It's About Time, I Think
The Artist in the Machine: Part I
This is the first part in a three-part series of essays on a theme that is as personal to me as I think it is universal. How do you survive as an artist in a society where commercial success is all that matters? In these posts I’ll attempt to share an honest account of my successes and failures and more importantly what I’ve learned in forty years navigating through the machine. If I do a good job, by the end, maybe you’ll feel a little less alone in your struggle to navigate the mind fuck that is the intersection of art and commerce.
I have a complicated relationship with concerts and it’s been that way my entire life. The first time I saw someone performing on stage, I had the uncomfortable feeling that I was in the wrong place. I wasn’t meant to be in the audience. I was supposed to be on stage.
It’s taken me the better part of four decades to admit this. It feels egotistical. Who do I think I am anyway? I’ve never been able to fully embrace this fundamental part of myself. This denial caused a lot of unnecessary angst and heartache but it was also the engine behind every creative skill I ever developed. At fifteen, when I watched Springsteen on stage in 1985 at the Charlotte Coliseum, I wanted him to hurry up and finish his three-hour set so I could get back home and practice the guitar. It was necessary. Playing the guitar and eventually writing songs was a way I could be seen. I didn’t understand that’s what I wanted, in fact I took offense if anyone ever called me out on it. So I spent most of my life self-sabotaging to avoid reckoning with the simple fact that I wanted to perform, that I wanted to be seen. Now, four decades (Jesus) later, I’m still wrestling with this thing.
Last night I went to see Gregory Alan Isakov perform with the Atlanta Symphony Pops Orchestra. As I sat in the cushioned seats of Symphony Hall and watched this slight man stand straight and still as a bowling pin, his face in complete shadow beneath the broad brim of his hat as he strummed his guitar and sang his haunting songs in a voice rich and dark like polished driftwood, I did that thing I do. I wasn’t an enchanted member of the audience. I was outside myself, hovering somewhere in the wings to stage left, like a cat on the wrong side of a door.
I wondered about his life to the point of distraction. I’ve been around musicians my whole life so that part’s not mysterious. What is mysterious to me is the rarified air Mr. Isakov was breathing on that stage in front of 1,762 people who bought $150 tickets six months ago, left work early, paid for a sitter, paid for parking, rushed through dinner, and hurried to their seats before the house lights went down. I wondered as he looked out across the blue-green sea of upturned faces lit in his second-hand light, did he see them? Did he understand that most of these people endured jobs that likely drained them of anything they remember of themselves, their dreams, and aspirations. Did he understand and appreciate the incredible collision of unknowable forces that converged to allow him to be on that stage in that moment doing the thing he was meant to do?
“The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.”
– Henry David Thoreau
He’s human, I believe, so likely not. At least not every night. I’m sure he’s found himself bitching about the tepid merch sales or whining about one of his in-ear monitors going out or maybe he just regretted that burrito of questionable origin he ate after soundcheck. He didn’t have to think of all those people, because I was. I was watching myself in the audience among those faces, so desperate to touch something sacred, to be lit up from within by anything like hope in these dark days. As a society, we’ve always worshipped success, but there’s never been a time before in history where we could do it with such convenience and obsessive abandon.
The black mirror we all carry around in our pockets with a magical algorithm that gives us instant access to an endless scroll of people just like us, but not like us. Those people are beautiful, rich, young, thin, and talented. They’re whimsically making the perfect summer salad while wearing a pair of 100% organic cotton underwear that accentuates their perfect butt and can be purchased along with the wrinkle-free skin toner they use if you click the “shop” banner below. We want what they have. We want to be influenced. We need to believe there’s something more than our hollow existence, noses pressed up against the glass, waiting to be let inside. We hate ourselves for our pathetic longing, for our envy but we can’t look away because we need the distraction. We need to be distracted from the reality that most of us feel we’re not enough and to be enough we must change who we are.
I thought of all this as I watched him sing and it made me both sad and inspired. We are meant for so much more than most of us find in our lives, in our careers. The degree to which we’ve become cogs in the machine has never been greater than it is today in America as we’ve specialized “knowledge worker” roles to the point of absurdity. And the kicker is that within a couple of years, all those specialized jobs will be replaced by A.I. agents. It’s not a question of if, but when. So, where does that leave us? The one task we’ve harnessed our beautiful minds to execute, the corporate dance we’re compelled to perform in exchange for money to spend to keep us on the treadmill, scrolling for a better life is suddenly gone?
I don’t know.
What I do know is this thing I feel, this longing I’ve felt since I was a kid watching Springsteen on stage is not unique to me. I think every single soul in the audience last night felt it even if they couldn’t name it. We are meant for more. We’re meant to be seen by each other and appreciated. The desire to be an artist is fueled by the need to understand and to connect with something more than the grind of existing affords us.
As I’m writing this, I’m trying to understand and account for my life. This life I’ve spent as an artist inside the machine. What I’ve come to understand is that my life, like everyone else’s, is built on a trade, a sacrifice we make to hold our place in society because there’s not enough luck in the world for everyone who has the talent, will, and dedication to be a Springsteen or even an Isakov. For every best-selling novelist, there are thousands of writers waking up at four in the morning to steal a few hours before they must fashion themselves into the shape of the gear inside the machine that keeps a roof above them and food in their belly.
What we trade is time. The minutes, hours, days, weeks, years, and decades of time we could spend pursuing what we love, we give up in exchange for the means to survive. The older I get, the more time matters. I’m on the back side now. What was once an endless parade of firsts will become a numbered march of lasts.
So the longing I feel now when I see an artist like Gregory Alan Isakov on stage is not for his talent, fame, or money nor any of the trappings that come with his success. As I sit here in the dark hours of a Sunday morning, struggling through the final edit of this essay, I understand it’s his time, I envy. His time to pursue, with wild abandon the thing that he was born to do.
Everytime I publish something here, it’s like a payment toward the dream of owning my time at some point in the future. When you become a paid subscriber, it’s about more than the money, it makes the Substack algorithm expose my work to more readers and every new reader gets me one step closer to being a full-time writer.
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How did this make you think about your time?
I’d love to know how this piece landed with you. How did it make you think about the time you have to pursue whatever you’re passionate about? How have you faired at the intersection of art and commerce?
Looking for a story to dive into?
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I literally don't know which part of this to quote first... what a brilliant, honest and brave essay. Huge applause from me Ben! At an age even further advanced into the second half of life than you I understand, all of me understands.The importance and need to control our diminishing time is ever present and for all my efforts ever more difficult to find pockets of, unless burning the midnight candle into the small hours counts - there is always a price to pay though and there shouldn't be not to do the thing we love and want most.
First of all, thank you Ben, for giving voice to this topic that bugs so many of us. What stands out for me, and what I can relate to most is this:
“It’s taken me the better part of four decades to admit this…. also the engine behind every creative skill I ever developed.”
And this:
“So I spent most of my life self-sabotaging … still wrestling with this thing.”
And this:
“We need to believe there’s something more than our hollow existence, …and to be enough we must change who we are.”
In other words, there is an inner conflict, this self-sabotage, which we clearly recognise and wrestle with, which also becomes part of the fuel for our creative work. And we might see people half our age and half as talented or accomplished in their art form achieve far greater material success…
On one hand we are yearning for this success, at the same time we are, perhaps, dreading it, sabotaging ourselves... while at the collective level, AI seems to be taking over ‘our creative work’ undermining it all as we speak (and write, play music, paint, draw…)
I am intimately familiar with this dilemma in myself. I don’t (yet) know how to resolve it. I do believe, however, that we may each have an important role to play in its resolution simply based on the fact that it is such a bugbear!
The main conclusion I’ve come to (for myself so far) is that I don’t want to feed the existing structures, which are set up to exploit the artist, drain our creative energies, turn our art into consumable products to be exploited by AI, or the industrial complex of the ‘creative industries’.
Of course it would be fantastic to earn enough money with my work to cover my costs of living (which I don’t, and have no idea how to do that within the current structure of the publishing industry)
But I do feel an immense gratitude and awe for the creative process itself. I appreciate that I do have this intimate relationship with my creative genius who is nudging me along to keep writing, who has gifted me with 28 years and counting of creative work which is just getting better all the time, which I consider the greatest gift. I feel this is a great start, and I am continuously feeding this creative source (as I can see you doing as well…)
Whenever I feel despondent about ‘this situation’, I turn towards my creative genius in wonder, and I feel reassured, because it is us, the creators who have direct access to the source!
I often wonder, how can we use our creative resources to flourish? How can we create an entirely new path, bypassing all those unsustainable structures that don’t serve us?