I’m running through the Artist’s way, almost through week four. No reading allowed this week! I’m about halfway through Infinite Jest, and do 100 pages per week, so not reading has freed up a ton of time. To modernize the challenge,I’m also doing no YouTube and no podcasts. Headphones are for music (and zoom calls) only.
I love the morning pages journaling. I find the weekly assignments/ prompts to be fun, and have had some emotional reaction writing them.
Many people have opinions about the spirituality aspect of it. I’m a Daoist, and so just switching “god” for “the dao” each time I read it has been easy enough. Not a problem.
Sure, people aren’t as creative as they could be and often feel creatively shut down. The program up to this point has been effective at addressing that symptom. The book doesn’t see it as a symptom, however, it sees it as the disease, and therein lies my disagreement.
People are alienated from themselves and from each other as a result of our mode of production. There is no inner self to express, humans are social beings. Our differences come from different material conditions throughout our lives, but our experiences are mostly social; art is social, and so why people aren’t taking pictures and writing blog posts all day every day is not because they haven’t journaled enough, it is that we’re working 3 or 4 jobs to pay the bills and too worried about losing 1 or 2 of those jobs to LLM that doesn’t really know what is ever going on. We are made to be separate from ourselves through work, through advertisement, through consumption. We are only allowed to connect with other people certain times of the day in certain contexts.
In this way, the book reminds me of “Drawing on the right side of the brain”. That book, apparently, is scientifically wrong, but it helped me an a ton of other people learn how to draw. It doesn’t have to be exactly right in the fundamental theory to have some positive effect on the people that spend time going through it.
Stuff Cam Wrote 