13 Reasons to Keep Making Art Even If No One Gives a Shit
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You hit publish or post & the silence that follows is louder than a rejection. It’s not that people hated your work, it just slipped through the cracks without even the dignity of a no.
& that hurts. More than we admit.
Because artists — despite all our wildness & resistance — are not immune to that stubborn feeling of wanting to be seen. We crave community, but we’ve been trained to believe that community equates to a following acquired through content.
Still, at the heart of it, we want someone — somewhere — to feel lit up or wrecked or slightly more human because of something we made.
& yet…
We were not built for these algorithms, nor for the humiliating calculus of attention. We were not meant to turn our souls into content calendars. We were never supposed to watch our own so-called failure in real time, pixel by pixel, painted in red hearts & artificial bookmarks & false little paper-airplanes of “shares”.
Social media has done something brutal to artists. Especially the tender & weird, obsessive, hopelessly-in-love-with-the-moon ones. We arrived here looking for proof we aren’t alone, & instead we’ve become consumers of our own selves, our own success or the echoing silence.
We learned to refresh instead of rest.
To scroll instead of dream.
To watch the numbers climb or stall or vanish, & read meaning into every metric like they were tea leaves.
But this is a lie.
The truth is quieter, slower & harder to market. The truth is that making something —anything — is still holy. Process is still sacred. Art still matters even when no one claps. Most of the great artists in history died in obscurity. & that’s just the ones we know about.
What you create is allowed to be forgotten by the world & still remain an inexorable part of the world.
Here’s 13 reasons why you should keep making art even if no one gives a shit:
Because you are a little god every time you make something that didn’t exist before.
Because not everything that helps us see is meant to be seen.
Because you are not a factory, you are a forest. Some seasons are quiet. Some seeds bloom late.
“Because right now there is someone out there with a wound in the exact shape of your words.”1
Because even if it’s been said before, it hasn’t been said by you.
Because art laughs at borders & outlasts civilizations.
Because sometimes the only way out is through a song.
Because it’s alchemy: the artist’s loneliness, wonder, pain, joy, they way they see the universe…transformed into something a small world anyone can hold.
Because the act of making art rewires you on a cellular level. You leave the page different than when you arrived.
Because what feeds the spirit was never meant to feed the machine.
Because art has long been forged in the dark. Shadows help us distinguish existence from illusion.
Because you deserve to see yourself away from the eye of the world.
Because you were made for more than survival.
So what if no one gives a shit?
Give a shit anyway.
Give so many shits you build a garden from them.
Make compost of the silence. Grow strange flowers.
Make art.
& add your own reasons to that list, grow it like a monstrous phantom limb, be weird, be crazy, write, create, sing, love.
“Why Bother” by Sean Thomas Dougherty from The Second O of Sorrow (BOA Editions Ltd. 2018).
Needed to read this today. Thank you. ❤️
Thank you for sharing. I just posted an episode of my serialized novel, which hasn't gained much traction so far. But last night, as I spent hours in post-production of the voice-over of the text, I was struck by the beauty of what I was doing. I could have published it as is without taking out all the little mouth noises and say to myself, "it's good enough." No, that's not good enough. I want to give the listener an audio text of the highest quality I can. Regardless of how many views I get, when I click on the audio and hear my voice read my words out loud, I feel the beauty of making art. That's good enough for me.