Overlooking streets lined with delicate railings resembling hearts and alleyways filled with warmly lit outdoor seatings, I think about what it means to create, which inevitably turns into an inquiry into what I’m on this planet for. Questions of productivity and creativity have been circling in my head for long. My concluding chapter with the Silicon Valley has imprinted a revelatory belief in my head: that it is perilous to laud productivity as the ultimate goal, how the essence of the human spirit is co-opted into an apparatus for capitalist agenda, the value of a person equated into the outcome of labor or metricized judgments of value. I offered nostalgia and care as actions to counter it: nostalgia in childhood, past media, dated appearances as a way to indulge in something that has already been created instead of making something anew and care in forging connections with others, nature, and self.

For the longest time, the joy of making fed into how I justified my being in this world. I was guided by a clear calling and would go straight to its source, what they mean when they include “passionate” in a list of adjectives to describe a person. Being passion-driven made the problem of productivity irrelevant. Producing was merely hedonistic indulgent, of having fun. Inspiration and motivation came easily: in school it was weekly assignments of visual expressions compounded with personal and freelance projects that filled up all my free time, at work it was putting my energy into shaping the way people approached creativity themselves, making tools that peel back layers of machinery that gets in the way of flow state. But when fun is also a flippant motivator; as it fades I’m called into question why else I’m doing what I’m doing.

So I thought critically about my discontent with creativity culture. It felt dehumanizing to tie self-worth with output yet we are accustomed to having the value of our being judged by parents, school systems, workforce, and society by the quality and quantity of what we produce. Test grades, acceptance letters, employment status, likes and comments—merit and product are so important that they became the primary way in which we value those that don’t come from wealth and status. Productivity has also become the main reward system I know, yet creativity isn’t treated as a pure trade, but a mindset, something that is present in all aspects of life outside of billable hours and seasons of awards, a lofty testament to the human spirit that is talked about in the same vein as spirituality and morality. The gap between practicality and ideology was ever wider, and both practices felt wrong.

I sought to detangle my value with the things I make and shifted my energy into taking in the world. Like mentioned, it came through activities that centered around not creating, such as the nostalgia in rewatching old shows and cartoons or rereading books I liked in the past, or the connection in taking psychedelics to feel in tune with how my being is present in the world while I peeled back the layers. I frequented movie theaters and libraries and exposed myself to the good and bad that other minds have offered. Yet despite how I demonize productivity in my head, I still constantly negotiated with myself how meaningful it is to be productive. Before I left I wrote this long journal entry where I worry about not being able to write my autobiography while overlooking the sunset, immediately followed up by another one detesting even the inkling of thought remotely related to the need for making. I’m learning to give love and be loved. And having rejected the type of productivity historically associated with my gender, of bearing and raising children, I still can’t detangle productivity from the only way I saw I could deem myself loved in the world.

So when the steam from my job ran out and the things I have been making no longer seemed interesting, I didn’t feel impelled to jump directly into something else. I put my life under a randomizer and wait until something calls to me again, as it always did. I left SF and traveled across oceans to find alternative answers despite telling myself that’s not the point. Like an Angelina Jolie movie I keep hearing about: make new memories, pick up some inspiration along the way, and I would make something of them perhaps. For the past month, I’ve been going about my days wandering around streets, hopping from city to city, tasting a little bit of the locality through the lens of a tourist. I ran around places where laptops are not the typical weekend activity. I listened to podcasts of domestic affairs as I didn’t have to pay much attention. I sipped on whipped milk mixed with caffeinated sources of a specific locality and painted my fingernails shades of jelly. Here and there I write down stories but I don’t finish them: a personal essay about growing up with internet censorship, alluding to larger themes of cultural imperialism and patchwork identity, but I can’t draw a conclusion as I realized I’m still faced with the same dilemmas of internalized imperialism, or a short story that captures a specific feeling of progress, but it’s hard to push out except for a few tidbits on gourmet femme confectionaries.

I barely speak, not because I have nothing to say, but because I don’t deem any thoughts worthy enough to come out my mouth. The narrative that is slowly building within isn’t pretty: if I speak of the situation it feels like admitting defeat, now I’m truly a neet, without irony, alone and untethered, adding to the pile of despair, living off my wealth, squandering for as long as it lasts me. But the silence is a custom of mine that I almost forgot; I went from being selectively mute, to talking, to conversing, to socializing, to spilling secrets and trading promises within the span of my coming of age. I learned to speak but pockets of silence come back to visit me when I forget what it’s like, this time again, a lifetime of interplaying with silence made me habituated to the solitude.

There is so much noise in the world that I seek refuge in silence. I reminisce tenderly over the times when silence was all-encompassing but I didn’t have any wish to fill it, like looking out at the desert when propped on the dirt ground or watching over the city perched over a rooftop. But when the lull becomes forced it slowly deteriorates the part of my mind that craves spirit, connection, and enlightenment. Sometimes I scream in my head and not a sound comes out of my lips. The juvenile tendency to be an alien, to pass by this life as an observer from another planet is seated within me. Perhaps it comes from my need for perfection but also a deflection of judgment. Even when I made things I didn’t dare to make works that were personal, as I didn’t feel adequate enough to add my touch out in the world. I hoped to observe and comment, but not willing to participate fully, to not offend but also to not leave a mark.

But I seek to challenge the exclusion and the doubt that is embedded deeply within me. I look through all the noise created by everything that exists in this world, by the AI sludge and the spoon-fed dysphoria and addiction, and I’m aggravated by the presumptuousness. When the silence becomes overbearing I realize that speeches and prints can be made of anything that I wish. They can leave marks or vanish into the sphere of all the other currents that surround us. I’m going to speak as there are stories, my stories to tell. To make something and send it out to the world, filling the noise but also adding to the dialogue. Make something, as elaborate, or simple, or bizarre, or ordinary, or personal, or communal, however you wish, however you don’t. To speak, and therefore to create, not for productivity, or to tie my name to something that can be recognized, but to keep a record of this slice of time, my internal disposition, the distressing, the fantastical, the cyclical, and provisional, captured like photos or used tissues, this time ever more intimate.