Make Art Anyway

I was supposed to write this five months ago. But I kept avoiding it – not because I didn’t want to write, but because I didn’t feel like I knew how to make something just for the sake of making it anymore. I still don’t. And maybe I’m not the only one.

I’ve been thinking about how easy it used to feel – when I was younger and painting, playing, building tiny worlds just to be in motion. Back then, creativity felt like breathing. Now, even stretching feels excessive. Picking up a pencil feels like a struggle. Most days I end up doomscrolling: dancers, disasters, meme creators, war, beauty, rage – all of it flashing past in seconds.

The Dazed article “Everyone Is a Content Creator Now” lays it out clearly: we’ve all become performers, even when we’re not trying to be influencers. The writer describes tourists filming themselves in museums like they’re on assignment. It’s like we’ve absorbed the job of being creators – even when there’s no actual job. We recreate, record, repost – even when no one’s watching. And we don’t always know why.

For someone with a neurodivergent brain like mine, it’s more than just overstimulation. Social media used to feel like a place to connect, share and be seen. But now it feels like it’s eating up more than I want to give. I rarely create without a small internal voice asking, Should I post this? Will it do well? And that voice rewires the entire process.

When I went looking for answers, I didn’t ask ChatGPT. I went to Reddit and slid down a digital rabbit hole. I landed on a post:

“I love to express, I love to invoke emotion with my creations. But Instagram influences my motivation in a negative way – validation seeking, overanalysing. I want to detach from that. But I still want to create. Does anyone here create without sharing? How does that feel?”

It was weirdly comforting. Proof I wasn’t the only one struggling with this creeping sense of creative purpose loss. Because somewhere along the way, the fear of disappearing – of making something meaningful and it not being seen – got very real. But wasn’t that fear kind of… new?

As a kid, I never cared who saw my watercolours. I made them because they made me feel something. That, I think, is the part we’ve forgotten. That we can create just to create – but it takes unlearning. Maybe we've forgotten what it means to make something without the need for a response.

Because platforms have trained us to conflate visibility with value. But a dance in your room is still communication, even if no one claps. A sketch in a notebook is still a moment of expression. Art doesn’t lose its meaning just because it’s unseen.

Maybe the discomfort we feel when we try to return to that space – where we draw badly, sing off-key, experiment clumsily – isn’t a sign of failure. Maybe it’s cringe. And maybe, as Elizaveta Federmesser wrote in her SEED Cringe = Sublime, that’s the point.

“Cringe can poke tiny holes in the mundane,” she writes, “sending shivers down your spine... And in that brief moment of heightened awareness, the sublime might just slip through.”

What if what we’re really avoiding isn’t failure or irrelevance – but vulnerability? That raw, unseen state of making something that might never be applauded or even acknowledged. But if the sublime needs cringe to appear, maybe what we make in private – awkward, imperfect, unfinished – is enough. Maybe it’s exactly what art is meant to be.

In SEED Club, Janne Baetsen said something I keep thinking about:

“Due to social media, the spotlight for expression grew exponentially. But it rewired us. The algorithm started watering the most visible seeds – not the most intentional ones. Influence got entangled with attention, and somewhere in that mix, we lost a part of our essence.”

That’s where Pierre Bourdieu comes in (yes, Dazed brought him up too). He argued that our creative instincts are shaped by the gaze of others, by our position within systems of recognition and value. It’s not just about what we make anymore – it’s about how we’re perceived making it. Even in private, we feel watched. That’s the rewiring. 

And social media is both the magnifying glass and the mask here, especially for neurodivergent users. As shown in this academic paper from 2023, many neurodivergent adults describe social media as enabling but also incredibly overwhelming. It offers low-effort modes of interaction, space for delayed responses and interest-based connection, but also imposes algorithmic noise, unspoken norms, and a pressure to perform “authenticity” under neurotypical standards. You can feel liberated and surveilled at once.

Sometimes, then, I think this isn’t just about being neurodivergent. It’s just being human right now. I don’t think any of our brains are really built for this much input, this fast, all the time. We’re not meant to absorb a hundred emotions in a 30-second scroll.

Still, the impulse to make never fully disappears. SEED CLUB member Joe Muggs talked about watching his daughter (who is also neurodivergent) get lost in her special interests, building little crafted worlds in her room. Pure, unfiltered “nesting” creation – no pressure, no audience. He described how he and a friend sometimes invent record labels. Not to actually do it – but to kickstart the joy of play.

So maybe that’s it. Art as a private ritual, not public content. A sketchbook under the bed. A dance in the dark. A collage of scraps you never meant to show anyone. Maybe creating like that isn’t a fallback – it’s the most honest version of it.

I still think sharing can be beautiful. It’s not the enemy. There’s joy in resonance, in being seen, in connection. But when sharing becomes the only reason to create, something important slips away. Curiosity gets replaced by validation. Expression becomes performance. The process becomes the post.

But I finished this piece – eventually. So yes, we can create for the sake of it. But we need to give ourselves permission again: to make things poorly, privately, strangely, inconsistently. To disconnect from metrics, timelines and potential virality. Not to reject sharing altogether, but to remember that art was never really about the likes.