Self-Exploitation, Creativity, and Capitalism

I was recently a guest on a new podcast from Brianna of ExistBetter.co. She offered up the initial premise of balancing a creative vs practical lifestyle and it turned into quite an in-depth conversation with big picture themes.

This was so much fun to do. I love talking about this stuff. It was an honor to be Brianna's first guest on her new podcast. Forgive the muffled audio, that will improve on future episodes.

In her words:

We are a society that has commodified our relationship to nature, to the feminine, and to the creative half of ourselves. This has led to all sorts of problems individually, like burnout & mental health crises, and may have even more grave implications in society at large. How do we restore balance in ourselves first?

If you are struggling to make money doing creative work, find your purpose without burning out or selling out, or simply trying to live a balanced life and feel like you're being thwarted -- you're not imagining it. The dysfunction is baked into the culture, and freeing yourself of it is often a slow process.

In this episode, I talked with fellow creator Jeff Finley about our own experiences with this problem and the big-picture trends that are fueling it all.