Nearly two years ago I wrote a blog post ‘Should I be Writing at a Time like This?’ that started with a quote from Bo Burhan’s Netflix special Inside (2021): ‘The more I look, the more I see nothing to joke about. Is comedy over? Should I leave you alone because really, who’s going to go for joking at a time like this?’
You’re really joking at a time like this? You’re really writing games about elves or stories about witches or making tiktoks in your back garden while the world is on fire? There are days when the monumental scale of all the horror and injustice and destruction in the world tower up and anything you do seems insultingly pointless. Even the existential dread of it all feels self-indulgent and childish.
What I said then was: that since I was little, I just wanted to write fantasy stories. I wanted to take the adventures I made up in my head and put them on a page. I’m not a wildly consistent person, so when something sticks around that long, I figure it means something. Even my work on biodiversity, my love of woodlands, comes from a relationship with nature I developed through stories as much as through science.
At the same time, I always wanted to matter, to be important somehow, to have my influence on the world mean that it was worth it. Whatever worth it is meant to mean.
It’s not a nice thing to admit. We’re not meant to want to help just to give ourselves a reason to close the door on self-loathing. But I challenge you to find me a healthier coping mechanism that isn’t some thinly version of just stop being mentally ill.
I used Bo Burnham as an example, as in some of his earlier work like Art is Dead, he touches on two key ideas that I’m circling around; that artists must be a little narcissistic, and the question of whether the art created is worth it. The narcissism of artists is to think that what we’re making, what we’re saying, should matter enough that we build our lives around putting it out into the world. The logical follow on of that is that we do think it matters. I don’t believe that this is exclusive to the creation of art. Everyone wants to matter, on some level, wants their actions to have meaning.
The next obvious question is, so what? If wanting to write stories about witches while other people suffer is a little awful, what do you do? Should you just stop writing?
I quoted from Rebecca Makkai’s ‘The World’s on Fire. Can We Still Talk About Books?’ from back in 2018, She said “you’d be hard pressed to argue that James Baldwin’s talents would have been better used registering 20 more people to vote than writing The Fire Next Time.”
This is a good point, but ultimately one that will only ever be convincing in hindsight. I’m not sure I’ve met more than one person who advocated seriously that we should stop making art. I have met many people who thought it hinged on whether it was real art. They will say that artists have the capacity to speak to people in times of crisis, to give shape to feelings and fears and social change in ways so little else could. But is that the definition of real art? Art that is worth something?
For every person I’ve met proclaiming the necessity for real art, I’ve met at least two more people too terrified to share their passion. Asking a young writer, still trying to find their voice in a world of such infinite mass media and “content”, to compare themselves to James Baldwin… That seems unfair. Either shape a generation or shut up?
We can quote Emma Goldman’s “If I can’t dance to it, it’s not my revolution” all we like. We can repeat again and again that the point of life isn’t always to produce and that we’re not machines. Deep down, though, I think the idea that we could be doing more is hard to shake, because it’s usually true.
Statistically speaking, you could be doing more. Very few of us have devoted our entire lives to improving the world on some vast scale. Even those of us who try to organise on specific social or political issues, to focus on the problems in front of us, can easily burn out in the face of apparently insurmountable odds. I have, several times, walked away from worthy causes not because I thought I’d made enough of a difference but I just couldn’t anymore.
Ultimately my conclusion at the time was there is literally no other choice but to carry on. To live as in line with your own values as you can, even when it is hard and exhausting and unromantic, not because meaning in it is guaranteed but because every other option is worse.
Orla ní Dhúill 