#117 - How Artists Can Resist Temptations That Are Unhealthy For Their Art Practice
It does require some effort. For a start, turn off youf phone!Warm-Up Drawing Exercises
Quickly become better at drawing—without burning out—by using my workbook.
When redesigning my lifestyle this year, I learned about the harmfulness of hyper-processed food. Processed food came up in the 1950s, along with a surge in heart diseases.
For millions of years, humankind lived in perfect symbiosis with nature. Take fruit, for example. Fruit wants to be eaten so that seeds get distributed. Fruit is packed with healthy nutrients so that humans who eat it live longer and spread more seeds. A little sugar was added, and humans evolved to love the sweet taste because humans who ate more fruit lived longer. Our bodies even learned to break down alcohol so that we could eat fermented fruit and live longer, getting addicted to alcohol in the process.
We help fruit, and fruit helps us.
We’ve learned to love sugar and alcohol because, in nature, they come with a massive pack of healthy nutrients.
Enter the food industry. Companies distill sugar, alcohol, and other addictive ingredients like umami from food and create new, much more addictive food. Why? Because they can make more profit from such processed food than from selling raw, healthy ingredients. It is about their profits, not our health!
They are good at distributing processed food. You have to look behind a curtain of processed food to find the healthy food, which is often even more delicious, as you find out when you try.
Processed food is way less work. Even if I am in the kitchen with all the ingredients for a healthy meal, it is still easier to rush to a shop and buy a bag of chips with some dipping sauce, both heavily processed foods.
Large corporations create products and services for us that are unhealthy and addictive to maximize their profit.
This doesn’t just hold for food. Media such as television, social media, and streaming services try to be addictive so they can profit from advertising or subscriptions, distracting you from your creative habits. Social media even tries to get you to make the content for them for free so they can make a lot of money. They try to make you addicted to the engagement on your posts, likes, follows, subscribers, comments, and shares. You end up wasting a lot of time designing posts just for these platforms; time you could have used also to create soul-nourishing art.
Large corporations try to make unhealthy, addictive products and services, which can also pull us from our creative path. Be on the lookout for that, and reach behind the wall of bagged chips, metaphorically speaking.