I’ve had a similar conversation with maybe a half-dozen people recently, about how “work”—in the sense of doing what one does to make a living, and especially creative work—has slowly grown in definitional scope to encompass things well beyond the work itself.

It’s possible, if you’ve already become a well-known entity, to make a living just writing, just painting, just making music or food or whatever else. You have a name and probably other people to handle the other stuff for you.

But for most of us this is not the case: we live in a world of “content” and content machines that demand ever-more of it if we want to keep a toe in the limelight; so a lot of effort is invested in feeding that machine.

This dynamic is so prevalent that even successful musicians and performers are being told their labels won’t work with them on new albums until a song from said album goes viral on TikTok.

It’s become impossible for many authors to get a publishing deal without first submitting their social media numbers to the publisher, and if you don’t have tens or hundreds of thousands of people actively engaging with your online content, it’s probably a no-go.

This isn’t an inherently horrible thing, as sometimes truly valuable and interesting work is created alongside what we consider to be our main work.

An artist might give an interview on a podcast that changes the lives of listeners, just as a writer might produce “bonus content” for their Patreon that supporters cherish as much or more as their last book.

But it’s an interesting dynamic to consider, as it raises questions about what different professions actually entail these days, whether it’s possible to make a living from one’s non-paycheck-oriented work without also engaging in supplementary efforts of this kind, and if there might be a way to create separate structures (on scale or individually) that allow us to focus more on the work itself, rather than those additional content-related concerns.

Are there things we might do that would allow us to spend more of our productive hours and energy on our books or paintings or albums, and less on the drum-banging we’re incentivized (or required) to engage in to make a living from such work?

This is something I’ve been turning over in my mind for years, and I’ve experimented with all sorts of approaches to dealing with it.

My contemporary default is to ensure all my projects work well together and that my lifestyle generally supports my work so that I don’t have to spend much of my finite resources on pure marketing efforts and materials.

Just by doing my thing, sharing stuff I think is valuable, engaging with folks in enjoyable ways, and hunkering down to do the work itself I’m generally able to pay my bills.

It’s a risky approach, though, and I suspect it wouldn’t work (even at the moderate level I’ve achieved) had I not spent so many years shoulders-deep in the other stuff—the content-generation side of modern creative professions.

Everyone will have a different perspective on, experience with, and tolerance for this world of self-promotion and content-farming, and I think that’s good, as—despite my own concerns and hesitations about such efforts (and the platforms and entities that’ve become unavoidable middlemen in the creative marketplace)—it has probably allowed more people to establish a presence in creative industries by weakening former gatekeepers.

It’s a massively imperfect setup we’ve got, then, but it’s better than some alternatives. And all most of us can do is develop an awareness of it and its downsides as we try to find relatively stable and ethically sound ways of operating within it.

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