If I were going back in time and could only bring one lesson back with me, it would be creating something of my own.
Doing so feels like realising you've lived your entire life with a clogged nose. You just won't be able to go back.
What do I mean by having something of my own? People obviously physically and legally have things. In fact, most people would say that with consumerism we tend to own too much.
It's easier to ask the question the other way. What do people have that's truly their own? The truth is that most of us own not just too little, but don't have anything truly of our own.
We are so disconnected from the things we own that we don't even know who and where they came from. The plate we eat off, the devices we live through, the beds we dream on. There is no story behind them beyond the ugly truth of exploited workers we prefer to hide between the folds of our minds.
The real kicker is that this commodification isn't just limited to our physical and mental possessions.
Every book we've read has been read by other people, our favourite movie is someone else's favourite, our clothes mass-produced by unthinking unblinking machines.
As even the narratives we tell and absorb are becoming increasingly algorithm-driven, they become increasingly derivative.
Our identity is now a character customisation with more options than ever before, which gives us the illusion of individualization.
Peasants in the 1600s didn't have the choice of being a “big titty goth girl” or “sigma male”, but they were deeply known as a person in their small community.
Now it’s the opposite. Two people from across the world can meet for the first time and tell the same jokes that they didn't make, peddle the same ideology they internalised from a mid youtube essay, and talk about whatever is hot in the subniche algorithm they’re in. Lego pieces that click with ease.
From what we own to what we like to how we think, who we are is becoming commoditised.
How do we stop our lives from becoming commodities? It's easy to criticise ‘the algorithm’, but the changes to our lives are deeply structural and too large to impact.
The one and only thing I've found that makes my life feel right is creating something original.
Living Happy vs Living Right
The word ‘right’ is important. It doesn't make me happier, per se. There's increasingly a modern obsession with living happy, but I've found that it's much better to live ‘right’.
It's just simply biologically impossible to be happy all the time (the hedonic treadmill is built into our dopamine neurocircuitry, we love the human condition 🤪). But part of it is that having your life feel ‘right’ supersedes feeling happy. It's really hard to be happy if your life doesn't feel right.1
What do I mean by living “right”? The best comparison I can make is to a tiger in a zoo.
By most human standards, it lives a much better life than in the wild. A peaceful life safe from starvation and disease, all without needing to work a minute. But there's something deeply depressing about a tiger in a zoo.
A tiger in a zoo is like working in a dead-end office job: comparatively easy to back when humans would literally run animals to exhaustion, yet nevertheless more soul-draining. Wrong. And I’m not just anthropomorphising. Tigers are routinely depressed in captivity and literally give up the will to live.
Creating something original, then, feels like how a tiger must feel when chasing its prey.
I doubt that it's feeling happiness. In fact, it's probably feeling stress. The most common population who have something of their own, artists, aren't exactly happy when doing art.
My image of an artist in motion is one of the brows furrowed in concentration, lips pursed in judgement, and eyes anything but closed in the way it does during a smile. It is fully open, absorbing the world in front of it.
Most artists I know feel if not straight-up anxious about their art, at least perpetually dissatisfied. Anyone who has painted, played music, or written knows that's what pushes them forward. It's not some imagined ecstasy as they fuss over every dab of paint, every note, every word.
It's getting it right. Or more accurately, fixing whatever is wrong.
If you've only lived to be happy, you wouldn't throw your rubbish away, you wouldn't risk hurt, you wouldn't risk a good life for something great.
Creating something original makes life feel right, but it also forms one of the most special relationships you can ever have.
The act of creation is locking hands with the universe.
When turning nothing into something tangible, you have to follow the grooves and curves of the universe. You have to dance along to its tune.
“The lonely mind in the busy city yearns for connection because it thinks human-to-human connection is the point of everything.” 2
The process of creating something of your own becomes in itself a kind of connection. A connection between you and the world. Between you and yourself.
It might be just me, but there's something special about knowing that this specific string of words has never existed in the universe before.
That there is something unique between me and the universe that has never before existed. That even if I die, and a million years later, I will have been there first, right here.
In the realm of ideas, there is no conversation of energy. It is common to take 1 + 1 and make 3, to spin ink into emotions, to turn enemies into lovers, one word at a time.
Something about that feels deeply right.
What society doesn’t know how to give
It's worth questioning why working on something of your own makes life feel so right.
Partially because the elements that make life feel right are universal, and partially to understand what working on something of your own really means.
Having something of your own is so important because it satisfies three necessary elements of life that society is really bad at satisfying. Mostly because society doesn't know how to satisfy them at scale, but also because society doesn't want to.
The first is replaceability. One of the ways we judge how valuable or meaningful something is is by how replaceable it is.
A commodity is, by definition, something replaceable. What does it say then, about a commoditised existence? What do you uniquely add to the lives of the people around you?
Replaceability also explains what initially seems like two conflicting desires. Wanting to fit in and wanting to stand out are actually two parts of a single desire. We want to play an irreplaceable role in something larger, to be the only red in a painting.
That's why being a cog in a machine isn't particularly meaningful, even though every cog is needed in a machine. Society would collapse without sewage cleaners, yet I don't see any of us lining up to be one.
This is also why thrifting is so meaningful to people. Thrifting is a way to imbue a little bit of your own story into the clothes. You had to physically go to the location and spend time picking from an incomplete and eclectic group of already worn clothes.
The struggle and irreplicable part of that process itself makes you feel like you own that clothing more. You can't redo it, because there's only one copy in that one store.
It's the same essence behind why relationships are so important and intoxicating. Every act of giving, every word, every laugh is something that is etched in time. This might be part of the underlying mechanism behind the sunk-cost fallacy.
Replaceability is also a good dimension to tell the difference between infatuation and love. Love is less replaceable. It's not that you can love only one person. It's that if you truly love a person, the love you have for them is specific to them. You can learn to love many, but the love isn’t interchangeable.
It works in reverse, too. Sure, other people have loved them, but not in the same way you do. If you feel like your love is replaceable, you're more likely to get jealous over truths like the number of previous partners or close friends because you feel like your love is competing with all the other love.
The second and simplest element is Autonomy. It's simply a fundamental human desire. There's a great amount of research that a sense of autonomy is critical to happiness and productivity.
But it's simpler than that: It's the principle behind why I don't want to do something I was initially planning to do once my mum tells me to do it.
Complete autonomy (anarchy) threatens the existence of society itself, so it's not only bad at giving autonomy but is explicitly strict in limiting it.
Good relationships are one of the last vestiges of our lives that fight against commoditisation because society can't control it (it still tries, of course).
A good relationship is never yours and truly yours, because it's also equally someone else's. That's part of what makes them beautiful. Relationships can only exist as a mutual choice, made in agreement again and again.
This full autonomy of both parties does, however, make relationships lack a certain security. You can't guarantee that what you own will keep being yours. You can't guarantee that life won't take them away.
When I was in middle school, a friend complained about how much her boyfriend's farts stink. I was deeply jealous, and naturally, wanted a “girlfriend I can fart in front of". What I really wanted was a relationship that was secure enough for me to be free without them leaving.
When people feel a relationship slipping away, a natural instinct for people is to desperately try to cage the relationship. But what they really want isn't just something that won't be taken away, but something that can't.
Having something of your own is a relationship that is fully secure, and that allows you to be completely free. Only by being free to explore can you arrive at what's most compatible with you.
Compatibility is the third and most crucial element of our life feeling ‘right’. The most meaningful things you own are the ones that bind to the shape of your soul the closest.
The odds are that what is most compatible for you isn't an existing job. Maybe you were born to politic in the consulting management world or be a cashier at Kroger, but are the rest of us just supposed to be fucked if our ‘calling’ doesn't align with a job?
It isn't that you specifically have to create something original. There are probably other ways to satisfy these fundamental desires.
It's that if you create something original it can’t help but satisfy them. Creating something will naturally fit the intersection between your quirks, your way of thinking, and your passions perfectly.
Autonomy isn’t just about the ‘freedom to’. It’s also a ‘freedom from’. A project linked to a reward society gives you will always limit your autonomy, if not directly than from what you’re aiming towards.
It’ll also be irreplaceable. You can't help but leave fingerprints on what you mould. You can't help but imprint your soul in the process of creating something original.
In fact, I've been saying ‘create something original’, but that's redundant. Almost all acts of creation can't help but be original. Anything you create becomes irrevocably something of your own.
Creating something of your own inevitably becomes the most engaging thing in your life. Engaged is the word I would use for a tiger pursuing its prey. That's what creating is to humans.
The lies that stop us
Creation isn’t just about an abstract satisfaction. For the first time in history, your passion can make a better living than doing conventional work. Everything that earns the most money is based on creating something original. Startups to a normal job, making music to covering it, consuming to creating.
Now you can go from making songs in your parent's attic to directing your own movie, skateboarding around New York City to become Casey Neistat, or being really good at playing with balls to become a millionaire.
Hell, there are people making over a million dollars a year selling fish tanks. The concept of occupation hasn’t changed this much since the Industrial Revolution.
But despite that, you're probably not seriously considering starting to create something of your own.
After all, something has to explain the fact that most of us are heading straight for a midlife crisis after spending half of our lives and still contributing nothing original to the world.
Interestingly, this is mostly because of some deeply embedded misconceptions our early education has planted.
The first is that we trick the young, which is the best time to be creating something of their own, into thinking that to create something worth creating you need experience and expertise.
But history tells us that this assumption isn't true. Newton discovered calculus, gravity, and light composition when he was 23. Mozart performed in front of 2 imperial concerts at 6 years old. Bo Burnham (who has multiple Netflix specials and directed a movie) was 16 when he posted comedy songs on YouTube.
In fact, even when we look at the pinnacle of ‘adult’ expertise, such as running a company, Mark Zuckerberg beat them all starting at 19 years old.
Of course, by the time you're supposedly experienced enough to create something meaningful, society squeezes the time and energy you have to do so with this magical threat called ‘being homeless'.
The second big misconception is probably what you were thinking while reading the first example. Society reserves the non-beaten path for people who are ‘special’. Probabilistically, none of us here are ‘great’ like Isaac Newton or Mozart.
But the fact that they created something so great wasn't the reason they started doing it. In fact, it was the opposite. They were drawn to something of their own, and that happened to lead to greatness.
In fact, the worst way to do something great is to go looking around for something great to do. Things that seem ‘great’ are the most examined and thus least likely to contain something undiscovered.
How many Newtons have been subdued with the hindsight bias blinding us with their ‘greatness’ when they weren't ‘great’ until they finished what they started?
But more importantly, the bar to make it worth it is much lower than greatness. Doing great work means doing something important so well that you expand people's ideas of what's possible. But it's worth it to simply do something that makes your life feel right. There's a big difference between how achievable those are.
I've always been someone who's felt like I was interested in everything but passionate about nothing. It turns out that I had just been tricked by the concept of ‘a calling’.
Not only is it a fixed way to look at people, but it's also constrained by the boxes society has produced. The one question that people ask kids is what they want to ‘be’, which is a choice between the 10 jobs they know.
Most of the most successful kids probably end up doing something that doesn't yet exist when the question is asked, but this is the question that kids are asked all the way until they graduate college, at which point the question shifts to the adult version of “What do you do”.
In fact, Isaac Newton himself isn't exactly didn't exactly have a calling.
He was equally obsessed with alchemy and theology as he was with physics. Newton's time dabbling in alchemy was totally unproductive because it was, well, physically impossible. But if he waited for something to call his name, to engulf him in passion, he would've never stumbled upon calculus or the decomposition of light.
It's always better to do something because you can always simply switch if you find something better to do. “A calling” is cultivated more than stumbled upon.
By casting aside this concept that there's a magical moment in which I will forever be consumed by passion (doesn't this sound like what society says about love 🤔), I now see the world as filled with too many wonderful things I want to work on, rather than nothing.
The last and by far worst way society tricks people from creating is by slandering work. This is a whole essay in itself, but by the time we leave high school, there is a deep association with the concept of work being unpleasant.
It's a bit sad to think of all the high school kids turning their backs on building treehouses and sitting in class dutifully learning about Darwin or Newton to pass some exam, when the work that made Darwin and Newton famous was actually closer in spirit to building treehouses than studying for exams.3
This is probably the most important benefit creating has for me. It fixes my relationship with work itself, and that impacts more than productivity.
When we're young, we build confidence by choosing whatever trait we're superior in, whether attractiveness, athleticism, or intelligence. But I believe that we all have an implicit understanding that none of those are earned. The only thing we have control over in life is what we put into it.
Our confidence is built on a facade until we put in enough effort to earn it.
Our solution is to just tell kids to “be yourself” and hope that they'll be accepted for it. But there's very little that's more scary than being your true self and not being accepted.
In fact, ‘being yourself' is surprisingly hard advice in itself. Our concept of self is so complicated that it's rather stunning that we reduce the application of it to two words and call it a day. But what could “be yourself” more than creating something original?
And in that process of becoming yourself, you can't help but put in work. You can't help but build the foundation for a truthful confidence, blooming into acceptance of a now much more actualised self.
From this angle, how could anyone imagine a life without creating something of your own?
This is the longest piece yet. Being concise is a strong weakness of mine, so this almost feels like a failure, but this is the product of many rounds of cutting.
It also is so long because creating something of my own has become a keystone to my life, and writing about it has revealed, combined, and explained so many ideas to me that I feel at least relatively good about the insight per word ratio, which is probably a better measure than a total length of the piece.
Also, I’m curious as to how many people actually find this interesting enough to make it to the end can you dm me lmao.
Having things that boost happiness without fulfilment helps hide this. That's why wealthy people are actually more prone to depression and mid-life crises than regular people.
From “The Midnight Library” by Matt Haig. The full quote talks about a connection with nature, but in my opinion creation makes for a much deeper relationship with the universe.
From Paul Graham’s “A project of one’s own”. A lot of information & ideas were pulled from his essays, which I highly encourage reading.