What Do You Do When You Realize Nothing Matters but You Still Have To Make Art?

On consciousness, complicity, and creating anyway

I’m sitting at my desk with my laptop open to a blank document and the world is falling apart—glaciers melting, people losing their homes, children starving, wars raging, systems collapsing—and I’m trying to decide if the opening line of this essay should be profound or punchy.

The guilt is suffocating.

What kind of person sits here crafting sentences about existential dread and creative burnout when there are actual emergencies happening that I could be trying to help with? What kind of narcissism does it take to think that my feelings about making art matter when there are real crises I could be trying to address?

And yet, here I am, writing, because this is what I do. This is what I’ve always done. And I don’t know how to stop even though I’m acutely, painfully aware that it might be the most useless thing I could possibly be doing with my time.

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Consciousness Is the Cruelest Gift Because Now You Have To Choose What To Do With It.

There was a time when I could just write without questioning every single choice I was making. I could sit down with a story idea and not immediately spiral into “but what’s the point?” and “who am I to think my perspective matters?” and “shouldn’t I be doing something more important?”

That time is, unfortunately, over.

Now, every time I open a blank document, I’m aware of everything. The attention economy I’m participating in. The capitalism I’m feeding by trying to build a platform. The privilege of having time to make art when other people are just trying to survive. The performance of vulnerability I’m engaging in by sharing personal essays online. The ego that drives the whole thing—the need to be seen, to be heard, to matter to someone other than myself.

I can see all of it. That awareness makes creating feel impossible sometimes. Like I’m trying to write while also standing outside myself, watching myself write, and judging every word for how complicit it makes me in systems I claim to reject.

And, I Hate To Admit That Sometimes I Wish I Could Go Back to Not Knowing.

But, you can’t unknow what you’ve learned just because it makes things harder and you most definitely can’t unpeel the layers of awareness and go back to making art for the pure joy of it without also seeing how that joy is tangled up in validation-seeking and capitalism and performance and ego.

You’re stuck with knowing. And now you have to figure out what to do with that knowledge.

In my humble opinion, you can’t stop creating entirely, though, some people unfortunately do. They decide that making art in a burning world is too indulgent, too selfish, too pointless and they redirect their energy toward activism or mutual aid or just trying to survive. I don’t judge that, though to some extent I disagree with it (we NEED creatives!), but sometimes I do think they’re on to something.

Alternatively, you can keep creating while carrying the full weight of awareness. You can keep creating while threading aspects of the above into your life in addition to your creativity, all while knowing that your art probably won’t change anything. You can keep creating while understanding every way you’re complicit in the systems you’re critiquing and feel the guilt of doing it anyway because, if anything, at least your creativity is an opportunity to spread joy in a system of oppression, stress, and worry.

That’s where I’m at. Doing it anyway. Even though I’m not sure of the impact that it will have, if any.

Master Morality Is Just Capitalism With a Philosophy Degree.

When you become too conscious to create innocently, you start noticing all the ways creative spaces have their own hierarchies. Their own systems of who matters and who doesn’t.

The “real” artists versus the hobbyists. The people who suffer for their art versus the people who just enjoy making things. The tortured genius versus the dilettante. The serious writer versus the person who journals for fun.

We’ve taken this Nietzschean hierarchy and dressed it up in intellectual language to make it feel more legitimate than just another capitalist ranking system. Master morality. The idea that some people are simply more evolved, more talented, more deserving of recognition because they’ve dedicated their lives to their craft while everyone else is just playing around.

But calling yourself a “real artist” because you suffer more or work harder or take yourself more seriously doesn’t make you better than anyone else. It just makes you complicit in a hierarchy that benefits exactly no one except the people at the top who get to feel superior.

I spent years trying to be a Serious Writer. Reading the right books, attending the right workshops, performing the right amount of tortured introspection about my process. Believing that if I just suffered enough, if I just took it seriously enough, I’d earn my place among the Real Artists.

And all it did was make me miserable and pretentious and entirely disconnected from why I started writing in the first place.

That, Paired With the State of the World, Made Me Spiral.

Because once you see the hierarchy for what it is, and you realize you’ve been climbing a ladder that leads nowhere, you’re left standing in the rubble of your own ambition wondering what any of it was for.

That’s when the nihilism hits.

The systems we participate in? Arbitrary. The hierarchies we’ve internalized? Made up. Suffering for your art doesn’t make it more valuable and creating won’t save you or anyone else.

It all just... is.

And for a while, that realization paralyzed me. If nothing matters, if it’s all arbitrary hierarchies and capitalist frameworks and ego dressed up as enlightenment, then what’s the point of making anything at all?

Why write if my words won’t change anything? Why create if I’m just feeding the same systems I claim to reject? Why make art when people are dying and the world is collapsing and my guilt about choosing creativity over pouring my entire livelihood and career into direct action is eating me alive?

Then I Realized Nihilism Isn’t the End. It’s the Beginning.

I didn’t have an answer. For months, I just sat with the weight of it. The awareness, and the complicity, and the complete meaninglessness of it all.

When you realize nothing objectively matters, when you can see through all the hierarchies and systems and stories we tell ourselves about what’s important, you’re left with a choice. You can let that realization paralyze you.

Or you can use it as permission to make art. Not because it’s going to save the world or make you important or prove you’re a “Real Artist,” but because you choose to. Because in a meaningless universe, you get to decide what matters to you.

And for me, creating matters. Even when I can see all the ways it’s performative and complicit and maybe even pointless. Even when I’m aware of every system I’m participating in. Even when the guilt sits heavy in my chest while I write about my feelings instead of doing something “more important.”

I choose this.

Not because it’s objectively valuable. Not because I think I’m special or my perspective is particularly important. But because in a world where nothing matters, I get to make this matter.

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