What If You Created As Much As You Consume?

I want you to picture something with me.

Laying in bed at 1:47 in the morning. Light of your phone casts shadows on your face and bedroom wall. You’ve been scrolling for—what, two hours now? Three? Time has become liquid, flowing through your fingers like water. Thumb moves automatically, each swipe revealing another fifteen-second video, another witty screenshotted tweet, another piece of content meticulously crafted to keep you here. In this moment, consuming.

Somewhere in the back of your mind, there’s an itch. A half-formed thought. Remember that idea you had for a story? That sketch you wanted to try? That song you’ve been hearing in your dreams?

It’s still there, waiting. But your thumb keeps scrolling. Itch remains unscratched.

I know this moment intimately. I live in it too.

## The Weight of Consumption Let me acknowledge that there’s nothing inherently wrong with consumption. Great art inspires. Beautiful design moves us. Powerful writing changes minds. We need input to create output.

The problem isn’t that we consume—it’s that consumption has become our default state, our automatic response to every moment of potential.

Author Jenny Odell, in [“How to Do Nothing,”](https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2020/03/01/book-review-how-to-do-nothing-resisting-the-attention-economy-by-jenny-odell/) describes this as “the attention economy”—a system commodifying our attention and selling it to the highest bidder. Eight hours of screen time feels normal. **Checking our phones 344 times per day (the average in 2023) seems reasonable.** We’re fish who’ve forgotten about water.

And here’s the really insidious part: *consumption feels productive.* When we read articles about creativity, watch tutorials about art, or scroll through inspiration boards, we feel like we’re doing something. We’re learning, preparing, gathering resources. It’s all in service of that mythical “someday” when we’ll finally be ready to create.

I’m oversimplifying. Creation requires skill and not everyone can be an artist, right? You might argue that after a long day of work, we deserve to relax, to consume, to let others entertain us.

You’re wrong.

### The Energy Myth Creation doesn’t drain energy. Think about the last time you made something, anything. Maybe you cooked a meal from scratch. Maybe you wrote a letter to a friend. Maybe you planted a seed or drew a picture or hummed a tune.

How did you feel afterward?

I’m not talking about the result. I’m talking about the process, the doing itself. The verb.

There’s something that happens in the act of making that no amount of consumption can replicate. The difference between watching rainfall and standing in it—only one makes you feel truly alive.

Creation activates different neural pathways than consumption. When we cre