The Discipline of Purposeful Time
Journal Entry: November 11, 2025 – 9:02 AM
There is no way around it. Artists live in a capitalist environment. To survive as a creator means navigating a system that rarely values what cannot be easily measured, monetized, or consumed. The romantic notion of the artist outside of commerce is lovely in theory, but in practice most of us still have to eat, pay rent, and buy paint. So if you need to make a living from your creative work, to be self-sustaining and not dependent on side jobs or subsidies, the challenge becomes one of equilibrium.
For me, this balance is personal and absolute. I have thrown all in on being an artist. No safety net, no backup plan. But here I want to talk about something more fundamental than money, the economy of time.
Let’s face it, most people waste nearly all of their time. Entire lives are spent in cycles of distraction, entertainment, and consumption. Our culture offers an endless buffet of “junk time,” and it is easy to fill every idle moment with something that numbs rather than nourishes. The tragedy is not only in what gets lost, but in what never gets born, the music never written, the painting never begun, the insight never allowed to ripen.
Artists, if they are to thrive, must live differently. We must maintain a healthy diet of time. To treat attention as sacred, to spend the bulk of our hours on what we truly love, even when it requires immense effort and discipline. It is not about grinding for productivity’s sake. It is about cultivating a life that is deeply aligned with one’s calling, even when that means sacrificing the easy, the idle, the wasteful.
There is a quiet joy that comes from a day well spent, from hours given fully to the thing that makes you feel most alive. It is not dependent on outcome or recognition. Even if the work is temporary, like a sand painting swept away by the evening wind, the value lies in how you spent your time, the quality of attention you brought to it, the integrity of your presence in the act.
That is the real measure of success, not how much you earn or how much others admire your work, but whether you have learned to spend your brief lifetime doing what feels essential, nourishing, and true. Everything else is only noise in the marketplace.