This is unashamedly about gear. It’s not really a problem when you’re making money, but recently I decided to cordon off my spending on creative tools and make it relative to creative income. That is to say, recognize it for the giant black hole that it is.
It’s also a challenge to do more with less, which I always find a great creative motivator.
Downsizing
The other day I looked at my desk. By chance it had all my devices on it – two macbooks, an ipad, iphone and desktop PC. Five things, all of which I use repeatedlty for the same things, except for a couple of specific use cases.
I’ve been struggling to downsize my computing… array… for years. It started when I began playing and then developing a game. I needed my macbook for music and work, and now my PC for games. It never felt great having both. The best system was when I had a hotted up intel i9 macbook which could run both windows and MacOS effectively – but that might have been too good to be true and it died a silent death on the couch one day.
So I reinvested the refund for that computer into Apple silicon – an absolute revolution in desktop computing for anyone who pushes their machines for any reason. I’m sure everyone else has noticed the lack of heat and noise coming from the physical machine. There was enough left over to build a small PC out, and that was superseded by this computer when I decided a small machine wasn’t cutting it. POWER! GIVE ME POWER!
All along my aged intel macbook with it’s dead battery glared at me jealously from the corner of my room. “You know I still work, right?” he whispered.
I was struck with the thought that if I were to adopt my ‘gaming’ PC as my main machine, there wouldn’t be much need to keep the m1 macbook around, and it might still be worth a bit of money.
The old macbook can’t be a portable device. So I’ll need to sit at the desk to do more involved things, or use the ipad. The windows desktop doesn’t run my music software, but that’s ok because music is a waste-of-time time-suck that I shouldn’t be dabbling in if I’m not going to take it all the way (I’m not).
If I DO need to use that music software, I can use it almost as easily on the old macbook. The jealous one that overheats from a screensaver.
I can use the Desktop for video, even though it means learning new software.
In short this decision puts me up some dollars and forces me to focus my creativity on my goals, and to get the most out of the technology I’ve got.
It feels funny moving away from apple, even this tiny bit. I’m so invested in the system and have been loving the experience for years.
But what I have been discovering lately has been reminding me that such things are unimportant when it comes to winning at creativity and reaching goals. You can do all of the same things, just in different ways. It’s a flavour, really.
It gets me looking at creativity how I should – a potential waste of time and money, and urges me to direct it in ways that will create value in some way. And until I manage to create that value, I’ll have to get by.
There will be no more purchases of gear. I recently got a camera by expanding my credit limit, and while that wasn’t the worst decision as I have big plans for that camera, it was certainly the last straw. I’ll be putting all spare cash into paying this off, after shifting funds to our expenses and saving accounts.
Rambles? Sure! But useful I hope.
One last parting thought - having some direction, resulting from self-awareness, is crucial to being able to downsize like this. Part of the reason I’ve always had all the things, was I thought any of the them could start paying off at any random moment. Now I know I need to be judicious with my time, putting my resources in service of a single project and goal. Everything else is not only expendable, but it’s the enemy.
For now.