Grappling For Purpose

On why the relationship we have to our passion matters more than where it leads

I find myself largely concerned with two things: the day-to-day of my family life, and some kind of purpose outside of that. I sometimes wonder if, dropped into another life in another world, this obsessive need to be productive and create would transpose into something other than making music. My hunch is it probably would, but my life journey landed me here, and understanding my relationship with my creative life has become more interesting to me as I get older, as I try to make sense of myself, my relationship with happiness, with balance.

I think what I’ve been circling is this: maybe the goal isn’t the outcome of creative work, but the relationship we build with it.

I’ve spent half my life around musicians, writers, designers, producers, and working with a couple of hundred students a year on music courses. My obsession used to be how to decode the industry to be successful, how to decode a song to write a hit, how to build something meaningful and unique to me. Over time, that obsession has been transferring into something else: understanding purpose in other people. I watch friends and see their happiness, their self-worth, their entire life arcs shaped by a need for purpose. They use it to define themselves. Work is often just a part of that ecosystem. Some are lucky and find a way to make work a cog they’re comfortable with, others aren’t, but either way the need for creative purpose runs through their lives like something deeper, harder to name.

When I tried to write about this last year in The Beautiful, Crushing Act of Expression, I reached for ikigai. The Japanese have a word for the reason for being, the value in life. English doesn’t have one that quite captures it. A year on I’m not sure ikigai is right either, because what I’m describing isn’t always a reason for being. Sometimes it’s the thing in the way of being, the shadow purpose casts. Either way I still don’t have the word for it.

I’ve written before about this thing being most usefully thought of as the sand that connects all the stones in your life, like in a Japanese garden. The gaps, the thing that holds it all together. Saying that, and actually making your brain reconceptualise your life that way, are two very different things. For most of us, the way we define ourselves is something we’re constantly chasing. It’s never quite how we want it, and when we get it we move the goalposts.

A year on from that first piece I see this differently. As something that exists across all ages, not just early in a creative life. It’s worth acknowledging I live in a western country with a healthcare system and no war on my doorstep before I say the next bit, but we have time. Time that we think we should be doing something different with than what we are, time we use to think we should be somewhere we are not, that there should be more. So at what point do we stop, and at what point do we decide this is enough, this is good? I don’t mean settling. I think constant output and exploration can be a destination too. So why is it so hard to find that?

The real stories rarely raise their head. They get preserved for quiet moments where they burst out: a text conversation in sarcastic irony, an outburst of frustration on social media disguised as a take about AI or Spotify, a confession at the end of the night to someone in the inner circle. The acceptable subject acts as cover for the actual one. Our stories are varied: the career that nearly happened save for some bad luck or a bad person, the passion you don’t have time for, the career that has become commercial and now lacks what we got into it for.

I often wonder why we apply a different framework to art than we do to the gym, where we set aside time each week to do a workout but don’t need it to lead anywhere beyond what it does in that moment. Or why my grandmother’s embroidery never needed to lead to success for her to love her artistic journey. It flourished in her later life, not financially, just as part of her life. We allow those things to exist without outcome, but for some reason we don’t allow that for art.

There is an all or nothing pressure on the arts, especially music, where local bands, music teachers, community steel bands are derided as places people go after failure. The confidence we build to get us through the challenge of chasing that career becomes a wall that keeps us able to keep showing up, but it also makes us treat others the way we fear being treated. The language strays into cruel as a norm, a way of coping. It’s not a joy to have, it’s like a ball and chain, where acting on it has for so long been tangled with a pressure to end up in a certain place, where to talk about it openly is only for those who are already successful, where “hobbyist” is used as an insult. Even though so often, those in a perceived successful position are stressed and unhappy, and those who love their thing and have separated it from work are much more balanced.

I happened to be reading Nadia Asparouhova’s Antimemetics this week, and she touches on René Girard’s idea that we don’t form our desires intrinsically. We form them through aspirational models we unconsciously orient ourselves around. In simple terms, we don’t just want things, we want what people we admire seem to want. There is a subject, the person who wants something, and an object, the thing they want, but the most compelling part is the model, the person the subject wishes to imitate through their desire of the object. We crave certain things not because we actually want them, but because the people we wish to imitate have them.

It put words around something I’ve been thinking about for a while. There’s a spotlight, and it lands on certain people through a chain of events: talent, timing, luck, structural advantage, the right introduction at the right moment. The most successful are often the first to admit it, they know what got them there. But once the spotlight lands, the people in it become the models, and the rest of us, without really noticing, start shaping our desires around them.

We don’t just want what they have. We start to believe their version of a creative life is the only one that counts. We try to fit into the box they sit in, even though the box was never designed for us, and most of the time we wouldn’t have chosen it if we’d built our own. We narrow our work, narrow our ambitions, narrow our sense of what success looks like, all to imitate something we didn’t choose and may not even want.

If our purpose wasn’t shaped this way, if we weren’t trying to imitate someone we’d been told to want to be, we might make more original work. We might collaborate more. We might recognise each other rather than competing for the same shape. The artists who interest me most, Elijah, Holly Herndon, are often the ones who seem to have stepped outside this, who use their position to redirect attention back to the scene that produced them. It’s what people who actually understand the culture do once they get a platform. Because the culture/scene isn’t at the tip. It’s in the thousands of people whose presence makes the tip possible: the relationships, the local scenes, the language and aesthetic developing across people who will never appear in the spotlight. The unicorns came from this and many are still inside it. The spotlight is a small part of a much larger system.

The mid-tier of creatives isn’t the middle. It’s where everything actually lives. So a healthy relationship with creative purpose isn’t a consolation prize, it isn’t what you settle for when the spotlight didn’t find you, it’s the condition that lets a creative culture exist in the first place. What I want to articulate, and I think this is the piece I’ve been trying to write for a while, is that those of us with a healthy relationship to our purpose are not failed ‘unicorns’. We are the success. We are what the spotlight is borrowing from.

The goal isn’t the tip. It’s the relationship, the thing that lets us keep showing up, the thing that makes the work possible in the first place. Because without that, there is nothing for the spotlight to sit on.

If that shift landed, I think it would change something. For the people giving up, for the people falling out of love with their work, for the way we treat each other. I don't know if I've made this up in my head, but underneath everything, I don't think any of us do this alone. Too much of our mental energy and attention goes on those we see as above us, and not enough on ourselves and each other.

Next month I’m putting on my first ever live show for my new EP / Project, its called Alone Together… but its a lot more than than a normal show, its an exhibition, a place to reflect, a place to connect.

Read more and get tickets now