The Hardest Question

Why do I do this? What's the point of this?

At some point in any major creative project, this question or some variant of it comes up. Usually, it comes up when the creator falls down from the "high" of the initial enthusiasm for a project for the first time.

The easiest thing to do as a creator is to let this question defeat you. With no answer to the hardest question, or a wrong answer (the nihilist answer of "there can be no meaningful reason or point" being the best example of a wrong answer), your project can die before it is fully formed. It is possible that sometimes project death is for the best - not all projects can be winners - but if you find that all your creative endeavors always seem to die when you face your first real loss of enthusiasm and run into this question, perhaps it is how you rationalize your work, not how you feel about it, which is to blame.

Let's face it, everyone has a moment in every big project where they have doubts, where they feel like there is no point. This feeling is normal, and everyone has to overcome it to finish major creative efforts. While everyone overcomes it differently, and nobody overcomes it all the time, if you rarely or never overcome this barrier, it's not the fault of your feelings about your work. It is very possible that you are being tripped up by more rational forms of self-sabotage - put simply, you probably don't have a good answer to "Why do I do this? What's the point?"

Despite what strict materialists and other victims of wayward philosophy will claim, human beings don't do things without reasons. We don't always do them for good reasons, but we are most diligent when we can at least defend our actions to ourselves with what we think are good reasons. This is why a brutal tyrant will often tire of oppressing his subjects for his own benefit, but a tyrant who is convinced that he oppresses his subjects for their benefit will rarely if ever pause. Luckily for us, this effect works for good as well as for evil - a person who is cleaning up trash in the city park will be far more diligent in the effort if they believe that it is making a difference for others, or if they are planning a family reunion in that same park. 

In other words, people with a satisfactory answer to "Why do I do this? What's the point?" can work more effectively, and your creative work is subject to these same motivational forces. If you run away from such questions, or pose only flippant answers, you are sabotaging the rational case for spending time on your own work, and this will lead to risk to the project when the emotional feeling of satisfaction with it inevitably falters.

While nobody can answer the hardest question for you, if you struggle with satisfactory answers, it may be useful to ask others how they answer it (and observe the long-term impacts of their answers). Good answers should lead to good performance in completing creative work, and bad answers in most cases will lead to a pattern of abandonment of creative threads. While you can't usually steal anyone else's answer wholesale, you can usually refine your own rationales based on the successes and failures of others with similar ones.

My personal conjecture based on anecdotal evidence is that good answers to the hardest question converge - that is, they are all rooted in the same core ideas, but each person looks in on those ideas from a different direction. This is not a suspicion I can defend with any rigor, though. Anecdotally, all the people I see succeeding in their writing or creative work tend to hold common value in the objective and self-evident merit of truth, justice, and beauty (or in a more explicit phrasing, they believe the following rather wordy assertions):

1. A and not-A cannot be true at any one time. When presented with a choice between A and not-A, the good choice is the one that is true, and the true choice is the one that is good.

2. Any action has consequences. Good actions have a preponderance of good consequences, and bad actions have a preponderance of bad consequences. An action that has a preponderance of good consequences is good, and an action that has a preponderance of bad consequences is bad.

3. A thing becoming more beautiful (or aesthetically pleasing) can make it better but not make it worse. A creative work is improved by making it more beautiful in some aspect, and it is degraded by making it more ugly in some aspect. A creator's decision to make their work more beautiful (or aesthetically pleasing) is good, and a creator's decision to make their work more ugly (or aesthetically distasteful) is bad. This does not mean that a thing or person being beautiful (or aesthetically pleasing) means that it is wholly good.

Anyone whose answer to the hardest question runs contrary to any of these formulations strongly (in my personal experience) tends to struggle to complete their creative work when their emotional satisfaction wanes. Again, this is based only on anecdotal evidence; I am nowhere near being able to prove it. As in the case of the dictator who oppresses his subjects in the belief that he is doing them good, there are probably answers which get results which oppose the objective merit of truth, justice, or beauty - if so, I've not encountered a sustainable example.

What is your answer to "Why do I do this? What's the point of this?" Does it at least sometimes get you through the moments of creative exhaustion and loss of emotional investment? Have you seen the results of good and bad answers to the hardest question in your own work or the work of others?

(Banner art by Wadim Kashin.)