From Consumer to Creator: Building a Personal Archive of Complete Thoughts in a Consumption-Driven World

My entire world is built for consumption and not creation. My phone knows it. My TV knows it. My computer and social medias, they definitely know it. Feel familiar? You’re in this world too, I’m sure of it. If you’re reading me, it’s probably because you’re in the same swamp of slop and trying to do something so your creative muscles don’t atrophy. There’s a way out. Or, there’s a way through - to creativity - and it’s not killing consumption off in the name of creativity, it’s actually in the combination of the two, and focusing on the space between tension and resolution.

In 2012, I was in 100% consumption mode. Sure, I was having conversations at work, and - I was kind of in a genuine friendship hole at that point, which is a whole other story, but I was working in finance, in a post-Global Financial Crisis world, trying to be a corporate person, and not hate others as much as I was hating myself.

I consumed news. I consumed blogs. I consumed, on occasion, books. I consumed TV. I consumed social media. I consumed podcasts. I consumed garbage of every variety across all of these aforementioned formats and others not even worth remembering right now.

And, I was miserable. A frustrated consumer. Not just of stuff, but of everybody else’s ideas, with barely a skosh of my own.

Remember in elementary school - before the cliques totally clicked, when you had weird stuff you did at home, or with your family, or even with your buddy down the street that you didn’t socially test to find out it was weird?

Building forts in the woods, or action figure games, or whatever your weird little jam that made you happy was. I’m talking about the age before you got laughed at for it and stopped. I must have had 50 of these things. Crying is a weird one of them too. I gave that up in 6th grade after a bully, who was about to kick my ass after gym class, made me cry and then opted not to beat me up because… “tears?!” Decades, friends, decades. Decades and therapy well into my late 30s and early 40s, just to start to fully reconnect with this stuff (and yes, I cry all of the time now, from “No I’m not, OK I am, a little” single tear cries all the way to full 90s Claire Danes levels, with no bullies in sight).

In that window of little kid-dom, before you had any meta awareness of taste of social proof, you didn’t consume without creating. Your curiosity told you something was fun, or interesting, or genuine, you threw yourself into it, and then you thought, “That was awesome/fine/makes sense, I’ll do that again.”

“I’ll do that again” is like abracadabra when you think of it like that. It’s full of an awareness. It’s full of admitting the next time life makes you curious about something you’re consuming, you’ll take another turn of creating some meaning out of it.

Which is very different than swearing to yourself to never cry publicly again out of shame. Although, that’s a version too, but dead-ending a future response is indicative of a whole other suite of trouble.

So, life beats it out of you. You start consuming without creating. It’s safer. And then one day you wake up, like I did in 2012 when I made my first podcast-related note in the notes app on my phone, and you say, “That was weird.”

And you try to do more with it, but you can’t, because you see all the other people making stuff you consume and you realize you miles and years and multiple degrees behind anything worthy of THAT.

It took me almost 5 more years to work out that I’d settle for a single complete thought.

Over the course of those 5ish years, how I thought about a complete thought changed a lot too. I started to realize, anything complete was entirely rooted in curiosity, and anything curious was entirely rooted in tension.

Tension isn’t just about strain or stress or whatever tension headache on your tensest day you’re thinking of first. In music, tension also means to stretch. On smaller scales and larger ones, musical tension refers to how far you’ve stretched away from, another excellent word, especially to pair up here, resolution.

Tension is the stretch away, resolution is the snap back. There can be, but doesn’t have to be, any conflict in that type of tension. And, if you complete the stretch and resolve, you’ve completed a something. Maybe it’s a simple chord change, or maybe it’s an entire orchestral work. In all cases, tension and resolution together is the key.

Curiosity happens when we pick up on some tension. We pick up on something that’s a little off, or out of place, or peculiar to us in real time. The trick to converting that out of body interest into genuine inspiration is to look at it and ask, “Why?” Look for the tension and concrete or only possible resolution as it exists outside of you. Then, and only then, ask what that tension and resolution triggers inside of you.

The reflection, the internal tension and resolution in response to the external tension and resolution, is a complete thought.

It’s a piece of creative output too.

Call it content. Call it a note to self. Call it a Personal Archive entry.

In 2017 I decided the way I’d consume less and create more was actually to consume the same amount, but force at least one complete thought per day into a publicly unfindable website I began to think of as my Personal Archive.

If a handful of my favorite curiosities from the day or week or recent past in my notes could result in one collected memory for me to look back on later, how else could I use it? Who else could I share the post with, or just mention something in conversation to? What other thoughts would start to connect across all of these?

In the last few weeks I’ve gotten messages from a handful of people about this process. One was from a person who had a wildly successful piece of online writing and now he doesn’t know where to jump back in, since he’s sure he’s never going to clear that impossible bar again anytime soon. I looked at my notes that day to assure him he didn’t need to pour his heart out on demand, and pointed at my own entry that day (based on a series of notes from a week prior) where a joke about a Too Short song turned into a riff about friendships in public.

There’s no virality there. Or, at least, I’m not expecting any. But - there’s all sorts of deep internal reflection there, as I play with the tension between my weird interests and how it resolves on friends I’m not scared to be myself in front of. It’s related. If we break out of the consume-only mode and start creating something - anything - too, we start to get our creator flywheel spinning.

Every single entry is a new start. It’s one place where something I consume, if only because it caught my attention, can be converted into a complete thought. And the common denominator is and always will be that tension and resolution underpinning it all. Finishing a post completes a loop. Noticing the next curiosity makes it a habit, and a hard habit to quit.

Don’t let the world steal creativity from you. Balance what you consume with something you create. No matter how small, and you’ll start to connect that network in-between your ears with the network across the rest of your life, and the world, and - I can tell you from experience, who knows where you’ll be almost 8 years in where I am now.

Don't know how to start a Personal Archive? The first step is simple: Notice one thing today that makes you curious, jot down why, and share it somewhere - even if just with yourself. Or if you already have a Personal Archive, send me a message. I'm putting resources together to track others who have picked up this habit, and help people who want to get started.