Consumption vs Creation
Good versus evil. Consumption versus creation. These are the main ideas that have led us to starting a blog and a YouTube channel. What do we consider consumption? What do we consider creation? How do we combine consumption and creation gracefully? Let’s take a closer look at these questions.
What is Consumption?
When we talk about consumption, we are focusing on activities like watching television, playing video games, scrolling through social media, shopping, overeating, smoking, drinking, or doing drugs. We reflected on this and both agree that consumption usually leads to short term rewards. The good feeling from these quickly fade and we end up searching for more of it which could start an unhealthy cycle. Let’s break this down a bit further:
- For watching television, there’s another episode to view.
- For playing video games, there’s another checkpoint to reach.
- For scrolling through social media, there’s another meme to laugh at.
- For shopping, there’s another sale to take advantage of.
- For overeating, there’s another pizza to conveniently order.
The consequences of one of these unhealthy cycles could be lack of sleep, overspending, weight gain, or even addiction. Also, investing most of your time in consumption naturally limits your schedule for creative outlets. There’s only so much time in a day to do things!
We face a reality where it’s easy to get sucked into these unhealthy consumption cycles. There are so many easily accessible things to consume. This blog is our attempt to break the cycle for ourselves by creating something instead.
What is Creation?
A dictionary would say that creation is the action or process of bringing something into existence. When we talk about creation, we are focusing on activities like blogging, filming, designing graphics, hosting a stream, gardening, cooking healthy meals, working out, or making music.
Typically, creation has a particular goal in mind. This could be to entertain, to educate, to share, or even to simply work on a certain skill set. We like to say that these activities involve choosing to make something out of your own creative energy.
Creation is purposeful and mindful. For us, it is an opportunity to put our own thoughts and ideas through the creative process. Can we make this entertaining? How do we teach this? How do we share this idea effectively? When we ask ourselves these questions, we usually end up refining the understanding of our own thoughts. Hopefully, it goes from a rough idea and transforms into something worth sharing. At the very least, we get to sort out what’s been floating around in our heads.
Choosing to create has led to some of our most rewarding experiences. The transformation of our ideas into something presentable gives us a sense of accomplishment. The process has been full of reflection and laughter. Working on a creation together has improved our relationship as a couple. We’re looking to involve other people in the process.
Our friends and family have told us that our work has inspired them to pursue their own creative outlets. Seeing their creations brings us joy and this is one of the things we were hoping would come out of this. We want to start a ripple effect of creative waves.
We’re less likely to get sucked into an unhealthy consumption cycle when we’re always looking for opportunities to create.
Creation = GOOD
VS
Consumption = EVIL
We realize that nothing is absolute and the statement above is a bit of a joke. 😄
How We Combine Them Gracefully?
While creating the outline for this blog, we were really focused on the idea of “consumption vs creation.” However, to even get to this point in our blog, we had to “consume”:
- We watched YouTube videos on how to setup WordPress, create graphics, and edit videos.
- We looked up blog writing styles and read popular blogs for inspiration.
- We listened to audiobooks and podcasts to gather more ideas.
- We watched TV and played video games when we needed a mental break.
Our decision to start a blog and YouTube channel keeps our minds on the creative process. Being committed to a creative outlet establishes a healthy balance of consumption and creation in our lives. There’s a time and place for most of the activities we’ve mentioned above. This might not be the most exciting revelation but moderation simply is the key to balancing creation and consumption.
Arvin and Megan create
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