Fun Is a Sustainable Strategy

When you work in digital media long enough, you start to see everything through performance. It's been a long road from the days of Xanga, DeviantArt and Tumblr (I hear the latter two are still alive?)

Back then you posted because you had fun making whatever you were making and you were excited to share it to the world. You found your people slowly then.

Bringing it back to now: as an emerging artist, performance is essentially hell on earth because creation becomes tied to output.

Then output becomes tied to results and before you realize it, creativity starts serving the algorithm instead of the artist.

And that’s when everything stops being fun and you want to go hermit mode. Because now the stakes feel higher than they actually need to be.

When you start asking will this perform instead of is this interesting? or when perfectionism stops me from creating, I ask one question:

Would this be fun to make?

Because fun as a strategy invites iteration and makes it easier to try again. If you aren’t having fun sharing your work, there’s a good chance your audience isn’t having fun engaging with it either. People can feel when something is strained.

The strategy part in the "fun equation" is iteration, and that is what actually builds momentum, rather than intensity.

People get caught up in pushing content for the sake of pushing content in order to appease the algorithm gods. There’s a lot of posturing and positioning in online spaces, and understandably so. Because when your goal is visibility, sometimes you need a bit of elbow grease and raw persistence (I respect the hustle.)

But if you’re an artist, you’re working with your intuitive side and structure is more difficult to execute. And intuition burns out FAST when it’s treated like a machine.

Again, FUN is a sustainable strategy. This doesn't mean forget about your numbers, quit your projects or the structures you built.

When I let myself enjoy the process, I can rest easy knowing that everything is still in motion. The learning continues as the road continues to open up, discovering what worked, what didn't work and then the next iteration does a little better.

Because in the long game — whoever has the most fun wins. ✨