Be a creator, not just a consumer
I was going to post something about how everyone should go out and get a Guitar Center credit card, but I hate April Fools Day pranks. Here's a serious post.
In the past few months, I've been combatting a consumer-driven spirit within myself, a spirit that I think was placed in me by our culture, trained up by 27 years of being totally bombarded by advertisements, and fueled to continue growing by our guitar gear culture on Instagram and TheGearPage.
Everywhere you look, as a guitarist, you see a plug for whatever is new, now, or next. You scroll through Instagram to find post after post of product releases from guitar gear companies, mixed in among posts from all of your friends showing off the latest edition to their pedalboard.
It's not wrong to want things, to save your money and buy things, or to talk about what you bought. What's wrong is to let want consume you as you consume things. Or to let want give way to jealousy or envy. We look at catalogs and experience want, we look at friends and experience envy. We have to be so careful to distinguish the feeling of want from the feeling of envy.
In many ways, consumerism is advertisement-inspired want and word-of-mouth-inspired envy. And we have a real problem in the US with consumerism.
I think the only way to combat consuming in our personal lives to promote creating. Consumers ask, what's new, now, or next, and how can I spend my money on it, how can I own it? Creators ask, what can I make with my hands, what can I give to the world, what kind of statement can I make about what I value?
Consumers are shoppers, always hunting down that next thing. Creators are artists, musicians, writers, sculptors, designers, architects, inventors, woodworkers, craftsmen and craftswomen, tinkerers, programmers, cooks, bakers, the list goes on and on.
Consumers are unimaginative—they only know to buy what they're told in advertisements and on social media. Consumers listen to messages like, 'You don't know what you're missing if you don't have this trinket' or, 'You're out of the loop if you haven't seen the latest episode of this show,' or, 'I can't believe how this gadget is changing my life,' and consumers respond to those messages by consuming.
Creators are wildly imaginative—dreaming up entire worlds to go on paper, making melodies previously unheard, carving out meaning from a formless block of wood or heap of clay.
In a way, we're all both consumers and creators. Feed your creativity, cultivate it. Your consumerism is fed daily—did you know we see up to 5,000 ads per day?—your consumerism has been conditioned and trained by years and years of messages about what you should buy, who you could become with things. Forget things and become a creator. Learn a craft, practice a skill, bring something out of nothing.
This message is especially important to guitar players, as I think we work in a completely consumer-driven culture, with four to six product-release seasons per year and a constant pressure to own whatever is new. The perfect example is any guitar pedal with multiple versions—where version one is obsolete because there exists a version two—despite each version being a minimal revision of the last.
Be a creator. Forget having whatever they're going to release at NAMM in two months and just be a creator with the tools you love, the tools you value, and the tools you can afford.