Path Undefined
— An undefined path of life.

The Pivot Point of the Undefined Path

The motivation of looking for a new lifestyle

Recently I had a burnout, a very bad one. I guess I have experienced some sort of meltdown — the first time I have had this in my life. I felt so agitated, irritated and hopeless, I was full of anger, anxiety and sadness because of all the pressures from my work, my life and also the emptiness from my heart. I clearly know that there is something lacking in my career, but I don't know what it is.

It is really a time for change. I need a new direction in my career life.

Creativity

I thought the problem was coming from my work. I have an 8-to-5 job, and it is paid very well. It is probably most people's dream job. But I'm fed up with it. Well at the beginning, I find this job challenging, creative, that's why I have started with it in the first place. But now after even not a decade, I have somehow got a feeling that I have seen the bottom of this industry. I find it dull, and constantly have the feeling that I'm not actually learning or building anything in my life.

Beside that, I'm unfortunately the type of people, who can't cut the career cleanly from my life. I can't treat my work as a cash printing machine, and enjoy the other parts of my life. No, my energy is constantly being drained from the dull work. I have to reduce the hours, and try to make a smooth transition to another direction.

So my first logical reaction was to take a career survey. I don't have to follow the result of the survey exactly, but at least I could know myself better, and then I can get some ideas from the test results, and plan my next millstone in my career life.

So I did it. The result is at first glance very interesting and promising. Most of the career suggestions were related to geography, environment protection, forest, mechanics etc. Indeed, these are all the domains I have interest in. But when the question "can I do this for another 2 decades" comes to my mind, I caved. Nope, whenever I think if I'm going to do that for another 20 years, the only feeling left is "suffocated".

I talked about this with my girlfriend. She pointed at one of the test results from the survey, saying "Art... I can never imagine myself working as a creative person. Well sometimes I do want to do a lot of creative work, but it can never be my main job".

I agreed at that time, and replied "me neither" mindlessly. But soon I started wondering. Why? Why can't I do this as my main job? I have spent 2 years designing covers for books, I have never felt a little bit tired of it. I started going through all the creative hobbies that I have pursued but eventually gave up, one by one, in my mind, asking myself "why I gave up" for each of them. And then, an idea struck me all of a sudden. Yes! Creativity, it is creativity that I have always looked for.

But why then? Why I always wanted creativity, but at the end ran away from creativity, why I have given all of them up? Wouldn't it be a huge risk in my future career life?

Being a brave perfectionist to accept the imperfect parts

To be creative is not easy, at least not easy for me. There are so many restrictions, both from myself and from society. So basically, to be really creative, I have to be brave, modest and selfless at the same time.

I'm an idealist and at the same time perfectionist. Generally speaking, the process of bringing an idea out of my head is a long way of protecting the idea from being killed by myself. At one moment, I could find some idea super cool, and I'm willing do everything to bring it out. But no, I usually cannot bring it out. On the 2nd day, or even several hours later. I would find it dull, I would find it stupid. I want to delete it, deny myself and restart from the beginning.

And in this long battle against myself. I would slowly lose my patient and interest. I would feel pressured, under stress. If I'm lucky, I will put the artwork at some very hidden corners of my hard drive, better that I could never find it again. After 2 years, when I accidentally find it again, I would again find so cool, and thus the artwork will survive. But otherwise, not more than several hours or days, the creation will disresolve in digital aether at its very early stage.

But I'm older, more experienced, having more understanding of myself now. I'm again looking back to whatever I have done back then, and I realised something new.

Well, the failure at that time was a mixture of my own weakness and the toxic trend of society.

Nowadays, a large amount of creativity has already become industrialized. Industrialized creativity is usually the one that we have got access to since a very young age. When we are talking about industrialized creativity, the thoughts behind it, the form of it, the authenticity in it, they all don't matter anymore. The only thing which still matters is "performance". I'm not talking about the performance on the stage, but rather how fast it can increase the value from the money that investors have put into it. So how good an artwork is, is usually being measured by a lot of people according to a very simple formula:

  [Value] = [Price of one copy] × [Number of people paying for it]

I think that's why the artwork is nowadays becoming more and more catchy but not deeper, more and more similar to each other instead of being authentic. It is rather more in the direction of "design", instead of being a piece of "artwork". It has been mixed with too many purposes in it. All of that is because creativity is naturally an enemy regarding lowering the risk of the investment. In such a context, pure creativity is discouraged.

Once creativity is not free anymore, once it becomes a slave of a very specific goal, and since the goal is so clear, the measurement of how good a piece of artwork is also becomes monotone. The artwork will be then classified into "genres", and then within each genre, there is usually a set of genre-related expectations or specific aspects of how good artwork is. If a piece of artwork is not fulfilling those expectations, or fails to score high in those aspects, despite how authentic it is, it will be labeled as dull, lacking soul, failed, etc.. Those expectations look like cookie forms for the cookies — no matter how delicious the cookies are, they still cannot run out of the forms.

And because of those expectations, and also because of my fear of being judged or disliked by the community and also because of the perfectionist nature of me. I killed a lot of works even before they were born. But all of this is not necessary. I'm not the society. I'm not doing these to follow a set of rules or a set of expectations that I don't even know where I have got them. I'm not doing all these to score high in certain aspects that I don't even know why and how they have been made. The beautiful thing here is, once one sets a clear boundary between the individual and the society, the way shows up by itself.

I slowly understand the truth behind creativity — after having dumped so many creative hobbies. It is really all about being the true myself. Only by being myself, but not pushing myself, not forcing myself, not bending my will, not being restricted by the expectations that the majority has set, not being restricted by the measurements set for reaching the marketing or sales goal, not being restricted by the context of the creativity, and then creativity can be completely freed.

Since there are no restrictions anymore, I can have my pure joy from simply creating stuff, why should I dump all these creative activities then?

The perfect wave and the pivot point of undefined paths

Since there are no restrictions anymore, I can have my pure joy from simply creating stuff, why should I dump all these creative activities then? Why not pick all of them up again, and do whatever I wanted to do?

And at that moment, the burden in my thoughts has gone. I was relieved.

This moment reminds me about episode 9 of the animation Carol & the End of the World. It is about a surfer who craves the perfect wave after she has accidentally experienced the joy of it once. So she spent a long time visiting different beaches, experiencing the different types of the waves, hoping she could find that sort of pure joy once again. She is even using mushrooms to help her recap the feeling of the perfect wave. But suddenly, she got enlightened. She noticed that each wave is perfect, the so-called "prefect waves" are actually always there.

At the time when I watched that, I only half understood the point of the story. But I guess now I fully understood it, and I think I also understood the mechanism behind it.

The waves are just like activities that I like to do. The perfect wave is the favourite activity that I've been looking for since long. Now I have finally understood, the perfect wave for me is actually creativity. It is almost integrated into my life, thus it becomes so sneaky. If it was not my girlfriend pointed out, if I didn't fall into deep thinking after that, I would probably never know.

I know creativity is exactly what I am looking for. This feeling is so mysterious, strange, yet beautiful. When I'm going on a motorcycle trip, I always notice that no matter which road I choose, no matter where I visit, I always pass through the same place. No, I'm not talking about my home. But rather a random strange place, not a place that I'm that familiar with, not that close to my home, I don't plan it intentionally on the map, I don't even know which place it is, but I just pass through it each time when I go on a motorcycle trip. It is just like a magical magnet, or a blackhole, or better to say "a pivot point of undefined paths". It always pulls me to it. Until I finally decide to look at it on the map, and then there will be an "Aha!" moment — "Aha! This is the place that I always pass through!" And somehow, I just feel that this place has a strange connection with me. And creativity is such a concept, just like a pivot point of all my undefined paths.

But why didn't I notice this earlier then? Why do I have to waste so much time to realize it? I think this is a necessary process for me. This finding doesn't come to me without any cost. I worked hard for my creativity, I worked hard to realize this, I suffered a lot while chasing my perfect wave. And it is exactly the learning from all that thinking, hard work, suffering and retrospective that has made me strong, mentally prepared for accepting creativity to be my perfect wave. All that thinking, hard work, suffering and retrospective is just like an integrated part of this answer, they cannot be separated from each other. It is there waiting for me to accept it.

The Concrete Plan

After so much nagging, you probably think that I'm planning something very creative, making your eye balls popping out, jaws dropping on the ground. But no, sorry to let you down. I don't have any plans to do something like that. Instead, I want to keep true to myself, and show the most authentic part to everyone. And hopefully I could make a living with it? Or at least I hope it could partially support this lifestyle.

In short, I want to be a YouTuber, trying to show a creative lifestyle, making it entertaining, so that the viewers could get inspired from some of the projects that I'm planning to do, and in the meanwhile, I hope I could get my fair share from the ads, praises and the merchandises that I'm going to produce and sell. The core here must be creativity, authenticity and the joy of the process, instead of making money.

I'm considering covering all the creative activities that I have tried before, just to try different things out, so that I know what I should focus on in the near future. For example:

  • Drawing (this could be a long-term focus)
  • Writing
  • Photography
  • Music
  • Sewing
  • Wood working
  • Machine building
  • Programming
  • Inventing new tools
  • or generally every activities which is going from 0 to 1

I want to make those activities purely and literally "creative", back to the root of this word. It is about creating something, going from 0 to 1, and it should be just that and nothing else.

I won't care whether the result is good or bad. I won't care whether my work is popular or hated. I won't care whether my work is aesthetic or not. I won't even care about whether my work is new or not, at least they will be new from my point of view. Maybe I'm not talented at all, and everything that I can think of is whatever other people have already thought about and done a long time ago. But I just want to enjoy the process of the creation, and this process shall belong to me and myself only, so why should I care about all these points?

And I also don't want to restrict the form of creativity. I think I'm quite good at trying out something but I never really did any of them well. But in front of creativity, it doesn't matter. Because there is no measurement of what is good, thus there is also no difference between good and bad, so why should I care about how I should create? They are basically just creations, going from 0 to 1, nothing more.