A Way To Live. A Way to Create. "Just One Beautiful Thing".
What the future of the creative life will look like.
Many years ago, I was having a much-needed holiday in the city of Stellenbosch in South Africa and driving my dad’s car to the beach, alone, to see the sunrise, drink coffee, read, and pray. As I pulled up to the beach, it was a wonderful sight, one that I had not seen in a very long time. Beach sunrises are wonderful things! I parked the car, opened the window and breathed in deeply and said to myself, “You know, this is what I need. The opportunity to see just one beautiful thing a day.”
And in that moment I realized that this would become my ‘rule of life’. To experience just one beautiful thing every day. Just one. Whether it’s a sunrise, or if it’s poetry, or (my favorite) watching a thunderstorm. But I need to take time out when the moment arrives and soak it in. I need to be intentional about it too - to look for just one beautiful thing every day.
Recently, Steve Whitford (also a friend of mine) and I were chatting in the comments at his Substack about forming a “rule of life” - forming a method of spiritual transformation. Something he said that was interesting to me is that certain types of behaviors or methods to spiritual transformation may appeal to different people because of their personality type. I thought this was a good point and one well worth exploring.
It made me think a little bit about whether I have a “rule of life” and I had to realize that, yes, in fact, that was the whole point of why I called my Substack “Just One Beautiful Thing.” It was a bit of a ‘head desk’ moment. It’s not just a rule of life, but I think it unpacks a way of looking at the future of the creative life in our world today.
I’ve lived by that very simple rule ever since my time in Stellenbosch. Every day, I look for one beautiful thing. It needs to be connected to the real world, not a digital experience. Sometimes I might use the digital to help me along, such as the Bible on my Kindle or the Book of Common Prayer app, but my prayer then must be bodily - I need to speak it out loud or put myself somewhere away from my desk or work. I imagine myself, if I have to, in some beautiful cathedral somewhere.
Sometimes, I don’t know what to do, as the day itself may have been stressful, the weather all wrong, and I feel surrounded by ugliness. Often, when the opportunity arrives, like a thunderstorm, I don’t want to slow down and check it out, I just want to get everything done before I get to enjoy. I have to remind myself that that sort of thinking is no use. Today’s culture has made as if productivity is the only virtue, and the only thing that rewards. I’ve had to learn that this is something of a noble lie.
When I started this Substack, I wanted to talk about the soul. That’s pretty much what I’m doing - by looking at culture, art, theology, and even journalism. I want to unpack what it means to have a soul in today’s soul-less, technology-driven, consumer-oriented and shallow world, and how we can think so our soul can sing. I think the refreshing we need for our soul can be found in the intersection, or weird space, between God’s Spirit and human culture.
That’s the meaning behind the name “Just One Beautiful Thing.”
The future of the creative life
It’s important to me that artists realize the unique space they play, as they essentially sit in this space between Spirit and Culture. It’s their job to bring what the Spirit of God is saying into the culture - to challenge culture, and to highlight the beautiful parts of a culture. As a pastor, one thing I’m passionate about is helping artists understand this role they play and giving them the encouragement and tools to do it so they won’t just become like the culture, adopting it and losing what makes artists, well, artists.
And when I say ‘artists’ I mean any person who engages in some sort of creative, making endeavor. Painters. Musicians. Dancers. Writers. Video game developers. Even journalists. And more.
One of the challenges these sorts of people face, and I count myself as one of them, is exactly where to go today to be heard, seen, and hopefully appreciated (but if not appreciated, at least heard and seen. I don’t mind if someone hates my writing, what makes me happy is at least they read it and engaged with it!). The internet was meant to open up more doors for artists than ever, and in some ways it did do that, while there have been many negatives. Today, it’s not just about the internet, however, it’s about the devices and technology that have opened it up to us but are now closing it in a bid to become the new gatekeepers. Silicon Valley no longer wants to open up the “information superhighway” to you, it wants to own the whole thing. It no longer wants to give you better access to music, it wants to produce it and have you consume what it makes. The techbros no longer want tech to be a tool to get things done in the real world, but want the tech to be the world. And they’re doing this by taking everything without even asking. Technology has moved into the realm of stealing the artist’s voice, the artist’s work, and commodifying it for the sake of what has become a cannabilistic industry.
Rant over, and I’ve written about this at length, and will continue to do so. The question of course is, what is to be done?
What’s to be done, as Ted Gioia says, is ‘think smaller’.
I’ve wrestled for a long time as to what to do about my writing. For some time, I thought I would maybe try and get a publishing deal. I’ve self-published several of my own books. I’ve been a ghostwriter for 15 years and wrote bestsellers. This year, I’ve turned down a ton of business because of my health. I’ve also wanted to focus on ministry and my local church, because that’s incredibly important to me.
But I still want to write, because I know I must. But what to do?
Recently, embarrassingly, I realized the missing the ingredient with my writing. It’s quite a simple one. It’s about getting back to the heart of it. The aim of my writing is to serve others. But, when you do something well, you begin to wonder how it may serve you. You begin to think, “career”. Because writing is an enjoyable exercise, it can serve you rather well. And so you want to pursue more of it so you can get to enjoy it - and if you get paid for it, and paid well, then you’ve hit the jackpot!
I realized that I had for too long pursued the writing life for me, and forgotten how it’s meant to serve others. How can I forget something so obvious? The same thing happened with my music. Switching this thought process around made me realize that trying to get a publishing deal is a waste of time. Who really benefits if I get a publishing deal? I can bet far less people than if I think small and use my writing to serve those who I actually know, or who can actually know me.
In other words, I realized that the pursuit of the big led to getting nowhere at all.
The internet has this ability to get us all to think that bigger reach means bigger impact. I’ve realized that this is absolute claptrap. If you track the careers of someone like Jordan Peterson (whatever you think of him), you realize he didn’t get to have big book tours because he aimed for big book tours. Actually, he started off trying to just help those he could help. What’s the point of everyone trying to shout on the internet to be seen? Far better to help those you actually can.
“Thinking smaller” for me means that it’s something of a waste of time to write 80,000+ word books as that’s what the publishing industry reckons ‘works’ with all of its data and marketing analytics. Rather, I’m looking backward to go forward. In the Gutenberg days, shorter works were cheaper to print and easier to distribute. And people distributed them to their friends. So I’m pivoting to shorter forms - treatises, or shorter theological devotionals (the Lo-Fi podcast is my experiment with that).
And this is all where the future of the creative life lies. We need to go back to analogue. People want authenticity. A New Romanticism may be on the horizon. We need to speak to actual, flesh and blood people. We need to get involved in each others’ lives. I would rather read a book written by a friend than a book written by another influencer just regurgitating ‘content’.
Get off the content machine
The future of the creative life is not in producing content. That was a big lie. Where has it gotten us? The future in that direction is nowhere beautiful. Everyone is producing ‘content’ today and it’s mostly just shouting now, and in any case it’s all getting sucked up by the big AI vacuum cleaner and spun for the benefit of big corporations, not for the benefit of real people who we can love.
The future of the creative life lives mostly offline. Not entirely, of course, technology can be a wonderful tool - but we have to use it as a tool again to help us create and make, not as a means to ‘build platform’ and enter the game as dictated to us by the ‘experts’ who need us to believe in the content lie so they can stay in business.
The future of the creative life lives in relationships. People are going to get fed up with AI-generated music and the unethical way it is made, and they’re going to want to go see live music again. I can bet they’re going to want to see bands again. They’re going to want to share good moments with friends. They’re going to want to meet writers or at least see them in the flesh again - a fact that was proved to me when I recently went to go see Jordan Peterson and 7,000 people showed up (to hear a guy talk about philosophy? Never when I was growing up did anyone really want to do that!). I can bet that people are going to want to go to poetry recitals again. They’re going to want to see art in the real world again. They’re going to be interested in the artists who make these things, because these artists are real and have a soul.
The future of the creative life lives in the local. People are starting to be interested in actual people that they have a higher probability of actually getting to engage with. Forget the hype of “AI” chatbots and deepfakes. It’s all hype that Silicon Valley is creating to get more funding. Real people are not really interested in fake people, except maybe as a toy to entertain for a few minutes. In the real world, no one seems to know the point of AI technology, especially since the product don’t actually work too well. The future is not the meta-verse (which already tanked), it’s not chatbots, it’s not the movie Her. No one really believes a chatbot is the answer to loneliness. The internet will be useful (as it always was) for connecting to real people and their art, but it will no longer be useful as a place for where that art predominantly lives. The art will live in the real world and people will want to connect with you because they know you, not because of your amazing ‘content strategy’ or your ability to post 1,000 tweets a day and shout louder than others.
The digital world used to be an escape from the physical world, but people are increasingly trying to find a way to escape the digital world. Why? To see just one beautiful thing, again, today, because that is good for the soul.
I’m increasingly optimistic that the future of creativity is going to be a good one. There is another shift coming. It’s long overdue. It’s going to mean a lot of change again. We might be on the cusp of a new way of life, a new enlightenment or reformation where something old is discovered new again. I could be waxing lyrical here, but I am convinced something unique is brewing under the surface - a return to soul.