Consumer or Producer?
Everyone who was born a writer, an artist or a musician– was born a creator. Making something out of nothing, adding color to the world around you.
Every creative child’s dream was to paint the sky with a new color and find shapes in tufts of white, dreading the day you looked up and saw only clouds.
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For those lucky ones who survive the incessant enforcement of practicality, there was one question: what can you do to not just stay alive, but live in this world? Some would correctly say this is a dramatic way of looking at things, but such is often the case when you have too much to say and no way to say it. You want to be a creator, but you also want to pay rent, so the only option left to you is to create what provides for you. You become a producer.
Every job in the world today seems to be divided into consumers and producers. Even if you want to make something original, it always seems to tie back to creating a product and generating content to feed back into the never-ending loop of consumerism. No job today is free from it.
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People who want to work creatively in a professional sense have struggled with finding jobs that fulfill their creative needs, while also making enough money to live in a world with rising inflation that worships the dollar sign. Some jobs masquerade as creative jobs and still, you create for someone else to make money or a customer to consume. Imagine how it would feel to create something free from a job title or resume, where only you decide if it matters. Would we even recognize it for what it was?
The objectification of talent, beauty and creativity has seeped into the cracks of how we see our work, along with how we see ourselves. In the modern world, nothing is pure anymore, unless you decide to strip it of its commercial identity and make it matter, for once, only to you. Even if only a few of us decide to do it, we can make the world a gentler, more miraculous space for all of us.
Strike Out,
Writer: Hadley Balser
Edited by: Reanna Haase and Olivia Wagner
Orlando
Hadley Balser is a content writer for Strike Magazine Orlando. They can often be found thrifting with one airpod in or spacing out to their growing record collection. They are also quite fond of writing, David Bowie and queer cannibals.You can email them at hmsbalser@outlook.com or follow them on Instagram @hadley_balser.
