human-scale
I recently read Keeping the web small by What the Fran. It inspired a couple of thoughts within me.
humans aren't built for the level of connectivity and information we have today
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari is one of my favorite anthropology books. Harari talks about how homo sapiens evolved as social animals in small groups of other humans (also often referred to as a tribe, village, clan, etc). They also had small networks of these small groups. Today, people can have hundreds, thousands, or even millions of "friends" or "followers," far beyond our natural human-scale.
And while the human brain evolved to be curious, learn, think independently, and generate brand new ideas, it still exists in the physical universe, and has a finite limit to how much information it can process and remember before it goes into overload. Today, the amount of information we have access to and ingest is far beyond our natural human-scale.
what does that mean for creatives?
What the Fran talks about how we shouldn't try to be creative for a massive audience of thousands or millions.
It's okay to make something just for one person! For five people. To say 'only a few thousand readers' or whatever is wild to me. Only? That is already a huge scale.
To me, human-scale is about knowing, feeling, and being intentional about what constitutes enough.
How do you feel about your creative projects? Is that enough? How do your closest loved ones or fellow creatives feel about it? Is that enough? If you've built a small community of people who genuinely appreciate and/or engage with your work, is that enough? If not, define what is.
While we all want to be seen and validated, I think that can come at a human-scale. I think about my favorite podcasters who have hundreds of millions of streams and are busting their tails to keep growing because they either haven't defined what enough is for them or they just keep moving it once they reach it (indicating that deep down, their definitions aren't accurate).
And it's that right there, the growth piece, that's simultaneously un-human (in that it goes beyond our natural human-scale) and inherently human (see below).
What the Fran talked about how "infinite growth on our finite planet leads to our destruction," which I wholeheartedly agree with. I wrote about this at the end of my blog post, AI, like all technology, is double-sided.
There's a floating theory in the NASA/SETI community that perhaps the reason why we've never seen evidence of other intelligent civilizations out there is because intelligence itself is double-sided. In a blog post, Marc Kaufman wrote, "This potential explanation is among the most unsettling: that intelligent and technologically advanced beings are likely to ultimately destroy themselves. Along with the creativity, the prowess, and the gumption, intelligence brings with it an inherent instinct for unsustainable expansion and unintentional self-destruction.
I've gone through periods in my creative life where I wanted to make money and/or "get rich" from my creative pursuits. "If I created a content farm blog, how much money could I get from ad revenue? If I churned out album after album on Bandcamp, how much money could I make? If I made a smash hit podcast, how long until Spotify buys me out?"
I'm a bit older now and have a stable career that I love and pays the bills, so the financial piece is taken care. Now I create stuff simply because it brings me joy, it uses a different part of my brain than my job does, and it leads me to meeting other really cool small and independent creatives. I've come back to creating at a human-scale, and it's a lot more fun here.