You do not need to create more than you consume.

I was sitting on my bed in the middle of a spring day, with Lana Del Rey quietly humming from my CD player. My window was open and my room smelled like my lavender candle as I made my first Substack account.

I was very excited to join this community. I heard it was a good place for unique voices and no ads. I enjoyed scrolling on it for about five minutes, and then I logged off for what would turn into a few months.

I, of course, love this site now. But when I first used it, every other post I saw had the theme of “creating more than you consume”. It’s a cute concept, but when I hear the same topic brought up over and over I can tell that the writers aren’t listening to their own advice. If they were, I wouldn’t have seen a hundred essays about the same thing. While this is how trends work, I find it funny that writing about the trend is directly contradicting what it’s saying.

I do not agree with the notion of creating more than consuming and this is why. First of all, the word “consume” makes my skin crawl. A word often used in cannibalistic novels should not also appear on my cutesy little Substack feed. It turns the act of engaging and appreciating art into a labor of shoving down your throat the great works of the past just for the sake of it. I feel that the word is also often used when talking about doom scrolling on TikTok and I think there is a great danger in associating appreciation of art with soul rotting short form video content. “Consume” is a gross word and makes the act of enjoying the world into some evil thing we do to avoid creating.

You are not creating more than you consume, if what you’re creating is the same thing every internet presence has talked about. You’re engagement with art should turn into more creativity, and by that I don’t mean the act of simply writing and posting it. I mean the act of writing something new, or at least something we’ve seen but told from a different perspective.

The internet has turned the act of creating into something you do for people’s consumption and that’s why we are all writing the same thing over and over again with no new point of view. Congrats everyone, we have finally merged art with capitalism and consumer culture.

I understand why this is all happening. It’s the micro trends of it all. But I do not want to criminalize engaging with art. We do not need to appreciate less art, we just need to appreciate different art. The reason the art we love does not turn into more creation is because we are not loving things outside of what people on TikTok love. I want to hear new perspectives and learn new things. I do not need one more person to tell me about Sylvia Plath, why trad wives shouldn't be trending, how to be more whimsical, and that it’s bad everyone thinks they need to wear tankinis. These topics were all interesting for about two seconds and then everyone started to rip them off and create cheaper versions of the conversation.

We need to let people who critique things and bring new things to the table say what they need to say, without feeling the need to write the same thing in different words. We should be contradicting things and asking questions, not rewording and posting on Substack.

Of course, a lot of conversations need to be had in our current world and art will spark that. But it loses its power after it’s filtered through different people ten times. We need to start engaging with work outside of the internet sphere and find weird things to appreciate. You can write about a topic that isn’t trending and people will appreciate it more, I promise. And if they don’t, who cares. Art is not to be made just to sell.

There is an underlying fear here of being too weird. After all, we let weird things only be different to a certain amount before it’s unsettling. I think this voice can be crushed if we make art that is unsettling or cringe, just because we love it, and then we can branch out into new territories of conversation. Let your heart race with fear of knowing you’ll be made fun of and judge by a lot of people, then put it out into the world anyways. That is how you create revolutionary work. No one ahead of their time had the thought process of staying on track with what society was doing.

I understand that this post is a little hypocritical. After all, I am writing about a topic that a million people have written about while saying how it’s bad to chew up and spit out the same work. But the bottom line is you do not need to “consume” less, you just need to pick up a random book about a topic you’ve never heard about or go to an art museum that doesn’t have any famous pieces. We need to branch out in what we are learning because if we rely on the internet for our hobbies and interests we will all eventually fade into human micro trends. So please, write about weird stuff that wouldn't make a viral TikTok just for the sake of putting out new work and perspective. We need to become more individually different, as an act of rebellion towards a world trying to make us mindless buyers.