January 2024 I speak to "artists" here but this applies to anyone. It's living the creative way. Living an inspired life. In this essay, I finished by saying artists were blocking themselves for things they didn't want but didn't know they didn't want. Indeed, as long as you haven't experienced Artist's Happiness, it's normal for you to fall into the trap of chasing things - be it metrics, audience or money. Artist's Happiness is, I believe, the same for every artist. Wether you're an artist or not, I conjure you to try this: Do, now, every idea that comes to your mind. Like it's an order. And do it in a savage manner. I don't mean ideas related to your preferred art. On the contrary, I recommend anything that is not your preferred art. I mean e-ve-ry idea that comes to mind. About a-ny-thing. Open the valves completely. For a start, you can use automatic writing. It intends to reaccess the stream of creativity and then let it flood in all areas of "doing" possible that will come to mind. Here's a practical example of a succession of inspired actions that can occur. So you can see exactly what I'm talking about: * You start with automatic writing. * You write so fast that your mind has to quit. * After a certain time, things start to arrive: poems, novels, even guidance about your life. * You feel like sketching some drawings now. You start drawing. * You think some of these drawings would look very good in paintings. * But you don't have any paint. You go buy some and come back. * Still moving too fast for your mind to plan anything, you let your hands get "possessed" by the movements that feel good. It's really all about reconnecting to what feels good. * You frenetically draw, splash, spill, spread whatever color comes, with big gestures. * Once you're done, you hang some of them on the walls. Even to your ceiling. * Why not cooking now? This super appetizing dish you just thought about! You cook it. * With paint still all over your forearms and knees, you decide that you're gonna eat crouched on the floor. Because it feels good. And with no spoon or fork, simply with your bare hands. Like a prehistorical man. Because it feels good. * You might even do that totally naked. Or in boxers maybe. Whatever feels good in the moment. * In fact, you're actually gRoOoOwling now. * Looking now at this tomato sauce all over your fingers, you start thinking that it really looks like paint! So you grab some of the paintings you just did and add tomato sauce on them with your fingers. This feels super good. * So good that you ask yourself how this would feel if you were spreading tomato sauce, not on the paintings, but... on your chest! * You spread tomato sauce on your chest. Hmmm, it feels sooo good. The sauce is still warm! * You wash your hands. You grab your phone. Cranking up some music, you start to shoot a little video of you dancing in boxers among those newly-born paintings. You're laughing! * You look at the video you just took and some photos of last week catch your attention. You edit them in a super "unaesthetic" savage way. And it feels super good for no reason. You don't now why. * You don't either know why but you feel like screaming now! You grab a pillow and scream into it at the top of your lungs. Now, you hear your partner just got home. Why not make love like society never existed? You spill some tomato sauce on the floor for the occasion. You start kissing, getting naked and sharing caresses and massages slipping on the tomato sauce all over the kitchen floor. Society and norms don't exist here, "it's just you and me". You lick the sauce on one of your partner's body part you've never licked before. And you start growling together. And you start screaming like animals. Because it feels good. And that nothing else in the world exists other than you two. With your bodies covered in paint, tomato sauce and the dirt that was on the floor, you're now making passionate and savage sex. Then sweat starts inviting itself into the mix and you think how wonderful it'd be to continue this love under the shower! You go into the shower but decide to block the hole so that it inundates the bathroom. Yes. You finally make tender, hyper-connected love on the inundated bathroom floor. If you don't have a partner, you were at the point where you just had screamed into your pillow. * Now, you find yourself completely speaking out loud! Answering questions to an imaginary interview in your favourite talk-show. They're asking about your art and way of living. * After 10 minutes of elaborate answers, you start giving a creativity class to university students. And you imagine what you'd do: * You would tell them that freeing creativity is going for what feels good with no interference or judgement of our conditionned minds. Simply for the sake of it because feeling good is the most coherent reason. (In the limits of law, of course.) * And you would jump on the table of one of the students in front of you. Asking him to scream with you whatever you both agree to scream. * And then ask him to draw on a paper whatever shape that comes to his hand. * Then another student to begin a random phrase and another one to finish it. * You'd then ask all of them to take a piece of paper, a pencil and start with drawing a simple dot. Then a line starting from this dot in whatever direction that feels good. Then a dot again at the end of this line. And again a line in whatever direction that feels good. To do that 50 to 100 times and then look at the drawing it now represents. As well as the sensation of relief they're feeling. To realize this drawing is in fact something pretty cool and absolutely not random! Something they couldn't have "thought", "planned", "conceived", "premeditated". Because the mind can't create and that it's all about bypassing it by reconnecting to your feelings. How? By doing just what we just did: doing what comes to mind, now, and that feels good for no reason. And not filtering it out. Doing it. And repeating it every "Now". Realizing there's this driving force behing this endless torrent of feel-good ideas popping up. And that you don't create these ideas. You "receive" them. Then you'll tell the same students to play a game when they have free time to hang out in the city: "At every intersection, choose the street that feels good for no reason, like you did with dots and lines. And see how you always end somewhere perfect for you that day..." You would tell them that it's just about cracking the dam enough to make it break, explode. Because the Source of good-feeling ideas that the dam was holding back is immensely powerful and infinite. That you cracked up your own dam a long time ago, on a lonely night, reading an essay written by a certain "Nahhu". That's how "crazy" the source is banging at the door for you ton embrace it. Kill the social self. It has encroached way more than you think on your creative self. This liberated, uncensored, disinhibited creative state is all I can wish you, my friend. From the bottom of my heart. It is Artist's Heaven. You'll look back in awe at all the pieces you'll have frenetically created: poems, novels, paintings, plastic art, videos, photos, songs, recipes, skits, clothes combinations... But also new encounters, jokes, ideas pondered, places discovered... Once you discover this state of disinhibited creation, discover all this EXPRESSION you had been restraining every day for a number of years you lost the count of, it now fills you up with extatic joy from the deep-within. To the brim. And you understand what they mean by "overflowing" now. You don't desire anything else anymore. Things pour out of you and electrify you when passing. It's now simply obvious that every external stuff - especially "SUCCESS" defined by audience, metrics, collaborations, money, validation... - can't COMPARE to this inner feeling coming from such a weird "mystical", "cosmic" place. Certainly not from anything given to you from the world around you. That these things are just "infos". That can be cool to think about [1] but nothing really more than that. 1 million times tinier than the existential fullness and profound electrifying joy of disinhibited creation. Receiveing and releasing on the edge. Flooding the world with new beings. You now know that, whatever happens, that's what you're gonna wanna do during all of the free time you have left in your life! Because it's just too good. Being the vessel. That if you had to stop something you were creating to go and get a Grammy Award, you would just think about rapidly going back home to continue this thing, while pronouncing your winner speech on the Grammy stage. Because the magnitudes of the 2 pleasures are incomparable. After a few weeks of creating whatever comes to your mind in all forms - and you're probably gonna discover new mediums of expression you had never tried - you'll naturally hear the calling to get back to your main art. With a totally refreshed approach. Not expecting anything from the pieces since you're already filled up to the brim by the blissful, life-transforming feeling of disinhibited creation. That's when you'll inherently apply this great advice of "having no expectations" that was so impossible to apply before. That's when you'll give birth to your most powerful pieces. Made out of overflowing cosmic joy. Notes [1] Pleasure from whatever metrics or "success" is a a pleasure from thoughts - about this metric - and is very shallow in essence.