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Dancing is very like poetry. It’s like poetic lyricism, sometimes, it’s like the rawness of dramatic poetry, it’s like the terror — or it can be like a terrible revelation of meaning. Because when you light on a word it strikes you to your heart.

That’s a quote from the American dancer and choreographer Martha Graham in the 1985 New York Times interview “Martha Graham Reflects on Her Art and a Life in Dance” (31 March 1985); found in the book The New York Times Guide to the Arts of the 20th Century.

I’m John Fanning and this is the Create with John Fanning podcast.

How’s it goin out there. Hope all is well.

This is Episode 17 of my series of episodes on Imagination creativity, based around my book Create.

Last time I spoke about Rejection and Failure. Today I’m going to talk about the Dancer and the Dance and doing what you love.

W. B. Yeats asks this question in one of his poems: “How can we know the dancer from the dance?”

About ten years ago, a Nigerian dancer came to La Muse. She made me think more about Yeats’ idea. When you saw this woman dance you thought, this is what she is, a dancer. She’s in the dance, she becomes the dance, and the dance becomes her. She’s free.

But when you ask her about her life you find out she’s a medical doctor. She also writes poems. She calls the dances she creates “dance poems”, and the poems she writes “dance poems”. When she’s poetic, she’s dancing, and when she’s writing she’s dancing. She’s free — you can see the freedom when she dances, you can feel the freedom from the words she writes.

“I have no free time.” I’ve a friend that hates that sentence. He says that’s your mind, not you. The “I” in that sentence is your mind, your ego, but you are not your mind/ego. You are you.

“Free time” is a mind construct — as is time itself. We “choose” what to do with the time we have in a day, a life. “Freedom” comes in knowing we are choosing. I have no “free time”. Yes, life is full of distractions but we have to create freedom. We have to create time. To do this we create disciplines, rituals, and show up to work.

When you are free you create your own new systems, whether it’s an organic garden, a community of writers or workers, a new political movement. This form of creation frees you from economic, dogmatic restrictions. It is truly counter-cultural.

Yes, accepting freedom into your life can lead to anxiety. As Kierkegaard said, freedom can lead to dizziness. But it’s natural. So embrace the dizziness, the excitement of it. Better to be excited about change than frightened by it. It’s a step further towards creative freedom. Accept “dizziness” as a natural part of creative freedom. We are free, free to create.

When I write, like the dancer with her dancing, I get lost in the writing. I am literally in the writing. I become the writing. Time disappears. All of a sudden, three hours have passed, and I realize I haven’t eaten.

Every creator I’ve ever met, on retreats, friends, enjoys this feeling: to get lost in the work. The act of creation, becomes a joyful, euphoric, meditative experience. This feeling feeds into everything you do in your life. It makes you feel good because you satisfied an important need, to get lost in creation. It changes the way you think, or how you were taught to think when you’re creating something. When you’re in it, you’re different, because you’re focused, because life around you recedes when you’re in the flow of creation.

You don’t have to be a dancer to dance. Just like you don’t have to be a golf pro to love playing golf. Why? Because it’s an act. You golf. You dance. In that moment you’re the golfer, the dancer. You become the creation when you’re creating, when you dance, when you hit the ball down the fairway, when you’re “in it” you become part of that action. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi writes about this in his book “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience”; you enter what he calls “the flow state”. You are lost to the dance, and it’s a joyful feeling.

You don’t have to be the best to get lost in the dance, in “flow”. We go against our natures when we reject the dancer, reject flow, and when we go against our natures, well, we’re not being true to ourselves, or the natural, joyful act of being alive.

And the best way to get into a flow state of creation – Do what you love!

I talked a bit about this before in the second episode when I talk about my experience managing the Good Mixer in the London of the Brit Pop 90s, how all those creators coming in taught me the lesson, do what you love, irrespective if whether you get rich or famous, because doing what you love, creating what you love makes you happy, and lets fun an joy into your life.

Yes, a lot of people don’t and can’t do what they love, all the time. Because of access, to culture, to money, to education, to so many things, we’re not all given the same opportunities. Johann Hari, in his book Lost Connections, and in an interview talks about this, referring to research about how people feel about their work done by the opinion poll company, Gallup. They found only 13% of us like our jobs most of the time. 63% “sleep work” we don’t like it, we don’t hate it, we just kind of tolerate it. Then there’s 24% of us who hate and fear our jobs. Pretty enlightening stuff, no? That means 87% of people don’t like the thing they’re doing most each week. And of course, depending on where you are, depdngin on how capitalistic or authoritarian the society this is only cutting into more and more of a person’s day.

OK. Yes, this is a fact. But, yes there’s a but, if we think creatively we can create windows through these walls, and create the time to invest in doing what we love, what we love to create. Yes, not all of us can start cooperatives and create meaningful fulfilling work for whatever reason or reasons. But we can create windows into the things we love. We can start small and be consistent, focused about being consistent no matter how many times you ego tries to sabotage your efforts to tell you you’re wasting your time etc.

When we started off La Muse we had no conventional business approach. No business plan. We just kept making mistakes. You keep smiling, even when you’re kicked to the ground, again. To smile is to create. It frees you from somber, bleak realities.

Know why you are doing what you want to do. Then thinking disappears. Creating takes over. Time disappears, because you’re doing what you love.

When I ran the retreat I’d be in my office for four or five hours not realizing it’s half an hour past dinner time. One of my boys or my daughter knocks on my door. It’s only then that I realize fours hours have gone by. It felt like minutes. I was in the moment, alive, lost in the process, disconnected from time.

The opposite is true too. If you’re doing something you don’t love, then four or five hours feels like twice that time. If you love taking cars apart, if it makes you joyful, then you’re creating. It matters to you. It may not matter to other people so much, but it matters to them if you come back into the house joyful.

What do you love? What do you enjoy? “Enjoy” is what gives you joy, literally, what creates joy ‘in’ you. If you enjoy doing something then that’s probably your form of creation, your field.What brings you joy? Why? Because if you love what you do, you don’t care how much you’re getting paid. When you’re in it, when you’re creating what you love, you’re alive, completely alive. You can’t buy that. That’s joy, that’s fun, that’s real purpose. So many people lack purpose in life then medicate themselves, because they’re not doing what they love. When you discover what you love, it’s an epiphany, a joy.

Neil deGrasse Tyson was once asked what it means to be brilliant, to be visionary. He responded by saying he was just doing what he loves. He said if everyone did what they loved then everyone would be visionary, brilliant. The man doesn’t understand the word vacation because what he does is already a vacation.

What are your dreams? Work from there. Write them down. Research them. Start off messy. Be explorative. How did others turn the same kinds of dreams into realities, creations? Who influenced them? Who inspired them?

You create your life. It’s the greatest creation. If you stay in the same lifestyle and are dissatisfied, it’s probably because you feel stuck. Nobody has it easy. It’s hard to create a life. It takes a lot of focus.

But, you have a choice to create the life you want, by creating what you love. You construct the house of your life around what you love, from the foundation up. Walls are no good without a foundation. Windows are useless without the walls to put them in. If you don’t get the basic tools to create what you love then how will you ever put in a beautiful bay window with a view of the forest?

How are you going to get a computer to write that novel? How are you going to buy the land to build the foundations of what will eventually be your end goal, a finished house you will live in?

A wall appears: “But I’m only starting out?” We’re all only starting out. This is my first non-fiction book. I’m an amateur too.

The word “amateur” is French. It means someone who loves something. I love encouraging people to create because I’ve been talking about it to people for nearly two decades. I love talking about it.

Be an amateur, it takes a lot of pressure off. We’re all amateurs, because if you really love what you’re creating then you’ll always be falling in love with it again and again, always being curious about how it works.

Will I get everything I want to into this book? No. Why? Nothing’s perfect and there’s always more to learn, more to love about my field.

It doesn’t matter what you create. If it makes you joyful, then it’s worth doing. To most everyone else it’s about the finished book, painting, building, car. To you, it’s about the process, the fun of doing it. It doesn’t matter if other people care about what you create. What matters is that you care about what you create.

So thanks for listening. I started with a quote from an American dancer and choreographer and as usual I’m going to end with an Irish proverb. This one means:

You’ll never plough a field turning it over in your mind.

Ní dhéanfaidh smaoineamh an treabhadh duit.

This podcast is supported by you the listener via my Patreon page. If ya want to support the podcast and help me get paid for doing it then please head over to patreon.com/johnfanning where you can get early and ad free access as well as extra episodes when ya sign up. Ifya can afford it then give me the cost of a price of a cup of tea or pint once a month. Ifya can’t afford it that’s grand too, ya can listen for free, but please subscribe to it on iTunes or wherever you listen to it and leave a review on itunes too or wherever ya listen to it and let your friends know about it so the listenership grows. Thank you! And thanks for listening. If you’re looking for more episodes you can find them on all the usual places like iTunes – or on my website at johnfanning.me under “podcast” where I’ve put up overview transcripts with links to all the people and ideas I mention. If you’re into social stuff and you’re looking to engage with me one-on-one, check me out on twitter @fanning_j and instagram @ johnfanning_. It’s been great sharing stuff with you today so until next time take care out there and be benevolent when you can!

Slán libh agus go n-éirí an bóthar libh.

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I love my rejection slips. They show me I try.

That’s a quote from Sylvia Plath in her posthumously published The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, and I’m John Fanning and this is the Create with John Fanning podcast.

How’s it goin out there. Hope all is well.

This is Episode 16 of my series of episodes on Imagination and creativity, based around my book Create.

In the last episode I talked about Doors towards the Imagination and creativity and how to start and understand the journey out of the Cave into the Platonic confusion and acclimatization of creating.

Today I’m going to talk about the Walls of rejection and failure, and how to transform them into opportunities, into Doors towards the Imagination and creativity.

I want to start today by talking about a young English poet who came to La Muse many years ago. To those of you who are new to the podcast La Muse is the writers and artists retreat I co-founded and ran for nearly twenty years in southern France with my wife Kerry, welcoming creators from every continent and of every creative bent.

Anyway, this young English poet had just finished university and sent some of his poems to “The New Yorker”, a place notorious for not responding. They responded to him, giving him a page of basically encouraging criticisms of his work. What did he do? He didn’t send out another poem until he got to La Muse. Why? He thought his poems were bad because they’d been “rejected”.

He didn’t realize that the rejection he received was an actual acceptance of his work. The majority of people only get a few lines in a form response from “The New Yorker”. Not an actual human writing back to encourage you. We explained this to him. He started sending out his poems again, everywhere. If he had not come on retreat and talked to other creators he would have given up.

Every time I get a rejection, I meditate. I take time to sit, doing nothing, to think about what I’m working on now. Not the creation that was rejected. By doing this I become aware of my thoughts, then my emotions, and realize my presumed failure is in actual fact my own mind making me feel bad, as opposed to asking the question: What can I learn from this rejection? This is turning a Wall into a Door, instead of feeling shame, or getting down I fail forward, lean into the failure, and see what I can learn from it, from the rejection. Doors open. It’s a path of turning a negative into a positive by changing the way our mind receives information. What can I do better next time? How can I fix this character, this chapter, to make the book better? Am I what people say about me and my work, or am I going to keep creating?

Rejection can come in many forms. No sales, no shows, no publication, no representation, bad reviews, not getting the part, the job. The psychodrama starts, and all the walls appear. The solution: resilience, perseverance, and an open mind. You have to remember why you create, because you love doing it, because it’s a need.

Mentors, peers encourage you when these losses come. The writer Judith Viorst talks about this in her book “Necessary Losses”. Basically, she says when we lose something we also gain something. Yes, she talks about death and divorce and big tragedies, but it also applies to the regular occurrence of rejection.

Rejection is not a bad thing. It can actually be a really healthy and positive part of the process of the Imagination. The more you fail the better you can get. The idea that quality comes from thin air is a myth. The more you create, quantity, the more mistakes you make, the better you get at creating, if you are willing to learn from your mistakes.

Look at any major creator. They always failed at first, but they kept going until they finally had a breakthrough. And a lot of the time they didn’t even realize they were having a breakthrough until after the fact. Thomas Edison failed to invent the light bulb, for a long time, but he never admitted failure. He said he’d just found 10,000 ways that didn’t work.

Also, rejection could simply mean you have not found the right setting or person to employ, buy, or produce your kind of creation. If you get criticism, does any of it actually help? If it does, then rejection can be a huge opportunity.

If someone doesn’t like your stuff, then get them to be specific about what it is they don’t like. Be responsible. Respond to what the person says, instead of reacting. Where are they coming from, what’s their basis? Ask them for examples of how your creation could be more workable. They are not criticizing you. They are criticizing the work.

We have to learn to detach ourselves from the work and not take it personally. Even if you’ve put your heart into your creation it still needs to be set apart from you. It’s like raising a child. At some stage you have to let the child go out into the world. As much as you love them, there will be others that don’t, irrespective of how wonderful your child is to you. It will hurt, but we can’t allow that hurt to stop us creating.

Here’s Ursula K. Le Guin in a piece called “Book Reviews” in her book Words are my Matter:

The New York/East Coast literary scene is so inward-looking and provincial that I’ve always been glad not to be a part of it; but when I lived in London I was positively terrified by the intensity of British literary cliques, the viciousness of competition, the degree of savagery permitted.

There are closed doors in every industry, but it doesn’t mean you have to have a closed mind, or worse, a closed heart. Yes, it helps to know people. Yes, it helps to be a prodigy. But does it really matter as long as what you are creating is making you joyful? If it makes you joyful, it will eventually make others joyful too. It’s infectious.

Yes, it’s frustrating to work in a vacuum and get no capital “success”. Sad casualties, such as John Kennedy Toole’s “Confederacy of Dunces” come to mind, his novel being published eleven years after his suicide.

Closed industries don’t have to stop our creations. If anything we should see rejection as an impetus to continue being creative. Getting published, produced, exhibited, being awarded a trophy, a degree, a prize, a decoration does not equal success.

Yet, we go out into the world, reaching for these carrots dangled in front of us. But why? Do we have to pursue happiness? Can’t we just be happy? Can’t we just write the novel and enjoy the process? Can’t we just paint the painting, run the race, hold the office? Why allow others to create our success? The answer: we don’t have to.

We do what we love and keep creating because success is a choice. I chose to write a novel every couple of years. Some of them might be failures. Some of them are okay and some of them I’m proud of. But that is not how I judge my books’ successes. I judge their success by how much they changed me. By how much they made me accept the process, the imagining of them, the writing, the editing, and the knowledge of what I’ve learned from doing each one being beneficial to the next one I will eventually write when I feel inspired to do so again. That’s how I experience success.

Success is what makes you happy right now. The process of writing, running, designing, inventing, is success, not pursuing, the publication, award ceremony or decoration.

Most creators do not get recognition or rewards in their own lifetimes or afterwards. Most are little known. Oscars, National Book Awards, seed money. This is not why we create. We create because we love what we do. If we are awarded recognition, financial gain, it’s a “bonus” not the goal in creating. We don’t create for external reward.

At one stage in her career Katharine Hepburn stopped getting acting roles. She was considered box office poison, but she loved acting in movies. Did she take the rejection and give up, or did she become mindful, aware?

She was acting in a play, “The Philadelphia Story”. What did she do? She got creative. She used it for her screen comeback. She bought the film rights to it, and went on to produce and star in the movie version. It was Hepburn’s first big hit after several flops. She empowered herself by being mindful of the rejections and changed her position to create a new opportunity for her Imagination. One door closed to her, she opened another one.

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak became two of the most well-known names in computers but it wasn’t before products such as Twiggy, LISA and Apple II eventually failed. Hewlett Packard rejected Wozniak five times before he created the personal computer and founded Apple with Jobs.

Each failure can be an opportunity to learn what is failing, but can also be an opportunity to embrace new ideas. Wozniak advises not to expect your first projects to be successful, but to do it for yourself, for the challenge, for the fun.

Even Samuel Beckett had something positive, well, encouraging to say on the topic of failure: “All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Beckett was dogged in re-working his writing.

The more you “fail”, the better you get at creating something different. We learn from our mistakes. Take rejection mindfully, and carry on regardless, with focus and awareness. Opinions are like mouths, everyone’s got one. It doesn’t necessarily mean what comes out of them is the truth.

So, the best way to handle rejection? Move onto the next project, creation. You’re now a free agent. Your agent should be trying to sell your book now, your building, your idea. You don’t have time to worry about it not selling because you’re already moving forward with the next creation. It’s what you do. Write. Build. Create again.

The Wall of rejection, and all the other walls, remind me of the children’s book “We’re Going on A Bear Hunt”. I used to read it every night to our kids. You can’t go over it, you can’t go under it, you can’t go around it, you have to go through it. Literally and figuratively.

And the only way through it? Again, keep creating. Keep creating new work and let the wall fall of its own accord, by beginning again. The work gets you through the frustration, the thoughts, emotions, into new inspiration. Any time I ever have a problem with a chapter, when I’m stuck, I begin another chapter. I begin again, somewhere else. I bring my awareness to another part of the story, the novel, the play.

The Cohen bothers do the same. They’ll start a script, get bored half way through, go direct something, start a new screenplay, get bored with it, then return to a previous one. They’re always starting again. Rejection, they don’t have time for it. They’re too busy doing the work.

Starbucks does the same thing. They come out with new ideas before they perfect them. They make them better as time goes on. They adapt. They start again. They know new ideas will not be perfect, but they can get better with time and innovation.

Every time I do another episode of this podcast I feel like I’m failing a little less than the last time. I’m not afraid to fail anymore. Why? Because I know failing is just part of the process. Does it stop me from putting out episodes? No. Because I know I’ll get better the next time. Every time I learn something new. Yes, not everyone is not going to love what I’m saying, but who cares? As I said in episode 8, we’re all different, and so are out listeners and readers. To many this podcast is a failure for many different reasons. But will I stop? No. Why? Because, like a novel, it’s a marathon, you have to pace yourself and just keep going until the finish line. Some may think you’re time was bad, others good, and then others again amazing. But you. What do you think, feel? To me, I finished. I set out a goal and followed through and learned through the process. I learned by doing, by embracing failure.

No work is ever going to be perfect, but no work will be created if you create a wall of perfection, rejection, procrastination. By starting again, creating again, you will get inspired again. So embrace failure. Don’t be afraid of it. Failure’s how we learn. See it as a Door toward imagining new creations. Every creator fails. Critics criticize, and yes creators fail, but creators also create something new. Be a critic, after the creative process. It’s called the editing stage. Authenticity lies there. You create an authentic work out of failure by conquering failure, by conquering the fear of failure, by simply accepting it is something that is part of the creative process. Create. Don’t compare yourself to others when you’re in it, creating. Comparison destroys the imagination, destroys creativity. So have heart. Be fearless. Risk. Invite failure, because failure is absolutely essential. Don’t let gatekeepers and your inner critic think you are a failure. If you’re not failing, well then you’re not getting better. And some day, when you least expect it, something you create will be beautiful to others, even if you think it fails in so many way.

Look to other creators to inspire you when you’re down. Read the writer you’re into most. Not Shakespeare, but someone on the same level you feel you could attain. Confidence comes back when you engage with those aspirational people. Comparing yourself to Picasso or Shakespeare will make you think you’re a failure. Look to creators you think you’d have a great conversation with.

So thanks for listening. I started with a quote from the wonderful Sylvia Plath but here’s another Irish proverb. This one means:
However long the day, the evening will come.

Dá fhada an lá tagann an tráthnóna.

This podcast is supported by you the listener via my Patreon page. If ya want to support the podcast and help me get paid for doing it then please head over to patreon.com/johnfanning where you can get early and ad free access as well as extra episodes when ya sign up. Ifya can afford it then give me the cost of a price of a cup of tea or pint once a month. Ifya can’t afford it that’s grand too, ya can listen for free, but please subscribe to it on iTunes or wherever you listen to it and leave a review on itunes too or wherever ya listen to it and let your friends know about it so the listenership grows. Thank you! And thanks for listening. If you’re looking for more episodes you can find them on all the usual places like iTunes – or on my website at johnfanning.me under “podcast” where I’ve put up overview transcripts with links to all the people and ideas I mention. If you’re into social stuff and you’re looking to engage with me one-on-one, check me out on twitter @fanning_j and instagram @ johnfanning_. It’s been great sharing stuff with you today so until next time take care out there and be benevolent when you can!

Slán libh agus go n-éirí an bóthar libh.

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If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.

That’s a quote from William Blake’s 1793 poem The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

I’m John Fanning and this is the Create with John Fanning podcast.

How’s it goin out there. Hope all is well.

This is Episode 15 of my series of episodes on Imagination creativity, based around my book Create.

Last time I spoke about capitalism and creativity. Today I’m going to talk about Doors and the Cave. As I’ve said in nearly every episode I see Doors as a metaphor towards Imagination and creativity, opposite to what I’ve called Walls, which I see as a metaphor that leads us away from the Imagination.

In the last episode I talked at length about capitalism, without getting into what I see as a creative answer to it. Well, I see Doors as the answer to Capitalism, as they open in the direction of positivity, of opening up, of growth, of inspiration, of human amelioration, of Imagination. And as I said also mentioned in episode 5 on Imagination and creativity, the ‘creativity’ of merchant bankers is not a Door, but a Wall. Their ‘creativity’ is easily defined: it’s greed.

The Door of Imagination is a potential which we all possess. It can be opened in a vast array of human activities – anything from traditional art and craft work (writing, painting, composing and so on) to sports and leisure activities (baseball or establishing a garden) or in other less obvious cultural forms (flower arrangement, say, or tea ceremonies).

At best, this is what a Door symbolizes, an opening to positive creation and imagination, an opening through every Wall, away from the illusionary security of fear, into aesthetic, ritualistic and symbolic creation. The key to the door is the Imagination, not the creativity of greed on Wall Street. Yes, Wall Street. A street of Walls. You become a creative insider on that street. You become a creative outside when you walk through the door of the Imagination with its many paths and streets.

In literature, Doors are everywhere. In the arts. Allegorical. And metaphorical. They signify change, openings.

Getting back to the Blake quote I opened with,

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.

But the text, the words, are so insightful. How we’re all in search of the infinite, if we could only clean the Doors of perception instead of closing them so that all we see are the chinks of light through the cracks in our cavern.

Plato called Blake’s cavern the Cave, another wonderful metaphor which I’m going to get into in a minute.

The point though for both is that the Door turns into a Wall a barrier to the light. If we don’t go out the Door of the cavern then we’re left in darkness to look through the narrow chinks, like Plato’s prisoners who only see the shadows of reality on the Cave wall.

I had a classics lecturer who loved Plato. Any chance he got he’d bring Plato up. And his favorite? The allegory of the Cave. He’d enthusaistically lecture about a hundred of us at eleven o’clock in the morning, hungover — us, not him:

“Plato has the character, Socrates, tell the story of some people chained to the wall of a cave since birth. They face a blank wall. They watch shadows on the wall, from stuff passing in front of a fire behind them. They give names to these shadows. The shadows become the prisoners’ reality. An escapee comes to realize, by the light, that the shadows are not reality. He can understand a different reality, rather than the fabricated one the prisoners still believe. But when he goes back to tell them his revelation, they don’t believe him. In fact, they think he’s crazy!”

At this point some of the other students woke up because the old man had started shouting.

“Why?” he shouted, excited. “Because they know no other reality than the shadows! Socrates says the philosopher is like one of the prisoners who frees himself from the Cave. He also says the other prisoners will kill anyone who attempts to drag them out of the Cave. Isn’t that an amazing allegory, gentlemen?”

Some of the students had fallen asleep again. I was wide awake. Why? Because this allegory fascinated me, as it still does today. We’re all prisoners to our own perceived reality — one that is influenced, even constructed and manipulated, by society — PR firms, corporations, government bodies. We not only see a “shadow play” reality; we ourselves are shadows. The Walls of the Cave which inhibit us from creating our own reality are figurative, but very literal too.

Creation is when an individual, a creator decides to change their reality, and that of their field, and walks out the Door of the Cave, the cavern. They have a life changing experience, which then becomes life-changing for the rest of us.

Is this not what some call the purpose of life, to offer an expression of a field to the rest of the world after investigating it from a personal perspective as deeply, internally, as we can, and then to share it with others? If a creator discovers a deeper nature amidst all the pressures of society then they can express their field of creation in the best of forms. These creators assimilate as much as they can from their field, physics, art, business, and they get so good at it, they enlarge it. They become Socrates’ escaped philosopher — an inspired, imaginative creator. The creator imagines a new reality, creates a new reality, by leaving the darkness of the cave, by walking through the door, to create.

You too can escape, but nobody can drag you out. It’s like the old adage, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. It’s not easy. Some people in certain parts of the world will still actually try to kill you if you try to escape. In the end though, we have to get up and walk out into the light ourselves, as the other prisoners do later on in “The Republic”.

It’s difficult. You’ll be blinded when you first step out the Door into the light, when you open your perception. You’ll be confused, but it’s simply part of the process. With time, your “senses” get used to the new impressions, images. You get used to the new world you have created by walking out the Door.

So thanks for listening. I started with a quote from an English poet and painter and as usual I’m going to end with an Irish proverb. This one means:

God never closed one door without opening another.

Níor dhún Dia doras riamh nár oscail Sé ceann eile.

This podcast is supported by you the listener via my Patreon page. If ya want to support the podcast and help me get paid for doing it then please head over to patreon.com/johnfanning where you can get early and ad free access as well as extra episodes when ya sign up. Ifya can afford it then give me the cost of a price of a cup of tea or pint once a month. Ifya can’t afford it that’s grand too, ya can listen for free, but please subscribe to it on iTunes or wherever you listen to it and leave a review on itunes too or wherever ya listen to it and let your friends know about it so the listenership grows. Thank you! And thanks for listening. If you’re looking for more episodes you can find them on all the usual places like iTunes – or on my website at johnfanning.me under “podcast” where I’ve put up overview transcripts with links to all the people and ideas I mention. If you’re into social stuff and you’re looking to engage with me one-on-one, check me out on twitter @fanning_j and instagram @ johnfanning_. It’s been great sharing stuff with you today so until next time take care out there and be benevolent when you can!

Slán libh agus go n-éirí an bóthar libh.

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Capitalism … is by nature a form or method of economic change and not only never is but never can be stationary. … The fundamental impulse that sets and keeps the capitalist engine in motion comes from the new consumers’ goods, the new methods of production or transportation, the new markets, the new forms of industrial organization that capitalist enterprise creates. … The opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the craft shop and factory to such concerns as U.S. Steel illustrate the process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism.

That’s a quote from Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter’s 1942 book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy.

I’m John Fanning and this is the Create with John Fanning podcast.

How’s it goin out there. Hope all is well.

This is Episode 14 of my series of episodes on Imagination and creativity, based around my book Create.

Last time I spoke about the Walls of ageism and retirement, but today I want to talk about one of the greatest Walls to the Imagination, to creativity: capitalism.

This episode is going to be at least twice the normal length I try to put out because of the nature of the subject. This battle between authenticity and this hyper-capitalist global reality we find ourselves living in effects the imagination and creativity in so many different ways. Because I will not be able to get it to be under an hour I’ve left it to be the last Wall episode before heading into Doors towards the Imagination.

Five years after working in a coffee shop on Manhattan I took another creative leap, this time with my wife, to the Black Mountains in the south of France. We created a place for people like us, whose first priority is to honor the need to create. We started La Muse to create an affordable, beautiful, inspiring and comfortable place for creators. Emphasis on the first word, affordable, especially because I’m talking about capitalism. We didn’t understand people wouldn’t come if we didn’t charge regular prices. We thought they’d come because we were offering really cheap prices. But that’s not the way we’ve been conditioned by capitalism. People didn’t come. We were told later that they thought it was a scam, too good to be true. Later, a friend who managed a Hyatt hotel explained to us how each room has to have a different price because people need to assign “value” to what they are buying. At the hotel he managed they only ever rented the presidential suite out twice a year. It was immense. It was empty the whole rest of the year. It didn’t matter, because those two bookings took care of all the fixed costs for the year for the hotel. So we raised our prices even though we wanted to keep them low so creators with no money would be able to come. And of course, creators started coming. That’s capitalism.

Like Camden Town before MTV moved in, like the East Village before it became gentrified, we moved to the Aude, the Cinderella of France. Creative people discover places before developers, because for creators living creatively is the motivation, not status, wealth. Creators are marginalized in our predominant capitalist society, often crossing paths in places they’ve discovered and nurtured before being “discovered” by those with capital. You only have to look at certain urban ZIP codes in the US with seemingly minimal potential to gentrify, and you’ll find a high concentration of artists.

We started La Muse with credit cards, nearly twenty years ago. We couldn’t find money any other way to create what we wanted to create. This is often the reality when someone starts to create something different. Where do you get the money, when most capital is oftentimes owned by an unimaginative few who were given their capital instead of creating it?

The world’s eight (yes, 8) richest billionaires control the same wealth as the poorest 50% of the planet. The world’s richest 1% are on course to control as much as two-thirds of the world’s wealth by 2030.

Here where I’m living now, America, the country has socialism for the rich, and cold, harsh capitalism for everyone else. They’re not my words. That’s Robert Reich, the Former United States Secretary of Labor. If you ask most people what socialism is here they get anxious and think you’re talking about a failed form of soviet communism. Amazon, Chevron and 58 other billion dollar companies pay no tax, even though they’re, or were, American companies.

As Noam Chomsky said:

the rich and powerful, they don’t want a capitalist system. They want to be able to run to the ‘nanny state’ as soon as they’re in trouble, and get bailed out by the taxpayer.

As Robert Reich puts it it’s “corporate welfare”. The handouts are going to GM and many other companies, not the people who need it, and “around 60% of American wealth is now inherited”. I’ll leave a link to his great short video with examples on my site:

And of course the corporate welfare happened all over again recently because of the coporate welfare due to the Corona virus and a fraction of money going to the people most in need, the American working class. If the American people fully understood how much tax money is doled out to corporations as subsidies, that socialism I mentioned earlier, or how much the tax code has been changed to help corporations, they’d storm Washington in their millions. But they don’t. Because the masters attack solidarity, run the regulators, engineer elections, keep the everyone in line by manufacturing consent and marginalizing people.

My two honor degrees in Ireland were paid for by the Irish government, actually by my local government, Meath County Council. I will be ever grateful for that. I was the eldest of 7 kids and because of being means tested I was able to get a free education, in a country which would be considered extremely poor at the time and even now compared to the states here, and yet people are expected to pay over $50,000 a year here for a degree. That’s insane. If the richest country in the world can’t pay to educate it’s people when one of the poorest can then there has to be something wrong with that system.

Now I want to mention Requiem for the American Dream: The 10 Principles of Concentration of Wealth & Power, a documentary interview with Noam Chomsky. I’ve always loved Chomsky, and it’s a pity he isn’t as accepted in the states the way he should be, when other inspired academics like say Joseph Campbell are. But then Campbell is much more acceptable to the mainstream media and welcomed more by American popular culture because he doesn’t skewer the media on it’s manipulation of the truth. People who own those companies obviously don’t want us to even know Chomsky’s name.

Anyway, Chomsky explains in his classic detached fashion and in the most logical way what the corporate class has done to the United States: created widespread income inequality, and a huge diminishment of democracy. In detail and with wonderful examples he argues his case of rich versus poor, powerful versus powerless, oligarchy versus democracy.

Chomsky explains how the “masters of mankind” – that’s a quote from Adam Smith by the way, the so called “Father of Capitalism”. So Chomsky explains how the masters of mankind have basically dismantled any real remaining opportunity for an immigrant to come to the U.S. and fulfill the American Dream like Chomsky’s parents did, where they can become socially mobile, get a job and build a middle-class house with a car in the driveway and the kids going to school to get a good education, quote:

for most of the population, the majority, real incomes have almost stagnated for over thirty years. The middle class in that sense, that unique American sense, is under severe attack. A significant part of the American Dream is class mobility: You’re born poor, you work hard, you get rich. The idea that it is possible for everyone to get a decent job, buy a home, get a car, have their children go to school . . . It’s all collapsed.

He outlines ten “principles” to show exactly what the few at the top have been up to, practicing what Adam Smith called the “vile maxim of the masters of mankind” which is “All for ourselves, and none for other people”. The “masters” do not like democracy, because it gives power to the people, so they reduce democracy, shape ideology, redesign the economy, shift the Burden, of financial problems, that is, to the masses. They attack solidarity, run the regulators, engineer elections, that is buy them, and keep the rabble in line, by manufacturing consent and marginalizing the population.

I suppose the only word there not used as much in American English is solidarity. It’s used a lot in France though, but what Chomsky means is having empathy for other people, caring for them, what an Irish politician once said, the tide that lifts all ships. We’re all in this together. And of course the rabble he talks about is the coordinated multiple decades long effort by corporations to destroy the labor movement.

Power has become so concentrated that banks ‘too big to fail,’ have become what some economists called ‘too big to jail.’” Enron was crammed full of ingeniously creative lawyers and accountants, military torturers, bomb and missile makers, to say nothing of ponzi scheme inventors, who all, no doubt, also feel very good about what they have created –until they are exposed, that is , and are sent to the Big House where they belong, if at all. Kurt Vonnegut refers to these individuals as PPs in his book A Man Without a Country. Better to let Vonnegut speak in this great section from his book:

I was once asked if I had any ideas for a really scary reality TV show. I have one reality show that would really make your hair stand on end: “C-Students from Yale.”George W. Bush has gathered around him upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka Christians, and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or PPs, the medical term for smart, personable people who have no consciences.To say somebody is a PP is to make a perfectly respectable diagnosis, like saying he or she has appendicitis or athlete’s foot . . .PPs are presentable, they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They cannot care because they are nuts. They have a screw loose! . . .So many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs in our federal government, as though they were leaders instead of sick. They have taken charge of communications and the schools, so we might as well be Poland under occupation.They might have felt that taking our country into an endless war was simply something decisive to do. What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations, and now in government, is that they are so decisive. They are going to do something every fuckin’ day and they are not afraid. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with doubts, for the simple reasons that they don’t give a fuck what happens next. Simply can’t. Do this! Do that! Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody’s telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club and In These Times, and kiss my ass!There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don’t know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.

Vonnegut wrote that passage nearly a decade and a half ago. I can only imagine what he’d have to say about the present administration of Donald Trump.

Of course, most of the X, Y, Millenial and Z generations are aware of what Chomsky has to say, that 1% of 1% of the population own most of the assets of the planet. That the 1% of 1% want to keep it that way. Last thing they want to do is share that wealth. The boomer generation and older generation for the most part are quite cynical about this. I’ve had people I love tell me that the only choice we have is either capitalism or socialism. They are incapable of even imagining a distinction between socialism and democracy as concepts and capitalism as something divorced from ways of government. Their viewpoint is that you’re either a capitalist or a socialist. This binary way of thinking has been created by the 1% of 1%.

If you don’t like documentaries, there’s also the book version of Chomsky’s documentary, which goes into the concepts more fully, but still in a very clear and simple way. There’s simply no arguing with the logic of either. It’s simply facts he presents, how it’s all engineered.

The problem here is that it’s not simply an American problem. Capitalism is a planetary problem. My experience growing up in Ireland, living in France, and visiting many other European countries is that the same structures exist everywhere. The social classes are hidden in different ways but if we analyze them a little we see that they are regurgitations of the same structures because people who own multinational corporations don’t have borders when it comes to getting taxed, or veted.

In Spain, France, Italy, Portugal or Greece it’s simply not enough today to have a full time job and not be poor. Many salaries are about 1000 Euros and others think they’re doing well when they’ve 1500 Euros per month, but this barely pays for rent, schooling, all your fixed costs, never mind having anything extra to save to invest or spend on a holiday. We were always taught to believe the poor were street beggars but now it’s people with full time work.

In Greece, this insane inequality led to the collapse of the system and the rise of a new left in the party Syriza. Capitalism not only wrecks democracy, as former finance minister of Greece, Yanis Faroukakis says, but it also wrecks the democracy of creativity, the democracy of access and confidence in what we create. Entrenched systems are not what they appear to be. The idea that not everyone has access to creation has been heightened by capitalistic governments, because representative democracy itself has never actually existed, even in ancient Greek times.

Yanis Faroukakis left government because the institutions, oligarchic, not democratic, in his country, under the pressure of an authoritarian German led European Union told him he had no choice. Even with a mandate from the Greek people not to do austerity his compatriots in his party were co-opted into going against him and supporting the EU. Inevitably, as Faroukakis has said, these powerful leaders were not powerful at all. They were there to simply do the bidding of the system, and the system we all live under is capitalism, not representative democracy because when someone uses those two words they’re really saying that extreme centrist neo-liberal politics of division – there’s that word again, divide and conquer, like I mentioned in the first episode of the podcast – and what does this division do? Creates a constantly fighting binary world where real democracy is taken away with attrition, gradually whittling away Imagination and inspiration for “investors” at the expense of the many.

We give power to the oligarchy, the 1% of 1% when we agree they are the ones with the power. We take that power back when we say we have the right to create the reality we live in. That reality becomes manifest as soon as we wake up and realize that the old paradigm is no longer an agreement we accept. Nobody can tell you to accept an agreement you never agreed upon.

Creation needs to be more democratic. There needs to be more access, but this goes against capitalism. But how can we democratize creativity, so everyone has equal access?

Gandhi was told he had no power to create a new India. As he put it, he became the change he wanted to see in the world. He created it. Martin Luther King was told he had no power to create a different reality than the one he was living in. He created one anyway.

The idea that money is how we define ourselves is not only bizarre, but only benefits the few who want power over us, the many. If you were a person living on another planet and you landed on Earth you’d be shocked by this reality. You can imagine some of the questions,

“Why are all these people starving when these people have too much food?”

“Your Earth has more than enough resources for everyone on the planet to eat and be housed well?”

“The Earth is the Earth, how can you buy it with paper you created from the earth?”

And yet we continue, enslaved by other men’s systems, as William Blake put it. We’re conditioned from an early age to accept this reality. We’re “educated” throughout our schooling to embrace this paradigm. We’re taught money is the end goal, and that success is only reflected when we’ve amassed vast amounts of it.

At one retreat nine years ago we sat on the terrace with our resident writers and artists when one man, an Englishman living in Italy for twenty-five years, took a deep sigh of relief and interrupted the flow of conversation.

“Can I just say what a huge relief it is to finally, for once, be in a group of new people and not have to explain why I would remain a waiter for 25 years just to keep writing my novel, without ever having published a word! I am SO relieved!”

We all clapped, laughed and cheered. The book he was working on at La Muse got published the next year.

Creation has been replaced by consumption. We consume instead of creating. Replacement therapy. But therapy is supposed to be beneficial to the individual, not destructive, addictive. We buy too much. We call it “retail therapy”, thinking this a funny phrase, when actually it’s a symptom of the problem. Instead of creating clothes for ourselves, instead of crocheting, stitching, mending, we buy clothes made by underpaid workers working long hours in foreign countries. We buy these peoples’ creations and soon lose interest in them and throw them away only to replace them with more.

Creation has been replaced by addictions, by spending. We buy too many clothes, drugs, alcohol, sex, objects, devices. You only have to look at reality shows to see how we hoard. People like Marie Kondō come along and show us how addicted we’ve become by simply asking, does what you’ve bought “spark joy”? If not, then why is it in your closet? For most people this is a revelation. How could I have had so much stuff? Why is something so simple such and epiphany? Again, because the capitalism is so pervasive.

We’ve become addicted instead of expressive. And that’s exactly how capitalism works. Don’t grow your own food, buy it. Don’t mend an old car, buy a new one. Don’t take care of your health, buy pills to get rid of the symptoms of your physical pain. Don’t make your own clothes like your grandmother used to, buy more. And don’t express yourself through art, do it by what you wear, what you buy.

A society that denies creation transfers negative ideas onto the “individual” when individualism is an illusion if we consider the fact we are social beings. It projects subliminal negative associations on creation, because being a creator means thinking outside the norms, rules and regulations. To encourage people to help each other create goes against elitism, capitalism, and “rugged individualism” because they are about competition and sociopathic economics. Most contemporary societies are based on this principal because governments are for the most part “owned” by multi-national corporations through donors. Success under this worldview depends on taking advantage of those around you, to get more, not to help others. All for me and who cares about anyone else. This myth of the successful businessman as some kind of deity is just that, a myth. We’re all god. What about the successful plumber, successful teacher, successful musician, successful mother?

And don’t get me wrong. I met lots of smart and ‘creative’ business people as residents at La Muse. Not all business people are sociopaths or PPs as Vonnegut put it. But when those business people and succesful entrepreneurs came to La Muse they weren’t there to write ‘creative’ business plans or think up new schemes for defrauding their clients – they were there precisely to get away from all of that, to try and discover or tap into something authentically creative.

Also, you could be jealous of the “successful” group in your field which is attached to one of the primary tenets of capitalism, competition. I used to look at the bios of other writers judging my own “success” compared to theirs, which is ridiculous, as the only value we should have is internal, not external, comparing ourselves to others.

This inner conflict about “success” (acclaim, critical, financial), does not mean I cannot be critical of capitalism whilst seeming to admire those who have “made it”. I admire their focus, hard work, tenacity. I think it’s important to hold two conflicting truths at the same time, what F. Scott Fitzgerald talked about at the beginning of “The Crack-Up”, how a good mind should be able to hold two opposing ideas in their mind at the same time, yet still be able to function, how things can be hopeless yet we can be determined to create a different reality anyway.

Being able to see both sides of an argument is contradictory and difficult. Again, I honor the “success” of people in their fields, but at the same time I do not respect the way capitalism forces assumptions onto successful people because they are “successful”. Just because one is successful doesn’t mean one human being is better than another.

We are drunk on this idea of success as capital and we have to change it. Instead of success = value, we have to understand this:

SUCCESS = DOING WHAT YOU LOVE

Your value is not in your house, your car, your body parts. It’s about the value you place on living from doing what you love, your internal sense of value. Most of the residents who go to La Muse aren’t making money full time from their art. A lot of them have “day jobs”, but they look forward to spending time away from that capitalistic world to create. Many of them don’t shop, go out to movies, restaurants, so that they can save to get away to create what they love.

The most joyful creators I’ve ever met have been people with the least material affluence. Why are they joyful? Acceptance, and doing what they love out of love, not money. They are joyful because they see creating itself as success.

As creators our goal can’t be money. We need to be busy getting inspired, creating. The whole business part of creation is to be considered when we actually finish creating something.

There are other forms of capital too. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu wrote about cultural capital (education). He basically said a creator’s natural talent and work ethic is effected by how much money their parents, relations, etc., have. His question was how can we create when we’re always poor, and how can we understand certain creations when we don’t have the cultural capital to understand them?

We all “suffer for our art” when we come from socio-economic backgrounds that can’t support our efforts to create. Some people inherit wealth. Some “get lucky” early on. Others, after a long career doing something else, start to create what they love. But the most important thing to remember is perseverance, which is a lot easier when you’re doing what you love.

“Competition” can destroy your inspiration, your work ethic, your focus. Watch Miloš Forman’s “Amadeus”. Salieri basically destroyed himself by comparing his work to Mozart. The artist combinations of Freud and Bacon, Manet and Degas, Matisse and Picasso, de Kooning and Pollock, were often destructively competitive, even if some would say this competition helped them develop as creators.

If you don’t win prizes, don’t earn lots of money, you are a failure. A Sunday artist. A poor poet. A “dabbler”. Recognition is not judged in the value, the wonder of your creation or the process, but in whether it has won sanctioned recognition in prizes, a competition (there’s that word again), fellowships, venture capital, reviews, a TV spot.

The fact that each creation can be so different from another never enters into this worldview. Different people like different things. Seriously, how can found objects, and say collage be compared to a huge landscape of cows in a field? It’s like comparing a tiny factory in New Guinea to a Wall Street firm. You can’t judge one compared to another. Comparison and competition in creation can only lead to despair.

Competition generates, thrives on anger and bitterness. They’re making more money than us, me. They’re getting more recognition than us, me. But anger and bitterness don’t inspire good work. They might get you started on something, but if it becomes too obsessive it destroys innovation, curiosity, inspiration, creation.

Consumption and production. Producer and consumer. We have to adapt the consumer producer model, and empower the creator creative model. If you do the work, the reward will be in the doing. Focus on the joy of the process of creation, right now. We have in our heart what it is to be happy, right now. We need to keep our eyes on our own work, our own creation, not compete with others, or look for validation from a culture that only pays off for a tiny elite.

Jacques Brel was once asked about a beautiful song he wrote and he responded, “Yes, it’s belle, beautiful, now.” When asked why he said that he explained that it was only accepted as beautiful when it became famous, when it made money. Before that, he said, it was a bad song to the majority of critics. When people started buying his music, when he started making money, then he was successful, but not before. Each song is successful, depending on how much money it has made. Brel said nothing about the song changed. He said it was beautiful, before and after it became a success. Also, Brel is another example of a creator who didn’t just do music. He was also a successful actor. He appeared in 10 movies. But he didn’t stop there either. He directed two films too, and would have directed many more if he hadn’t died at the age of 49.

Capitalism knows no limits in it’s destruction of ethical creative ways of living. Even babies, one of the ultimate creative processes a human being can engage in, has been commodified. How can this be? How can we capitalize on on of the most creative acts in life? Where is the spirit, the human being in all this? I’m just asking questions here, hard questions. Isn’t surrogacy exploiting women, in the most part presumably poor or marginalized women who are paid to have children? This is contract capitalism. A baby has become a thing, an object, not a created being. Where’s the line between buying and selling children? Does all creation have to be capitalized upon?

So, how do we stop mourning the wrongdoings of these few “masters” Chomsky describes, and start reenacting the parts of our infrastructures that were healthy and productive in the past? Yes, by becoming active, but also by being creative, irrespective of the conditions we’ve been obliged to live under. At the end of his documentary, and his book Chomsky recalls his friend Howard Zinn’s reflection:

what matters most are the countless small deeds of unknown people who lay the basis for the significant events that enter history.

If you haven’t read his wonderful book “A People’s History of the United States”, you should, because it’s full of stories of people laying a basis for significant events to enter into history. And again, there’s the quote attributed to Margaret Mead:

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.

Like, Chomsky and Zinn I’m an optimist. I trust the arc of history to be bending toward justice, even amidst all this capitalistic injustice, but an individual politician or some public intellectual is not going to change things. Movements move things. It’s what the word means. My movement is creative. To create is to create a real popular movement. We need a creative uprising, not elected officials of art and writing and sculpture. The Civil Rights movement did this. Labor solidarity and unrest in this country did that. Even the the Occupy movement tried to do it. Black Lives Matters is trying to do it right now. They were/are creative movements. They react against the capitalistic culture of class, step outside, literally, into the streets of our consciousness and create a new dream, as Martin Luther King said in his famous speech. Each one of us can become apart of a creative movement, if we fight against this idea of powerlessness capitalism wants us to feel. Behind apathy is a great potential to create.

At the beginning of this podcast I quoted the wonderful Stephane Hessel in the second episode:

To create is to resist; to resist is to create.

To create is to resist. To resist is to create. When we create we resist the capitalist modus operandi of society, we resist what we are told we are, what we are supposed to be, what we ought to be, and become who we are. By resisting we are being creative beings, one of the most powerful things there is.

Ursula K. Le Guin talks about resistance too. At the end of her well known short speech “Freedom”, when accepting the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2014 (which can be found in video online or in her wonderful book Words Are My Matter) she had this to say :

Books aren’t just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changes by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words… the name of our beautiful reward isn’t profit. Its name is freedom.

So, understand capitalism for what it is, the greatest wall there is to the imagination and leading a creative life. Accept it, and then resist it, by creating, and so glean the beautiful reward of freedom.

So thanks for listening. I started with a quote from an Austrian economist and as usual, I’m going to end with an Irish proverb, one which rhymes in both English and Irish. This one literally translates as:

Better health than wealth.

Is fearr an tsláinte ná na táinte.

This podcast is supported by you the listener via my Patreon page. If ya want to support the podcast and help me get paid for doing it then please head over to patreon.com/johnfanning where you can get early and ad free access as well as extra episodes when ya sign up. Ifya can afford it then give me the cost of a price of a cup of tea or pint once a month. Ifya can’t afford it that’s grand too, ya can listen for free, but please subscribe to it on iTunes or wherever you listen to it and leave a review on itunes too or wherever ya listen to it and let your friends know about it so the listenership grows. Thank you! And thanks for listening. If you’re looking for more episodes you can find them on all the usual places like iTunes – or on my website at johnfanning.me under “podcast” where I’ve put up overview transcripts with links to all the people and ideas I mention. If you’re into social stuff and you’re looking to engage with me one-on-one, check me out on twitter @fanning_j and instagram @ johnfanning_. It’s been great sharing stuff with you today so until next time take care out there and be benevolent when you can!

Slán libh agus go n-éirí an bóthar libh.

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Ageism is the stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination against people on the basis of their age. Ageism is widespread and an insidious practice which has harmful effects on the health of older adults. For older people, ageism is an everyday challenge. Overlooked for employment, restricted from social services and stereotyped in the media, ageism marginalises and excludes older people in their communities. Ageism is everywhere, yet it is the most socially “normalized” of any prejudice, and is not widely countered – like racism or sexism. These attitudes lead to the marginalisation of older people within our communities and have negative impacts on their health and well-being.

That’s a quote from the World Health organization on ageism.

I’m John Fanning and this is the Create with John Fanning podcast.

How’s it goin out there. Hope all is well.

This is Episode 13 of my series of episodes on Imagination and creativity, based around my book Create.

Last time I spoke about courage, trolls and human Walls, but today I want to talk about ageism and retirement.

For decades, I used to always read a writer’s bio first, even before the first line of their book. I was obsessed with age. What age was she when she got her first novel published? What age was she when she got her second one out there? The nearer she was to my age, the more relieved I became.

Why? Because I, along with so many young people, are obsessed with this Wall of age, and early achievement. I used to see myself as a failure because I hadn’t published a novel earlier.

This is the culture we live in. You’re supposed to come out with something wonderful in our twenties, when we’ve barely experienced life.

This can have really bad side effects. I’ve seen many writers who had early success and never had another thing published. There were many different reasons for this. Trying to reproduce the same thing which made them successful then being called derivative. Not being able to write another book for over ten years because of the pressure they felt to “perform” the same way again.

As a young writer I was a somewhat bitter individual. I’m not too sure I’d like to have a conversation with that young man. He was fun but he hated a lot of things. He was an angry “intellectual” railing at everyone who’d sold out. Back then, I had no idea about story. I just did what I thought I was supposed to be doing. I wrote and wrote and wrote, and got angrier the older I got, especially the more I saw badly written books getting published.

Now, I am so grateful that my earlier novels were never published. Why? They lacked story. They lacked craft. They lacked emotional intelligence. This is not to say young writers aren’t valuable. There are many wonderful books published by people in their twenties, but now I’m glad it didn’t happen for me, because it’s allowed me to grow, and so allowed my writing to evolve in private, not in public, where oftentimes you are punished for not putting something wonderful out into the world first time out, and every time after that. It’s like a film editor friend of mine once said to me.

“I don’t mind if this movie is a failure, John. The spotlight is on the director, not the editor. I have the time to grow. A director has to hit it every time out the door, and most directors can’t sustain that.”

That friend is a very successful film editor now, but when I met him first he was doing indie documentaries, not big budget movies.

So, for the majority of creative fields there’s this pressure to hit it out of the park first time out, after college, with your first creation. Well, that’s a wrong-headed and destructive way of thinking and being in the world. It only leads to anxiety and depression or worse.

It was only recently I discovered Charles Bukowski, Raymond Chandler and J. L. Carr didn’t publish their first novels until they were 51. J.R.R. Tolkien was 62 when the Lord of the Ring books came out. Harriet Doerr didn’t publish her first novel, “Stones of Ibarra”, until she was 74. And this is just novels. Think of memoirs, like Frank McCourt’s “Angela’s Ashes”, written in his sixties, after decades of being a teacher.

Then there’s drama. At 41, Beckett thought he was a failure. He’d had one novel published, “Murphy”, and it was forgotten. His career in academics was abandoned. He went home to take care of his mother in Dublin where he realized what he really needed to do. The beginnings of what he’d done in Roussillon in the south of France came alive: “Waiting for Godot”. Then there’s Ionesco, a favorite of mine. He didn’t write his breakthrough play “The Bald Prima Donna” until he was 40. And nobody liked it. They didn’t laugh. It was too far ahead of its time. Only later did people start to enjoy his play.

The mental Wall hits you with this:

“It’ll take too long. I’m too old to start writing/painting/designing, etc.”
“I should give up. I should have produced something when I was much younger.”

Well, that’s crap, the mind-ego building yet another wall.

This idea of being too old to start is ridiculous really. Picasso never stopped. He painted until 91, literally until three in the morning, a few hours before he died. Frank Lloyd Wright designed, Stravinsky composed, and Sophocles wrote (“Oedipus at Colonus”), all in their nineties. In her eighties, when Georgia O’Keeffe lost her vision and could no longer paint, she began making pottery. In their eighties, Willie Nelson and João Gilberto are still performing, Quincy Jones still producing.

Retirement? What the hell are people retiring from? Life? Why bother living any more if you’re going to retire from it? Why not create something instead? Why not re-create, not re-tire? Are you really that tired, or only tired because society says you are?

Young programmers, or more brogrammers, and certain unwritten company policies from the tech generation are even more willing to retire people. In his book Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Startup Bubble”, Dan Lyons says the tech industry are firing people at 40 now. They’re too old for the brogrammers. This is crazy.

So, what do we say? How do we combat this? Don’t be ageist? Saying geezer is prejudicial? Old coot too? Calling someone decrepit is the same thing. I used to do it myself. I used to call people older than me, geezers. And as with all the brogrammers in Silicon Valley, I did it because of the one thing we really know about life, that we’re going to die. And as the Romans used to say “Timor mortis contrubat me” – The fear of death terrifies me. And what reminds you of death? Old people. So, we need to get them out of our sight, not listen to them, learn from, let them inspire us to be even more creative. I’m not saying old age makes a person wiser, but as Hemingway wrote in “Farewell to Arms”, it does make them “more careful”.

Just because the body fades doesn’t mean what’s inside it does not have the same incommunicable wildness that was there 50 years before. It’s about how old you feel, not how old you are. Don’t be agist. You’re only insulting your future creative self.

The World Health Organization has started four studies to define ageism and to discover ways to combat it. In their fact file: “Misconceptions on ageing and Health” they say one myth is that mandatory retirement ages don’t help create jobs for youth, quote:

Policies enforcing mandatory retirement ages do not help create jobs for youth, but they reduce older workers’ ability to contribute. They also reduce an organization’s opportunities to benefit from the capabilities of older workers. Age has not been shown to be a reliable indicator for judging workers’ potential productivity or employability.

They also cite surveys in the United States that found the majority of people approaching traditional retirement age do not actually want to retire. But still, many countries or industries have mandatory retirement ages. These discriminatory practices should be abolished. People should be allowed to participate creatively in whatever they want until whenever they want.

Even if someone decides working isn’t a creative or passionate practice for them, then retirement from work shouldn’t mean waiting to die in the living room. Life isn’t about sitting down all day, doing nothing, staring at the TV with your hands crossed. When you’re older you don’t have to make as much money to pay for the mortgage, the kids, the bills, etc. If anything, when you stop working for the man it’s an ideal time to start creating. It’s an opportunity. To create. To do what you always never had time to do, not to vegetate. Are you a vegetable, or a creative being?

It’s also an opportunity to help, to be of service to others, to help others create, to become what the Hindus call a forest dweller, to go out into the “forest” and bring back your wisdom to give to the rest of the world, what they call “Vanaprastha”. It could be doing art classes with a grandchild or daughter. Writing a journal of your life for your grandchildren. Helping people in your community. Anything.

For example, was poetry woven into your life from childhood, but then family and work took over? For a seventy-four year old woman who goes to La Muse every year this was exactly the case. She didn’t even consider becoming a “poet” — that was for Whitman, or T.S. Eliot, the pinnacle for her. But when she retired from wage work, she knew she wanted to write poems. So she went to La Muse with a book called “Poetry as Spiritual Practice”, and worked through it like a text. She hasn’t stopped since. They (both life and her poems) have only gotten better and better with time.

So, say no to retirement. Resist ageism. And if you’re younger, try to have compassion for people with older bodies. Just because they’re bodies are old doesn’t mean their hearts are no longer young, and just because your body is young doesn’t mean you have to create a masterpiece in your twenties. The imagination is not about age, but about patience, compassion and consistency.

So, no. Don’t compare your age to others. Don’t retire. Create!

So thanks for listening. I started with a quote from the World Health organization and as usual I’m going to end with an Irish proverb. This one means:

Youth does not care where it sets its foot.

Is cum leis an óige cá leagann sí a cos.

This podcast is supported by you the listener via my Patreon page. If ya want to support the podcast and help me get paid for doing it then please head over to patreon.com/johnfanning where you can get early and ad free access as well as extra episodes when ya sign up. Ifya can afford it then give me the cost of a price of a cup of tea or pint once a month. Ifya can’t afford it that’s grand too, ya can listen for free, but please subscribe to it on iTunes or wherever you listen to it and leave a review on itunes too or wherever ya listen to it and let your friends know about it so the listenership grows. Thank you! And thanks for listening. If you’re looking for more episodes you can find them on all the usual places like iTunes – or on my website at johnfanning.me under “podcast” where I’ve put up overview transcripts with links to all the people and ideas I mention. If you’re into social stuff and you’re looking to engage with me one-on-one, check me out on twitter @fanning_j and instagram @ johnfanning_. It’s been great sharing stuff with you today so until next time take care out there and be benevolent when you can!

Slán libh agus go n-éirí an bóthar libh.