— 15 minutes read —

The dark playground

There are times when one can’t muster the bravado required to simply do the work. In those instances, it just gets pushed aside and some mindless activity takes place instead. It could be anything ranging from doing the dishes to Youtube numbing. In other circumstances those activities would have been fun and enjoyable. But not at this point in time. In fact author Tim Urban goes as far as calling this state of joyless distraction “the Dark Playground”. All there is to be found here is guilt and suffering.

You’ll find a voice screaming at you as if there was no tomorrow ; begging for you to get back on task. And maybe you will even drag yourself back to the work table in front of the work computer, equipped with some sort of work intent. Yet that’s not what would happen. You might find yourself not even doing anything but witnessing the existence of a second voice ; arguing back a million reasons why the work is stupid anyway.

In fact your head might literally get hot from all the back and forth nuking incessantly going on inside. You’ll feel hopeless, on the verge of crying. Yet in the concrete world, you’re just staring at a screen, unable to align a mere 5 minutes of focus-time. How can doing nothing be such an all-consuming, agonizing even, activity ?

It’s not laziness

What’s going-on ? Are we just being lazy ? “Procrastination” is derived from the Latin verb procrastinare meaning ; to put off until tomorrow. However, the word is also derived from the ancient Greek akrasia ; doing something against our better judgment. It would be so much easier wouldn’t it if we weren’t even aware of the harm we were inflicting upon ourselves by delaying the task. Blissful ignorance has been denied however, and yet we’re still putting it off until it’s basically too late. That surely must mean you’re broken in some crucial and very definitive way.

But wait a minute. It’s confusing to think that this person you have became that’s unable to work to save its own life, is the same person that have once proven capable of focusing for hours on end. Maybe your preferred procrastination method has to do with cleaning up the whole place until doctors are comfortable performing surgery in your kitchen ? How is that lazy ? If you’re a gamer, how diligently have you been farming those mobs to prep’ that epic boss fight that’s waiting around the corner ? Maybe you’re out running all around the city seeking some sun the minute you’re supposed to be slashing that task. Whatever it is ; you’re not unwilling to expend energy. Far from it. In fact you’d be thrilled to be able to do so on task rather than pouring it in random directions. Yet, what is it about a deadline that makes it so hard to channel all that burning energy into the work ?

Well it’s turmoil. Bad mood. Anxiety. Feelings for you. All that good stuff.
Time-management should really be rebranded as emotion regulation. We have to get clear on the goal here otherwise we won’t go far in our attempts to tackle it. Making a better schedule won’t save you. Smarter to-do lists ; that’s not it. I mean those things can help, but it does not seem to me like you’re suffering from planning malfunction. You know exactly what you should be doing. Yet you’re not doing it. At some point this fact becomes so certain you might even start wondering what’s the point in planning at all. How does it matter if there’s no follow-up on your part ? Yeah, well that’s despair. That’s dark, bro.

What is anxiety anyway ?

Anxiety is actually a pretty useful function of the brain all things considered.

All vertebrates attach to sources of energy better known as food, and sexual objects. That’s self-preservation and reproduction for you. Mammals (and some birds) also attach to parental and social objects. But there is one uniquely human feature ; we attach to the future.
See, fear arises when a danger towards any of the previous items is perceived. Gets you motivated real quick to run for your life when a Lion starts to manifest interest in ripping your insides out. You can see this even in rats ; turns out rats run much faster towards a food reward than they would otherwise if you scare them with cat scent.

What we do better than other mammals is the prediction part of what constitutes danger. That we would call “Doubt”, or Anxiety.It’s all about the future. We manifest fear responses when something could, potentially, maybe, do us harm, in some sort of imaginary uncertain time ahead. And you might think ; “sometimes we experience anxiety about past events” but if you play close attention, you’ll notice that what’s stressing you out in those instances is the anticipation of bad outcomes resulting from past events, not the past events in and of themselves.
Anxiety’s superpower is the capacity to motivate action in the present to prevent disasters 5 years from now. This certainly has some evolutionary advantages.

In fact anxiety is extremely common. Sometimes though, the mechanism spins out of control. The anxious mind overestimates the risk of threat, underestimate its ability to cope, narrows attention onto it to the point where it can’t disengage from the thoughts and jumps to the most negative of conclusions. Anxiety disorder are so prevalent that 12 to 15% of the population is anxious enough at any given time to justify a visit to the psychologist. Unfortunately that number has been steadily rising in the developed nations ; for we have not evolved our brains for the lifestyles that are currently the norm. Also I need to mention anxiety disorder is two times more prevalent in girls than it is in males.

So what are you anxious about ? Well that deadline, duh. What if you can’t make it in time ? What if you’re unable to produce great work ? What if it’s too much for you ? Maybe you’re not cut for it and then what ? An interesting thing to note is that there’s a correlation between intelligence, and the severity of the anxiety. That’s right, more brain power means more predictive capabilities. The stronger the analytical capabilities, the stronger at knocking all sorts of reassurances away. Anxiety can come up with all sorts of arguments to justify its own existence. And art people ; they’re pretty smart on average. There’s indeed some correlation between creativity and the IQ thing. And so it follows that it’s not uncommon to witness crippling anxiety in such people.

Avoidant type

When anxiety becomes too much to bear, that’s when we start to procrastinate to forget it’s even there. If anxiety is literally the mind thinking about the future, it ensues that a way to reduce anxiety when it becomes overwhelming is to get back to the present.
Well, whatever you are doing when you are procrastinating ; understand that you are doing it for exactly that reason. Binging a TV show grabs your attention and puts it back where it belongs ; in present tense. A bath ? Same thing. Alcohol or marijuana, same thing. Anything really to prevent you from wandering in hypothetical futures. When anxiety has reached debilitating intensity ; it needs to go down. We make it go down with distraction (that is, until it can no longer be contained).

We can easily see how that’s maladaptive. Remember Anxiety is there to motivate action in the present to prevent negative outcomes in the future. Those negative outcomes aren’t going away just because you managed to ignore the anxiety for a while. The moment you drop the numbing is also the moment you’re back face to face with your problems and with the panicking, essentially.

And maybe you know that already. Maybe you’ve been confronted with the problem so much that you developed some sort of PTSD. Then you might have gone the other way as there is a second possible response to anxiety.

Control-freak type

The thing is, if you’re not going to run then you’re going to fight. And that means reducing all forms of uncertainty as much as humanly possible. You won’t stop until the only thing your mind is able to see in the future is the outcome you desire. That’s perfectionism for you. We’re talking high achieving, hyper organized people. You think up solutions, you implement them religiously. You get some feedback that things are moving in the desired direction. Anxiety goes down. You get a release. In a nutshell ; if you want to reduce anxiety, fix your life, essentially.

Problems start to arise when life remains chaotic despite all our best efforts to keep it in check. This is where obsessive behaviors start to appear.
Maybe it’s working more and more in order to reduce the likelihood of failing, to the point where there’s no time left for anything else, maybe including sleeping. Typical workaholism ; the kind that wears on relationships.
Maybe it’s spending less and less money in order to reduce the likelihood of catastrophe on that front in some far-fetched future ; to the point where even the food budget shrinks to near oblivion. Turns out anxious people make good money managers.
But at what price ?

Sometimes no amount of acting is sufficient to bring certainty into the picture. We can never fully control the outcomes and therefore it’s entirely possible that one would take lots of meaningful steps to reduce uncertainty and still be faced with this much left. There’s a limit to how much effort one can expand. It is entirely possible that all that stress might exceed one’s resilience. It probably will in fact if the streak is long enough.

Crossing that line would be burn-out. Ironically, the people most culprit of overdoing it are very similar if not the same people that used to avoid their anxiety through procrastination : high stress, low self-compassion type people.

Burnout

I want to point out ; burnout is truly not something you wish for yourself. This is a strategy that takes place when all else fails. An avoidant one, just like procrastination, except that one can be permanent. If you keep pushing and pushing and uncertainty remains sky high, and your mind can’t find a path through, what happens is it starts to distance itself. You no longer care. This is defensive detachment. And it’s a sad thing to experience.
Maybe you had a goal that you poured all your energy into ; the kind that gets you up in the morning and keep you busy until bed time. It started out of deep love for the thing and so you grew it and grew it to the point where it became all consuming. Now the anxiety that arose from pushing this particular outcome has stolen all the life that once was there. A pain threshold has been crossed. And so you detach. You simply do not care anymore. Not caring means no motivation of any kind to pursue further.
You wake up some day and all you feel is indifference toward what was once a passion. It’s confusing. The part of your identity that’s tied into that takes its toll. You’re left unsure what happened ; burned-out. And that sucks.

Ok at this point you might say well if I can’t deal with the excess anxiety by avoiding it and I can’t deal with it by trying to come in and control everything, then what ? What’s the game plan ?

Physiology of a calm mind

One might wonder at this point what life even looks like without anxiety ? And sure, we will answer that.

CBT therapy states that you could intervene on any of those three entries on a circle : the thoughts, the feelings, the behaviors. Improvement in any of those dimensions tend to snowball and improve the other parts as well. That feelings part though is just an interpretation the brain does based off the signals it receives from the body’s physiology.

On that note ; the first thing to notice when you are in a calm state, at that level, is that your heart beats in a metronome-like fashion. We can measure what is called Heart Rate Variability or HRV. It really doesn’t matter how fast or slow it is beating overall ; as in the average doesn’t matter ; it is the variance that truly counts. In fact HRV directly translate into positive or negative emotions.

To be clear ; as long as it has a steady pulse ; a fast heart rate would translate into passion and excitation rather than anxiety or anger and a slow heart rate would translate into calmness or curiosity rather than apathy, boredom or indifference. When HRV becomes chaotic, it shuts off the frontal lobe and lets the other parts of the brain play out their drama. When instead HRV reaches a state called “coherence”, where the heart beat is stable ; positive emotions arise and focus ensue. That, we would call a flow state. In a nutshell ; regular heart beat ; positive emotions. Erratic heart beat ; negative emotions.

So how to reduce heart rate variability ? Controlling your breathing is a potent method to reach that result. In particular ; the rhythm of the breathing would be of the highest priority. It doesn’t matter the pattern as long as it is regular. You want to maintain a very smooth breathing cycle. If you’re curious, you can check an entertaining presentation by Dr Alan Watkins demonstrating the impact of Heart Rate Variability using a live guinea pig picked from the audience. The talk goes back to 2012, however that part has been discovered and rediscovered many times around in human history. In India, one such method is called Dhyai ; which is a sanskrit word for “to contemplate” ; also called meditation.

Thought patterns of a calm mind

The practice of meditation really just ask you to pick a thing ; anything really, and then focus on it for like 20 minutes or more. Most often it is your breathing pattern. Sometimes it is a mantra. Some people just count in their heads. Some people focus on their “third eye”. Whatever it is, just focus on it as long as you can. And whenever your internal chatter comes back to forefront, just observe the thoughts as you were doing with your object of attention, and then simply let it pass. Come back to were you left. That’s it really, nothing more. It is literally the practice of focusing the mind, again and again and again. And what you will notice happen is that during a meditation practice, you are in effect entirely anchored in the present. You’re not thinking about what could happen in future tense and even when you are, you distance yourself from the thought and place yourself as an observer of the thought as it arises and fades away ; which gets you back into present tense again.

Remember that CBT thing ? Take care of the thoughts and what you’ll find is that the physiology will naturally take care of itself. Anchor your thoughts in the present and the breathing will start to regulate itself. HRV will go down, you’ll feel content, relaxed, focused. Anxiety literally cannot exist in the present. Meditation has received a lot of attention lately from the scientific community. Turns out you can see different parts of the brain light up when monitoring meditators. The prefrontal cortex gets activated while what is called the default mode network, that is the neural signature of the wandering mind, shuts off. In long term meditators, the prefrontal cortex (the brain region associated with learning and emotion regulation) actually grows new neurons while the amygdala (the brain region associated with stress and fear responses) starts to shrink.

Charging/discharging batteries

One assumption that you may or may not make is that in order to reduce the likelihood of experiencing burnout, the b best course of action would simply be to pace oneself. Work less and you should be good. Well, its not that simple isn’t it ? You might have noticed that it feels very different working on an assignment or some client work when comparing that to free-form personal work. When doing the later, there’s sometimes no difficulty what so ever staying in focus mode from early morning to late at night with close to no interruption. When tackling the former however, it might feel instead like everything is straining. What is the difference ?
I will adventure and guess that expectations that are the culprit.

That client work starts with a brief. There’s a clear goal that’s stated in words. And then you build a mental image of said goal in your mind. You’re collecting references, doing construction drawing, you’re envisioning a final in your mind with such clarity. And then you execute on your plan ; you start painting. At every single detour you’re comparing what you just put on the page to what’s on your mind. And there’s a difference. There will always be a difference. You end up feeling down because you didn’t manage to paint a picture on par with your expectation of what that picture should be. And that statement is true irrelevant of how good your final picture is. It might be a perfectly fine piece of art ; but to you it still falls short compared to the goal you set up in advance. You are taking damage on the moral department. You’re discharging your batteries.

Now compare that with personal work. This is something you do on your own time. You just start drawing. There’s no plan, at best a vague direction and that’s it ; you’re doing it on autopilot. Very little to no expectation. In that scenario, each time you deviates you are creating positive surprises for yourself ; “wow, it turned out not that bad”, “it’s better than I expected”. Think about it, if you start drawing with the expectation that all you’re going to produce on that sitting session will essentially be scribbles ; each time you end up drawing something half-decent creates a spike in positive emotions. This is probably what got you hooked to the art practice in the first place. It used to be a worry-free space where you essentially surprised yourself by outdoing what you thought you were capable of times and times again. That’s play, essentially. You’ll find most healthy artists that work a lot have maintained a personal practice time ; this is how they balance out the strains of assignments. You’d find those same artists are unable to maintain the volume when all they are doing is assignments. It’s not the hours. It’s about charging vs discharging batteries. It’s about expectations.

Bringing meditation to the art practice

So I have this quick fix for fellow procrastinators out there. You have this assignment that’s due and you typically can’t get yourself to work on it before the last minute, if at all. How about a subtle change in thinking. What happens if instead of telling yourself “I have to work to do that thing and meet that deadline”, you switch to something akin to “I’m just going to work for this set amount of time tonight” “I’ll make myself available, and try to focus during that time. If I can do that I will have done my job, regardless of whether the project gets completed or not”. By doing so you remove the expectation that you have to slash down that gigantic project. You’re not thinking about the potential for failure, or the potential for sub-par work. You’re not thinking about any of that. That part is not in your hands anyway. It never was. Your job is just to be present. Ancient cultures often thought that inspiration came from the gods, and that the artist was only providing the hands to be borrowed for the job. There’s real psychological benefits to that sort of reasoning.

The next level would be to incorporate the teachings of meditation directly into the art practice. It all starts with awareness. Artist Steven Zapata talks about that topic a lot on his YouTube channel and I would gladly recommend taking hints from his philosophy. It’s all about putting oneself in the same position that we had when we were contemplating our breath or coming back and back again to our mantra. Catch yourself whenever you are getting frustrated ; whenever the chatter comes back. Maybe there is this tree in the painting ; you need to change its scale. But doing so means repainting a lot of the background. “What a drag” you think, in anticipation of the pain that you will experience when attempting to fix the problem. Catch yourself in that moment. You’re doing it again. You’re thinking beyond the present even if not by much. You’re getting out of flow at that precise moment. Just observe your frustration arise and let it go ; do not entertain the thought. Pay attention to your feelings moment to moment ; do not fight them. Now you are free to take a back-seat and watch yourself fix that tree and that background where you would have otherwise delayed it by an other couple of hours I’m sure. It doesn’t even feel like you’re the one doing it. How strange, isn’t it ?

Remember ; anxiety cannot exist in the present.

— 14 minutes read —

Arts seem useless

Humans are weird in all kind of ways. Take laughter for example. What is that, really ? This percussive air squeezing and hyperventilating at random times doesn’t seem like a particularly practical thing to do. Especially when it comes as a reaction to punchlines we failed to predict. One might even argue laughter is essentially our brain going rogue ; no less or no more than a full-blown processing bug when encountering one of those nonsensical one liners.

Well, let me tell you, the arts share a lot of characteristics with laughter. For one ; they appear pretty much equally useless at a surface level. I mean ; they are nothing compared to other traditional human activities such as hunting, gathering, cooking and the likes. Yet, just as laughter, we’ve been doing it for quite a while now and kept passing it down through generations as if there was in fact some benefits to do so. Art history goes back to at least 70.000 BC. We’re talking late stone age here. That makes for a lot of seemingly useless art-making time.

Arts might even be bad

So, are arts a bug ? Is it just some sort of anomaly without a reason to be, coming out from nowhere, surviving despite odds again and again ? The purpose of the arts used to be so self-evident to my eyes that I never stopped to ask the question. But then all of a sudden through some life shenanigans, it stopped being quite so clear.

From an artist’s perspective who has lost touch with the meaning of the arts ; one might be left wondering : is it all just a sophisticated addiction. Some egotistical self-indulging ? At times, it might cross many of the boxes needed to qualify as such : “a compulsion to engage in a rewarding behavior, despite negative consequences to a person physical, mental, social, or financial well-being.” And be sure that such negative consequences can arise. The arts can be so time consuming and focus intensive that one can easily skip meals here and there, forget to seek out friends altogether, not see much sunlight. And should I mention the difficulties that can occur when trying to turn them into a financial well ? Yet people choose to do it despite the stress, despite the odds. And I mean a lot of people ; as can be seen from the number of art schools that have been popping out all over the world and online in the recent years alone. Are they all somewhat crazed ?

It certainly doesn’t make much sense for people who aren’t creative. They would argue artsy people are able to do what they do for the sole reason that everybody else is busy actually working and being more and more productive with each passing year. You would certainly need excess production to allow an entire class of people to spend decades doing nothing but arts ; something who does not feed nor shelter anybody. And it is certainly the case that some time periods are more auspicious to artistic flourishing than others. Think about the birth of the Renaissance in Florence consecutive to its economic development as a striking example from the past. All that brain power could have been used learning medicine or something. At some point, it becomes really easy to wonder why anyone would choose to do it.

Maybe the arts are only there to cure boredom and we shouldn’t overthink anymore than that. Sure enough, you’d find all sort of attention “disorders” in the artistic community. Hyper-focus on one thing is often the flip-side of an inability to focus on most other things ; or to say it bluntly ; finding most things boring. But then you can’t avoid the question ; why do we get bored at all ? Surely we could have evolved without a feeling of boredom and maybe that would have spared us the trouble of having to create all that arts stuff. Truth is ; in the current state of affairs, people would rather administer themselves electroshock rather than experiencing boredom. And why aren’t the arts boring ? It really doesn’t answer much once you start digging.

Is it all just vanity, you might even ask ? In crude words, are we doing art to get laid ? The idea of the guitarist song writer getting all the girls is a tenacious one after all and clichés tend to live on some degree of truth for them to catch on. Rest assured that some people where curious enough to test the hypothesis, and sure enough, you get more phone numbers carrying a guitar case than you do walking around empty handed or with a sport bag. Therefore maybe there is some narcissism that’s driving it after all. And yes, it seems narcissists tend to come out on top of the field. To verify that ; a psychologist measured hundreds of signatures then matched that data against historical auction prices, numbers of museum shows, and artistic reputation. As there seems to be a long established link between the size of one’s signature and self-regard, the study concluded that artists with the bigger egos get greater than average attention. In fact, a one standard deviation increase in narcissism would increase the market price by 16%.

Yet artists exhibit desirable traits

But another way to frame it would be ; what is it in that artistic persona that people get attracted to ? Why do we turn our best artists into glorified figures ? What is it that’s good that they represent ? Surely there must be something there.

One idea we need to establish right away is that artists do not truly “choose” it over other pursuits. People genuinely differ in their inclination towards creative endeavors ; a trait captured under the “openness to experience” umbrella in the big five personality test (the one that’s currently used by psychologists). Turns out creative people that aren’t being creative ; they kind of die inside and stack-up on the depression square ; the same way any extrovert person that isn’t seeing people would feel disheartened and lifeless after a while. What kind of choice is that, then ? Try as you might ; we do not control what grabs our attention and artists-type people certainly act like arts matter (duh).

And it’s not just artists that find it appealing. Let’s zoom-out a little bit and see what happens when the arts gets common place. At that scale, it is a part of culture. And that sure is a powerful thing. England gets a large share of its gdp from its creative industries. We’re talking over 100 billions pounds a year, something like that. The USA influence is all over the place, for better or worse. Visitors come to France and Spain for the beauty stored from the past in the form of churches, castles, gardens and museums. Looking from afar, it becomes hard to entertain the idea that the arts don’t have value. Numerous industries, from real-estate to tourism, are benefiting from what is called “cultural influence” and that mysterious yet crucial soft power is built in big part through artistic production. If arts are useless, we sure as heck don’t act like they are. How peculiar.

Plus, one error we might make when assessing artists value towards the greater community would be to believe artists are just artists anyways. In most situations ; that’s simply not the case. A significant portion of artists are also working non-creative jobs. They are some engineers doing drums when coming home ; restaurant workers painting oils at night, teachers writing fiction each time they get the chance. In fact you would even find that artists are more likely than the general population to contribute to associative and charitable work. Not bad for a population often stricken by the “recluse” label ; what’s up with the false dichotomies ?

What’s more ; there’s sort of a conflict between the ideas of arts and cold efficiency. So much so that in an education system that’s all about uniformity and standardization, there is in fact a zero to negative correlation between creativity and the grades at school. But could we do without ? Is efficiency enough ? The creativity element in the arts is all about newness and originality. That’s why everybody and its grandma in the field is chasing the idea of having one’s own style. To answer a question previously opened : the purpose of boredom is to encourage exploration. And it is necessary. It’s about expending the realm of what is known ; pushing the edge. Criterion for art quality are constantly evolving to account for the displacement of that line ; it’s like a living thing. And although the most efficient way to do anything is to do it the proven way and follow the recipe so to speak ; we tend not to call that arts though. Arts are rebellious in nature. Artists are typically more inclined to risk-taking. Creativity is how we get from surviving to then thriving.

Plus, our brains like it

Maybe the solution can be found in neuroscience. It turns out arts seem at the very least beneficial for the artists themselves as has been discovered and exploited by the entire field of art therapy. It is believed to help improve self-esteem, self-awareness, and emotional resilience. Maybe arts-making simply provide some sort of evolutionary advantage to arts-makers in the larger scheme.

When we get fully immersed into art-making endeavors ; our cortisol levels significantly go down. They are responsible for our experience of stress. Thus, we get less agitated, and achieve a calmer state. In fact such a state is often called the flow state. One way it achieves that is by providing what is called an optimal challenge. Because arts present infinite possibilities, they are forever capable to push an art student an inch forward in a way than more definite day-to-day activities could not. No matter how far we’ve come, there’s always further room to grow and we tend to respond to that positively.

In fact, the arts train prolonged attention according to research, which in turn improves cognition. Through their practice, children learn how to engage and persist, how to learn from mistakes and press ahead, or even how to commit and follow through. I’d say those are all kinds of beneficial values for anyone to display.

What’s more ; individuals engaging in the arts have been shown to display greater emotional regulation which has been proposed as a component of empathy. After all the arts feature some ambiguity and respect for the viability of different perspectives and judgments, so it only makes sense that it could be beneficial in that department. Need I argue about the necessity of perspective-taking in the context of the social world we inhabit ?

In fact the arts might truly have played an important part during the development of our pro-social behaviors. Music improvisation for instance uses the same brain regions as language and syntax does. The two might have co-evolved. Any theory for the evolution of language might have implication regarding the birth of music and vice versa. Some even draw hypothesis of an intermediate stage of human evolutionary history characterized by a communication system that resembled music more closely than language, but was identical to neither.

However you want to look at it, the arts and the development of our brain definitely share some history together to the point where it becomes hard to even distinguish the two of them. It seems to me we are fundamentally an arts-making specie.

So, are the arts language ?

Let me get back to laughter. Turns out tons of people have been left wondering about that puzzle. Some of them got sufficiently upset to sit down and properly research that topic. Some key findings they uncovered : in a conversation the speaker is about 50% more likely to laugh than the listeners ; we’re also 30 times more likely to laugh in a group than we are doing it alone. In other words ; laughing is almost always social. It’s communication.

In a similar vein, let’s pretend that arts’ purpose is indeed communication. Do you know what else has the same purpose ? Language. Talking ; words. Yeah. That’s one of our superpowers as a species ; truly some incredibly sophisticated prowess. We’re capable of passing knowledge and understanding with such precision that it is jaw dropping when you stop and think about it ; and we’re doing that real-time. You are yet to find a dog capable of such a feat, nor any animal for that matter.
Let me ask, how valuable do you think that is ? Do you believe we would have succeeded in organizing our societies to the degree that we have if it was not for the ability to talk ?

Saying that, you would notice people making a living from sheer talking are rather rare. We’re talking teachers, politicians, humorists. If that’s the case, is it useless for the rest of us to ever talk ? Why do we bother learning to speak when it’s not providing a roof nor the food on our table. Maybe we should stay on our lane and just learn our trade, never bother with the whole language thing.

Does that sound appealing ? Right, for me neither. Language is all encompassing. It is even used to heal from trauma as the label “Talk therapy” suggests.

What has been occurring for most children : they have been surrounded early on by all those adult figures that were talking around them all the time -exchanging information, trading jokes, yelling even from times to times- and then found that instinctively interesting. The kid wants to join the conversation ; and so pays attention to all those shiny words. He in fact, pays so much attention that he makes associations between the sounds coming out of people mouths and all sort of contextual clues. Soon enough, he understands, can reproduce those sounds, and even recombine them to form his own sentences.

Arts happen the same way. You’d be hard pressed finding a kid that doesn’t find drawing inherently interesting for example. They use it to express feelings and thoughts long before they can even write. In fact you might be aware that scripture evolved from drawing. The letter A for instance was once a symbol representing an ox. It got passed along from the Egyptians to the Phoenicians, to the Greeks, all the way down to us.

There you have it you say ; drawing became writing and that’s that. We’ve found new and better ways. Maybe arts are just obsolete. What kind of added value is there to be found ? Why are we keeping it around ? After all, when it comes to description ; painting got tackled by photography a long time ago ; and 2D animation should be irrelevant in a world where video is a thing. It seems to me what we do with paintbrush and pencils lacks a lot in the precision department compared to digital lenses. Yet what’s the deal with say, abstract art ? Music isn’t even representing anything. How could there be any sort of meaning in there ?

Well. This is where the symbolic comes in. Can you picture a smiley for a second ? The standard one. A circle, two dots and that banana-like mark. It looks nothing like a face at all. Yet we universally recognize it as such. In the animation field, they got into the habit of exaggerating the features of the face a great deal of the time. Why ? Turns out it’s more effective at conveying emotion to the viewer, even though it looks nothing like a real person. This is where the idea of hyper real comes in. There is a distinction to be made between what is ; and what it means. It is possible to make art that feels more real than reality. Video cuts are more effective at conveying a story than a proper unfolding of events in real-time. Realistic painters soon found-out that broad brushstrokes tend to be more convincing than fine classical-period-like details. How do I know that your red and my red are the same red anyway ? Artists are not to trying to depict what is. Not exactly. They are trying to depict the experience of what is. In that sense ; it is erroneous to think that images are pre-verbal. They are meta-verbal. They offer ways of knowing that are linguistically inaccessible. That sentence alone tells a lot about the unique value of the arts.

Stories are powerful

Stories are an important part of the human experience. They help carve out meaning. Meaning is the difference between courageously pushing through a hard life and an all too banal suicide. People are able to tolerate so much more tragedies when they are blessed with a sense of purpose in their lives. It is where we draw our strength from. In fact meaning seems to me vastly more valuable than happiness. Think about parents ; most of them would report being happy they had children and would not trade it for anything, yet if you look closer you’d notice most of them score not only low, but in fact very low on measures of happiness while they live with them. Pregnancy and delivery are full of suffering, let alone what comes next. It more closely resemble a long and epic fight than it does tranquil vacations on Serenity Beach. Yet parents choose to do it again. Nobody would get more than one child if this happened on some sort of misunderstanding. In fact it’s been theorized that meaning is not a luxury but rather a need. The arts, through their unique ability to tell stories in hyper-real, poignant manners, help all of us in our sense making endeavors.

For the artist, there is a lot to be gained ! You might be aware that arts are often being used for therapy purposes. Writing and journaling often allows a process of self-reflection to take place. This introspection helps notice patterns and bring order to thoughts as they arise and acts as a positive buff for mental health. Painting with intent or trying to translate emotions into music all share the same virtues ; they help make sense of our tormented lives and bring order to chaos.
But it goes beyond ourselves and find its place in society at large. Most people would agree a world without arts would feel dull, inhospitable, uninspiring. Perhaps even undeserving of being lived through. If all there is to experience is a long string of unexpected challenges and problems to solve, one might get disillusioned pretty fast and choose to disengage from it all. In that scenario, everywhere you would look would feel crude.
How is it that we ever recover from such a sight ? How is it that we get back up from trauma, injuries and all adversities ?
I propose that it is the stories we tell ourselves that get us through. In fact, maybe everything we create is made of arts. Maybe they are part of the mysterious fuel that carries us through suffering and makes us so immensely resilient.

There’s one story that the art themselves are very good at telling. Think about what happens when you are watching your favorite artist perform. Maybe it is a jazz musician pulling a solo out of thin air. It has never been done before. Not like that. The harmonic super-impositions are otherworldly, the rhythmic variety is attention grabbing, the tones are spot-on. You are in awe. There is tension in your body, what you are witnessing is impossible. Yet here it is, being performed before your own eyes. How is that even happening ? How is it that a mere human that has roughly the same two arms and feet as you do is capable of such a feat ? Seriously though, HOW ?! What are we even capable of as a specie if we’re capable of that ? What is the upper limit to human potential ? At times, there seem to be none. And that’s damn miraculous. And in that instant, we can feel it.
And so the arts story goes something like this : there was once men, there are still men, there will be men. Look how far we’ve come. Imagine how far we can go. This is us. We are remarkably humans.

Art is hope.