1 — Have You Tried Turning Your Phone Off?
Let’s start with the obvious culprit: the smartphone. I’m not here to say that phones are evil or that you should throw yours into a river. They’re incredibly practical tools. I use mine for research, references, communication, even work. But the problem isn’t the phone itself — it’s the constant stimulation it creates.
The endless scrolling, notifications, videos, opinions, images, memes, outrage, inspiration, and anti-inspiration all mixed together into a single stream. Your brain never gets to rest, never gets to wander, never gets to sit with a question long enough for something interesting to emerge. It leads to what I call sterile anxiety.
Now, don’t take it the wrong way, as it is a word with very negative meaning: anxiety can actually be good for artists, a lot of people use art to sublimate the negative feelings they have and anxiety is one of those. But this kind of smartphone induced, dopamine-rich anxiety is not the kind that can lead to great inspiration.
Inspiration doesn’t come from being constantly fed ideas. It comes from the friction between what you’ve absorbed and the silence that follows. Books, museums, sketchbooks, long walks, slow observation — allow your mind to connect the dots on its own. When you remove constant stimulation, something uncomfortable appears first: restlessness. Then anxiety, the good one, this time. And if you stick with it and try to sublimate it, something else eventually shows up: ideas.
2 — Make Yourself Slop-Proof with Art
We live in what I like to call the age of slop. Slop is content that exists to be created easily, consumed quickly, forgotten immediately, and replaced endlessly. It’s optimized for engagement, not meaning. It’s frictionless, disposable, and emotionally shallow. The problem with slop isn’t that it’s bad (although it is, most of the time) — it’s that it trains your brain to expect everything to be easy, fast, and instantly rewarding. Art is the exact opposite of that.
Human-made art, especially art that takes time to understand or create, resists this logic. It asks for attention, patience, and presence. It doesn’t reward you immediately. It doesn’t scroll. It doesn’t autoplay.
And because of that, it feels increasingly alien in a world dominated by algorithms. But that’s precisely why it matters. Making art is a way of reclaiming meaning in a landscape that constantly tries to crush it. It forces you to slow down, to care, to struggle with something real. In that sense, art is not entertainment — it’s resistance. And the more slop-proof you become, the more clearly you start to hear your own voice again, and express it with your art.
3 — Embrace the Slow Grind
One of the biggest lies modern culture tells us is that speed equals value. That if something takes too long, it must be inefficient, outdated, or pointless. History tells a very different story. Many masterpieces we admire today took years — sometimes decades — to complete. Were those artists wasting time? Of course not. They were living inside their work, refining it, questioning it, allowing it to mature. That slowness is not a flaw, it’s the very reason these works still speak to us centuries later.
Real art takes time because real thinking takes time. There is no shortcut around that. The slow grind — the repetition, the doubt, the revisions — is not something to endure until inspiration magically appears. It is the creative process. And once you accept that, boredom stops being the enemy. It becomes a signal. A threshold. A quiet space where something meaningful can finally begin to take shape.
If you can learn to sit with that boredom, instead of escaping it at the first sign of discomfort, you’ll find that inspiration isn’t missing at all. It’s just been waiting for you to stop scrolling long enough to notice it.
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