The Fear of Self-Indulgence

Today I want to write about self-indulgence and the soul-killing anxiety it inspires, about how many times I stopped while writing even just this sentence, trying to think of ways to reword each phrase without using first-person pronouns. Where does this fear come from? And is there any way to think my way out of it?

Stigma

There is a clear and obvious stigma against self-indulgence, against putting oneself first to the point harming oneself or others. This stigma is old and runs very deep. We see it embodied in all of the deadly sins: gluttony (indulging in food and drink), lust (indulging sexual appetites), greed (indulging material gain), wrath (indulging in anger), sloth (indulging in comfort), envy (indulging one's estimation of others), and pride (indulging one's estimation of oneself). Each of these is deemed sin based on degree, not because of a single action: eating to sustain oneself is not gluttony, having a bubblebath after a long day of work is not sloth. Context is important.

These stigmas exist, in large part, because resources have been scarce within human communities for all of human history. If someone put their desires before the good of the community, it might mean destabilizing that community entirely by upsetting the social fabric, the sense that each person, however small, has a role within a group that is larger than themselves. In other words, these stigmas emerge from real human needs. The stigmas against self-indulgence are well-founded, then, but they are inherently conservative, and they have been around so long that many people apply them almost instinctively and indiscriminately to others.

Is Art Self-Indulgent?

I believe that art is necessary, but I also understand that many think of it more like a luxury. Everyone needs to eat or they'll die. Not everyone needs to write or paint. And yet, history shows us that there have been artists of all kinds who truly needed their arts, who sometimes bought pencils instead of bread. This situation has been mythologized in the trope of the "starving artist" who pursues their craft with utter disregard for their economic circumstances. They are amateurs in the truest sense of the word, creating art for the love and sake of art. This is all well and good for the a little while, but it's also understood that most starving artists hope to stop starving eventually. Thus the maturing artist is repeatedly faced with a seemingly impossible choice: "Do I continue making meaningful art that others do not value?" "Or do I start making valuable art that I consider meaningless?" "Do I care more about being idealistic or practical?"

This is a false dichotomy, of course. There are countless works of art that are deemed both spiritually meaningful and economically valuable. But this dichotomy arises for a simple reason: for art to have economic value, people have to want to experience it, to value the art enough to pay for that experience. We see this in microcosm in the concept of the attention economy, in which what events seem to deserve attention are determined by people all over the world deciding, more or less simultaneously, what to pay attention to. This has, in turn, led people to get the idea that maybe attention is payment enough for creative work, and some self-appointed producers prey on the talents of "smaller" (read: less recognized) creators with promises of "exposure." Paradoxically, this provides an avenue for displacing some of the shame associated with self-indulgence that a smaller creator might feel: "I am using my creative energy for the direct benefit of someone else, so my creative expression can't rightfully be called self-indulgent." These arrangements often turn out to be devil's bargains.

But, you might say, haven't readers, audiences, patrons and benefactors always been a part of the art world(s)? And hasn't there always been a certain element of mutual inspiration, plagiarism, and/or cannibalism within creative fields? To the first point, I admit it's obvious that people with influence--whether as a group or as individuals--have always shaped how art appears and is perceived in the world, but what seems different now is the speed at which people can indulge the destructive impulse to tear down creators online, even without good reason. To the second point, I freely acknowledge that new art often emerges from or echoes old art in an organic, almost mystifying way. What I object to is the production line model that threatens to turn all artistic pursuits into different kinds of "content creation" reduced to inputs, outputs, and interchangeable parts. This model seems to expect all artists to become influencers, expecting them to appeal to the least common denominator by creating in a way that can easily be deemed likable and "monetizable". It does not (because it can not) reward experimentation. Similar to stigma, then, this model is ultimately conservative. It encourages self-indulgence and self-promotion at the expense of self-exploration.

The Self as Channel

See what I did there? It was an accident (no, really). Now, not every happy accident is an unintentional double entendre. But when it comes to any creative process, happy accidents are a lot of the fun, they are moments that delight precisely because they were unexpected yet somehow also make perfect sense. This had led many generations of artists to feel like they are not really "in control" of their art, per se, and they have come up with many different ways of describing the creative force that flows through them but seems to enter externally (many have called it genius, Lorca named it duende, Spicer said it was Martians, Rick Rubin calls it source). I expect it was an understanding of this feeling that led T.S. Eliot to say that art is "an escape from personality."

The artist might choose when they create and how they create, but the what has to be discovered along the way. For me, the deep spiritual satisfaction that comes from making art comes from this process of change, this tapping into an understanding that the world and everything in it is constantly changing from moment to moment. I am drawn to theatrical and performance-based arts because they are ephemeral, and an understanding of this ephemerality requires presence for performer and audience alike. I guess it's no wonder, then, that I've always had difficulty sharing anything online. I freeze up at the notion of a snapshot, a profile, a short series of paragraphs somehow replacing me, taking on a life beyond me that is not mine but may seem to be to everyone but me, a life that might appear to indulge in solipsism and self-possession. But I choose to call it honesty, a truthful expression of how I'm thinking or feeling in a particular moment of time. So if honesty is self-indulgent then call me a glutton for punishment, because after a lifetime of trying I'm finally starting to let go of my fears about what other people might think about me, because if they think they know me better than I do, they're dead wrong.