Producer vs Consumer: All the Difference in the World

The pride of a craftsman, the knowledge of an expert, the melodic songs of a musician : these are things that are fast vanishing from our culture, much to its detriment.

When you get home from work, do you spend time watching sitcoms, or do you get to work on that play you’ve been writing, that chair you’ve been carving, or that landscape you’ve been molding to your liking?

This fundamental difference is what separates the producer from the consumer, the creative from the commonplace, and an interesting person from a boring one. Consumer culture is taking a toll on humanity in that it is wiping out our ability and need to create.

There’s nothing wrong with admiring the work of others, even the mass-produced work of a factory. Some of my greatest joys come from beloved books and movies. Yet when the absorption of finished products takes up the majority of our time, and we make no meaningful contribution or construction of our own, our lives are boring, unsatisfactory, and depressing.

I was highly depressed in my teens, especially in junior high school. I was overweight, my earlier athletic abilities had waned along with my confidence, my friends were deserting me, and I just couldn’t seem to do anything right. At the same time, I had a rather strong love of advanced computers that my wallet could not support. Mostly as a means to save money, I decided to build my own computer after working up the nerve for a few years. Back then, buying your own parts and cobbling together a computer could shave a quarter or more of the price off of an expensive name brand with equivalent parts (though that’s not so much the case today), and the quality of what you built would likely be much better.

So, knowing not a soul who was familiar with the workings of computers, I bought a few magazines, ordered my parts, and much to the dismay of my parents, made a mess of the basement building myself a state of the art computer. There were problems and hangups, of course. Malfunctioning parts, misplaced jumpers, and incorrect bios settings added on an additional two days to my effort, but in the end, I had created a computer that was fantastic and glamorous to a 13-year-old kid, with my custom case and lighting job getting many an interested look.

This may not seem like much, but suddenly I had at least one thing under my belt that no one else had. Adults deferred to me in the realm of computers. I was talented, a prodigy, as far as my parents-Luddites both-were concerned. While it didn’t exactly vault me out of depression, in retrospect, it certainly raised me up a little bit.

If you want to make a major change in your life, start consuming less and producing more. I don’t necessarily mean in the environmental sense of putting less in the waste stream. I mean start producing creative work that is of lasting value. That report you’ve been slaving over at work doesn’t count; try recording a CD of your music.

As you watch yourself transforming from a novice to a talented expert, you’ll see all sorts of things changing in your life. Someone who creates is always thinking and questioning, and has their eyes open for new items of interest, which is exactly what this world needs. Your confidence will increase, as will your sense of accomplishment, and you’ll find yourself getting all kinds of ideas.

Most people mistakenly believe that creativity is something you have or you don’t, when in reality, ideas are built off of other ideas and experiences. When you work aggressively to create, new inspiration will come to you. The more you incorporate creative pursuits into your life, the more creative you’ll be.

I’m sometimes astounded at how boring, talentless, and without experiences people are. We live in such an interesting world, and yet there are those who barely take notice. They do not have opinions, because they haven’t bothered to craft them, nor anything else of value. They only absorb the opinions of others, which they probably don’t fully understand, and the finished products of our consumer society. They passively sit in front of the tv, taking in entertainment. Ask them about themselves, and they’ll probably have little to say. They are not striving, they are not bettering themselves or the lives of others, and they’re certainly not creating.

I’ve found that the curious, the experts, the craftspeople of any field are by far the most interesting people to talk to. Those that create, be it books or furniture, know that they must improve their craft. They must pick the brains of others, and in turn have their own brain picked.

Learning to create creatively means learning skills, and that means becoming more confident in yourself. The more you can do, the more you know you can do.

As I wrote about in my “Unplug the Cable, Rediscover Your Life” article, taking a fast from tv, or any other passive entertainment that you may have in your life, even for a month, can change your life. Decide to completely give up these things for awhile. Even cancel your cable. At first you might find yourself bored, but eventually you’ll  see that you’ve the time and the inclination to work on some of those long neglected passions.

Write poetry, build a desk, film a movie, paint a picture, do anything but passively sit by.

Be a producer, and you’ll find that it makes all the difference in the world.

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