a culture has become decadent when its people prefer to pay others to dance for them, rather than a whole room of people doing the dancing for themselves.

In the modern culture with nigh-infinite things to watch, read, listen to, it's easy to mistake consumption for something worthwhile on its own, and have it edge out the time you spend creating for yourself. Even a few minutes writing or drawing triggers a muscle inside our minds that stays dormant if all we're doing is "engaging" at a superficial level.

Instead of merely reading a book, you should be writing out your thoughts on it, too. You could even do this with movies and TV. Just get started making something of your own.