un-Commodifying Creativity

Lately, I've been having some feelings.

 

feeling distracted, feeling aimless, feeling like I'm not accomplishing "enough", feeling like I "should" be doing more of any given number of activities, and a lot of these feelings have been related to my creative life in one way or another.

 

This blog has been quieter than I initially hoped it would be. This isn't so much because I haven't been creative, but because my drive to make & do stuff has been taking me in a different direction lately. As I've mentioned before, I gain interest pretty easily.

 

At the same time, I've been thinking about the idea & act of Commodifying Creativity. You know what this is, even if you've never heard it said quite this way before (& by no means am I claiming to have invented this idea; I probably heard somewhere at some time, somehow). This is what it looks like, though--or, I should say, 'this is one way it might look': One is engaging in some creative endeavor. A friend or passerby sees this & immediately asks or tells how this can be turned into money. "You should open a shop!" "Do you sell on etsy?" "You need to have a booth at the street fair!"

 

There's nothing inherently wrong with any of these ideas. As a person who is not independently wealthy & who would very much like to have a bit more money, this might seem like a natural thought process. Also, I am by no means hating on people who produce to sell. I have simply realised that this is not a process that necessarily works well for me. So, rather than plan projects based on questions like "will knitters think this is cute & interesting to knit, but not too easy & not too hard?" or "is this too simple to be a pattern?" or "will this be too complicated to write a pattern for?", I am going to redirect to my original plan of making what I want to make & trusting that my ideas are more awesome than I think they are & that they will go in exactly the direction they are meant to go.