Paint Your Life: A Metaphor For Creating From Your Own Life Experiences

Feb 03, 2022

Dear Friends,

Undeniably, today’s web platforms impoverish the way we “experience” life. They render people catatonic and passive. They make readers into zombies, and they bankrupt our creative process

But the problem isn't the tool, it's us. We're not alive to the world. Instead, we’re deadened to physical life and digital life.

We should never consume books or articles or YouTube videos or podcast episodes. Instead, we should:

Distill
Digest
Inhabit
Sit with
Harvest
Channel
Live with
Commune
Get Lost In

In short, we should live with the richest possible information sources in our lives.

If we let ourselves, we can be just as affected by a YouTube video as we can a Broadway play in person. Paying close attention to our surroundings – and indeed choosing our surroundings in the first place – is what makes us creative.

Here’s a story about paying attention.

The great American painter Andrew Wyeth grew up in the 20th-Century without the internet. He painted his masterpiece, “Christina’s World,” in 1948.

Andrew didn’t travel the world like many artists. He lived in only two places during his 85-year artistic career.

Andrew saw the world around him. He had an “almost painful sensitivity” to the world.

When Andrew’s father died suddenly, in 1945, it gave Andrew’s work new meaning His creative philosophy can instruct us today, and give us a roadmap: Andrew once said:

This is what I’m trying to tell you. Paint your life history.
Do the things that MEAN something to you.
Do the things that are your OWN.
PAINT YOUR LIFE.
PAINT YOUR OWN BACKYARD.

We can take two lessons from this story:

We don’t NEED the internet to do great work. We don’t even need to travel extensively. We just need to be alive to our everyday life and “paint” it.
But today, more than ever, we can choose our own “backyard.” We can “live” anywhere – and do things that mean things to us, unlimited by geography or boundaries.

The alternative to passive life online is to actively design your own life online and offline. To construct your physical life and digital life, and to make them work in harmony together.