This One Doesn't Count
You might have been able to tell from my writing style that I mainly dictate my blog posts while walking my dog. So at the moment, I am enjoying the smell of the Hill Country after the rain. And I am excited to think about what the rain is doing to the forests that I will begin to enjoy as we begin a new season.
In my seasonal mythology, it is the first week of the next season, called Early Summer. Because summer is so long in Central Texas, it makes sense to split it up into two eleven-week seasons and really celebrate the differences between them. Early Summer, when the trees are leafy, the rain has moistened the ground, and the temperature is not yet so hot that we can’t really enjoy the outdoors. The birds. The flowers. And wandering into the heartwood.
This is not a productive season, as much as it is a chance to release the things that I’ve been working on and celebrate with the people in my life.
For that reason, the post today is going to be all about what I’ve been reading. There are several books or articles that I’ve been looking at that all circle around the same problem.
Books and links:
The Score by C. Thi Nguyen - bookshop.org:
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-score-how-to-stop-playing-somebody-else-s-game-c-thi-nguyen/10cacf42dab73bd5
The Score - libro.fm: https://libro.fm/audiobooks/9798217163588-the-score
In Defense of Dabbling by Karen Walrond - bookshop.org:
https://bookshop.org/p/books/in-defense-of-dabbling-the-brilliance-of-being-a-total-amateur-karen-walrond/22158836
In Defense of Dabbling - libro.fm: https://libro.fm/audiobooks/9798341905184-in-defense-of-dabbling
Fast Company pieces - Wrong definition of success: https://www.fastcompany.com/91501882/youre-not-burned-out-you-have-the-wrong-definition-of-success Careers aren’t ladders they’re quilts: https://www.fastcompany.com/91486024/careers-arent-ladders-theyre-quilts https://
Stylist - Competence hangover: https://www.stylist.co.uk/life/careers/competence-hangover-signs-explained/1062193
In the book by C. Thi Nguyen called The Score, he talks about the games that we play in capitalism, how we keep track. He’s a game philosopher, and he explores how treating life like a game has its benefits and its drawbacks. His big point has to do with this idea of value capture: when we choose a metric, that metric can end up colonizing something that we love and works to redefine something that matters to us.
An example of this would be when you start tracking the number of steps you take every day. It turns walking into a game, which is great, but then you are suddenly angry that you left your watch upstairs when you were about to take a walk, because it “doesn’t count.”
And then there is a book by Karen Walrond called In Defense of Dabbling. She is talking about keeping your hobby as a hobby. In a word, amateurism. The word amateur used to mean a lover of art. And now it just means you’re not good at it, which is, I don’t know, kind of a terrible indictment of the world that we’re living in.
This brings up the idea of a competence hangover: that the worth of an activity becomes fused with how useful it is, and this allows exhaustion with your everyday life to build up silently and slowly, until suddenly you are stretched out flat. That idea was brought up in the Stylist piece on competence hangovers.
There are also two articles from Fast Company. One about the wrong definition of success, how you can hit every milestone and still feel nothing. And one about careers not being ladders, but being quilts, which obviously the textile idea really appeals to me. You need to be building this checkerboard of skills, rather than trying to reach a certain pinnacle, because there is no safety at the top of the ladder, especially when there is no ladder.
All of these are the same problem, just wearing different clothes.
This brings me to a confession. Painting used to be a hobby. I started painting as a hobby. Then a colleague pointed out that if I took a silk painting workshop and got good at silk painting, it could count as creative scholarship for my work. And yeah, that was a definite choice.
Elevating it to become a serious practice was a choice. And for me, it was the right choice. But it involved actually deciding that I needed a new professional identity, that I was unhappy with my identity as an academic scientist, that I felt academic science has become bankrupt in the U.S. to a certain extent. It has been damaged through its connection with federal grants, which have turned out to be a tool of corruption, and with its connection to the peer review journal system, which turns out to be riddled with falsehood, especially with the introduction of AI. And this unsatisfactory system just isn’t having the impact on the world of sustainability that I’d hoped. Hundreds of thousands of journal articles later, and we still haven’t solved the real problems in life.
Taking what was a hobby and turning it into a serious practice was irreversible. I can’t have that hobby back as a way to relax, even though painting is still very relaxing. It’s now surrounded by hours of admin to keep track of it as a practice. And I know from the inside out what happens when you turn your hobby, whether it’s just the hobby of walking the dog, into something serious. Suddenly, it’s all steps on a counter.
Years ago, I thought, I really enjoy textiles. I enjoy making textiles; why aren’t I designing textiles? It makes perfect sense to have those go with my workshops to make clothes, which is related to my sustainability practice. And as I was designing these textiles, I realized that I had a product opportunity.
I bought a sticker cutter. My wonderful illustrations that I was designing for textiles could be sold to other stationery hobbyists as stickers. I bought the sticker cutter. I took some classes. There’s a whole path to monetization right there.
And I’ve made the decision this season to step back. I’ll probably continue to participate in the online surface design communities because I feel like I have benefited from what I’m learning about the tools. But I’m not going to use this as my new get-rich-quick scheme. Among other things, we are now in this influencer economy where breaking through all the other people who are trying to do the same thing isn’t fun. And I want to keep this as a hobby, something fun. Make stickers for me, make stickers for my sister, make stickers for my friends, but do not make stickers to sell, because it distracts from the real thing that I want to be doing.
Speaking of hobbies, I’m really excited as I put the finishing touches on my plan to go to my first stationery festival. I cannot think of the last time I went to a conference that wasn’t work-related. Because of federal funding cutbacks, my work is no longer paying for me to go to conferences, so unless they’re local and I can drive to them, they are out of reach for me. I haven’t been to a conference in more than a year.
Going off to Little Craft Fest in Houston, I initially thought, oh, I could look around. I could see what the other businesses are like. I could capture data. Suddenly, I’m making it into a job. When I could just go as an amateur. I could enjoy it. I could set a budget, and I could buy some washi tape and enjoy looking at the stickers that other people made.
I am going to plan that as play, because I deserve some play. And this isn’t a reward for having done a good job, for having had good sales, for having completed developing a new workshop, or for giving talks. This is just because I deserve it. And I would have deserved it even if I had done nothing “successful” in my practice at the moment.
Stay tuned for my report on my hobby.
The fragrance that comes from the rain isn’t about production. It’s just about the sheer joy of the trees celebrating that they are being bathed, taking part in this lifecycle system. Play is the point, not the reward.
Thank you for reading what emerges from my process.
Gwendolyn