A psychological guide to: Creating more than you consume
What if "more" was never the right metric?
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It often strikes after a 3-hour doomscrolling or Netflix binge session. You feel that same disgust and guilt that overcomes you after gorging on an inhumane amount of fast food. You tell yourself you're done being an information and dopamine glutton. You're not going to be a slave to the algorithm. You're going to finally have control of what passes through your consciousness.
We're all on a mission to create more than we consume. And I've seen lots of great suggestions from other writers with ideas on how to develop better creative habits. Setting time blocks for consuming. Scheduling creative projects. Having a rule that for each thing you consume, you create something as well.
I think those are all fantastic ideas. But lately, I've been looking beyond the doing, and considering the thinking behind living a more creative life.
You see, the issue with “create more than you consume” is that it focuses on amount. When we set time spent on X activity as the benchmark of success, we end up on the slippery slide of another version of consumption. You start chasing the creative streaks. Creativity becomes a status to own. Creative slumps become filled with anxiety because it is treated as failure. This starts to look eerily similar to a consumptive endeavor. This is the danger of creating consumptively.
The same trap can show up with consuming, too. Restrictive caps on your social media hours can turn passive consumption into anxious restriction: checking the clock, tracking the number, treating a low score as proof you’ve won. You're not really free because it's compulsion wearing a different face. The frenzy of bingeing replaced by the frenzy of restricting. What actually changes things is bringing a creative spirit to how you consume. This is reading, watching, and listening as an active, transformative act, not an input to be minimized or rationed.
Whether we create or consume, perhaps the target shouldn't just be amount, but deeper psychological measures: The quality of our presence, our motives, and what we feel we need to prove from how we consume or what we create.
Here are 3 ideas on developing a more authentic and active relationship with creating and consuming:
1. Presence: Be active, not busy
Being busy isn’t the same as being active. Busy is the factory worker working at an assembly line: always occupied, hands constantly moving, but none of it self-generated. The motion is driven from outside by a quota or social expectations.
Being active is different. It’s doing that actually comes from you—consciously chosen, alive, yours.
Busy mode is most apparent when consuming. The mindless scroll running on pure habit rather than real curiosity drawing you in. But you can be equally "busy", even when creating. Writing just to show off the streak. Painting for the final product instead of the process of growth that happens with each stroke. Creation isn’t automatically the opposite of consumption. It can be just as passive and compulsive when you're absent from the process.
Whether you create or consume, being active means the process of doing comes from you. You pick up the book to immerse yourself in the experience of ideas coming alive. You write the sentence because it’s actually something you need to say.
Ask: Am I really present in the process of doing this? Or is this running on autopilot because of ego or social pressure?
Two more practices for creating and consuming more actively are below.
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