You may have very much noticed that these essays or episodes, at the time of their initial publication, come in waves. Meaning not one by one regularly on a set standardized, reoccuring schedule, but instead more in chunks or bursts, a bit sporadically, with oftentimes sizable gaps of time in between each wave. For example, not always, but oftentimes, they're may be 3 or 4 publications in a month and a half and then it will be 4 months of downtime - Crickets! Dust bowls! Making half the listeners or readers think we've hung up the reins, put them out to pasture, rode them off into the sunset, otherwise known as completely concluded them. Only to have another wave show up at some previously non-defined amount of time. Until this all re-courres again!
Creative outputs are often intermittent due to a variety of factors. One of the most prominent reasons is the nature of the creative process itself. Each of these writings we try to make (hopefully somewhat) timeless and figuring out what the next one will be is based on what we feel at a certain time based upon how much introspection and incubation we've given an idea. Ours or anyone else's real creativity requires a certain level of inspiration, and inspiration is not always present or easily accessed. Often arriving sporadically and is influenced by factors such as emotions, schedule, environment, and life experiences. Primarily in this scheduling case, it's because we also undergo various waves of a short term slave job - day work. Having typically freelanced over the last decade, in various film related capacities, which means being absolutely slammed for numerous months, and then suddenly unemployed. Feast or famine.
Creative work is very undervalued in the dysfunctional everything is for profit culture. Like most others, our most creative work makes us almost the least amount of money - so we work as well. Not as a permanent staff infection company man but here and there at various places at various times. So when little to no creative outputs are occuring, it almost always equates to us working. Less on our own projects, and way more on someone else's projects. Thus, these essays, along with our documentary and photography outputs, get mostly paused. There is an unfortunate stigma around creative personal work being viewed as a hobby or a luxury rather than a viable career option. This can make it difficult for artists to earn a fair wage for their work, particularly in fields such as writing, visual art, or music, where piracy and unauthorized sharing of content being rampant hasn't helped and the rise of the ghost in the machine, otherwise called Artificial Intelligence, is both a simultaneous help and hindrance as well.
Even though, in the early 2020's there are now new models for funding, distribution, and monetization, pressures of commercial viability and financial success more often than not stifle creativity and limit artistic expression. In order to make a living off their work, many creatives must make compromises and sacrifices in their artistic vision, leading to a dilution of their unique autor voice and style. Not to mention spending time away from what they want to be doing to instead develop business skills. Another challenge facing creative individuals is the lack of stability and security that comes with working in a freelance or self-employed capacity. Without the benefits and protections of a traditional job, such as healthcare and retirement co-provided in a more sophisticated European society that provides those as a social contract through tax dollars paid - rather than solely through an employer, creatives often have to navigate a complex and often uncertain landscape of contracts, clients, and finances just to be able to be paid a modicum of a living wage along with a nestegg for the future. Furthermore, creative outputs are often hindered by the pressure of deadlines or expectations. The stress and anxiety associated with the need to produce on demand can be a significant impediment to the creative process, causing artists to second-guess their work and ultimately stifle their creativity. This is why we long ago learned to completely decouple our day job work from our own work. Knowing they are two completely different things. So between all of these life dynamics one goes through to make a living, or let the sand drain from the hourglass their whole life making a slow dying, intermittent waves of others work generally pause intermittent waves of maximized individualized original creativity.
We've previously released a private essay on the subject of having "no set schedule" in regards to outputs. So we encourage you to seek that out and try and not have this be just a duplicate of that previous writing, but what is important to highlight here is that - it's incredibly difficult to make a full time job out of your own creativity. John Anthony West, the Egyptologist who, unlike most mainstream legacy forgettable Egyptologists, actually knew things about the esoteric and initiatory aspects of ancient egypt, thereby actually knew deep things about Egypt, and was someone who wrote his own books from his decade of research on the subject and made a documentary series about it as well called Magical Egypt which is very much worth your ear holes and eyeballs, once said in a lecture that it's nearly impossible to make a living off your own creativity.
Creative fields, where one does actually use some level of their own creativity, are highly competitive, with many talented individuals vying for nauseatingly limited keyston creative opportunities. This means that success often requires not only skill and talent, but also luck and perseverance. And then something called The Pareto distribution sadly also comes into play. Which is a power-law probability distribution that is used in describing the ratio of many types of observable phenomena sometimes within more perfect nature and way more often within dysfunctional culture. In short it highlights how most people will have little to very moderate success at something, while a tiny few will be wildly successful at it. Basically the scale of resources and thus power, is incredibly off balance. Such as how most podcasters make little to no money off their podcasts, and then one podcaster sells his to Spotify for $100,000,000.
Regardless of how one makes an income, in a boring slave job or even if it is lucky enough to be off some percentage of their own creativity that's in a job that is mostly enjoyable, over the long haul, being years or decades, the intermittent nature of creative outputs allow for more flexibility. Also allowing for splashes of productivity followed by periods of rest and reflection. This pattern of intense focus and rest is often necessary to allow the mind to recharge and generate new ideas. From within, not from outside sources. Such is how the band Tool is able to make such incredible albums that dont degrade over time. Where songs on their last album can be mixed with songs on their first album, and they pretty much all lock in place together without a noticeable style or quality change. You could take all their songs from all their albums, mix them all up, and basically not be able to tell which are newer and which are older. They are one of the only bands which seem to be able to do this, but the catch is their fan base will have to wait the better part of a decade between each album being released.
Because the creative process is often unpredictable and nonlinear, meaning that progress may not always be immediately visible or measurable. It is not uncommon for creative individuals, outside of what they get paid for, on their own time, which is likely a rarity to begin with, to also spend long periods of that rare personal time on a single project or idea, only to abandon it entirely or return to it later with a fresh perspective. So we find, during these freelance job chunks, our creative flow, and frankly much of our self development, get either paused or turned down to a slow drip. As it's really hard to have time for introspection, travel, and synchronicity when you are working a lot of hours for 6 or sometimes even 7 days a week from home. At that point not only can you not get out there, see the world through travel and walk the yellow brick road, you barely have time to fold the now clean and formerly stinky laundry.
The ebb and flow of inspiration, coupled with the need for rest and reflection, can often lead to periods of apparent inactivity. However, it is important to remember that these periods are not indicative of a lack of value, creativity, skill, or legacy built, but rather an essential part of the process that ultimately leads to the production of meaningful and impactful work over a lifetimes. So the intermittent nature of creative outputs is a natural and inevitable part of the creative process - and is how these essays will continue to arrive in waves over the months, quarters, and years. Think of this venture's orbit just being longer. Which should increase the value of the waves when they arrive anyway. So this orbit is not Venus, it's Jupiter.