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.
The fact that creating my art does not depend on making a living from it makes my life an uncomplicated one for sure. Once upon a time when married with small children and having an art show once every other year, even then my life didn't depend on the money I made from selling my art but it did help a lot. I don't think I could deal with the stress if I only depended on the money earned from selling art so having that taken out of the equation makes making art so much more gratifying for me as it's in the making of it that is so necessary for me and my finances are taken care of being retired. And yes, I do "waste" a lot of time but really don't see it as wasting but in living, doing other things. Art is a big part of my life but it isn't the ONLY thing that's important to me.
This landed with such clarity. There’s something grounding in the way you speak about time — not as a resource to be optimized, but as a field to be honored. Your distinction between “junk time” and purposeful time feels especially true in a culture that pulls us toward distraction at every turn.
I really felt the reminder that the value of a day is in the quality of attention we bring to it. Even temporary work — like a sand painting — holds meaning when it comes from a place of presence and integrity.
Thank you for articulating this so honestly. It’s a needed reminder that the real measure of an artist’s life isn’t the market’s response, but the alignment between our hours and what feels essential.