One Way to Fight the Resistance: Are You a Producer or Consumer?
Do you know who won the latest “Reality TV Show XYZ“? Do you find yourself agreeing with the car commercial that insists that “you work hard, you deserve this car” (have you ever used that phrase in conversation with your spouse)? Do you find yourself spending copious amounts of your day keeping up with sports or entertainment news? Do you find you spend a significant amount of your income on entertainment?
Here’s something you need to think about. It’s another LOOK IN THE MIRROR message.
We’re back mining wisdom from Stephen Pressfield’s “The War of Art”. In the section on Resistance, he’s got a quote that battered me with a sledgehammer as soon as I read it. The quote is:
As artists and professionals it is our obligation to enact our own internal revolution, a private insurrection in our own skulls. In the uprising we free ourselves form the tyranny of consumer culture. We overthrow the programming of advertising, movies, video games, magazines, TV, and MTV by which we have been hypnotized from the cradle. We unplug ourselves from the grid by recognizing that we will never cure our restlessness by contributing our disposable income to the bottom line of Bullshit, Inc, but only by doing our work.
Of Course! Let’s look at what I think he’s saying:
- We have to recognize and acknowledge that our culture is, and has been, bombarding us with THEIR agenda
- We’ve got to fight that internally in order to do anything useful…move forward…accomplish something
- To do that, we have to unplug ourselves from the machine and actually do THE WORK
- We’ve got to take back our time, and take back our money, and produce something
Where are you on the consumer culture scale? Ultimately, we all need to keep the culture’s secret agents in check in our own lives if we want to move forward with our work. The consumer and pop culture of the day feeds the Resistance, and if we’re not aware, contributes to our lack of productivity. We must set our OWN AGENDA, not give in to the culture’s agenda in order to beat the Resistance.
How do we do that?
Each of us are different, so we have to find our own method by understanding what feeds our own consumer mindset. But here’s how I check myself: I ask myself, “Am I being more of a producer or more of a consumer?”
If you are producing more than consuming, your net value is positive. Always strive for positive net value. Notice that I use “net value” purposefully. Certainly all of us go through seasons, and phases whereby we are in consumer mode. But the point is, we are striving for positive NET VALUE, therefore, producing more than consuming overall.
I’ve been asking myself that question for many years now. I hadn’t discovered “The War of Art” until recently, but when I read that quote, I found the synergy right away. To me that’s what he’s really saying: “Be a producer, more than a consumer.”
We have to wage this war with our own mind, which would rather give in to the resistance. It’s a war of producing more than consuming. One of the battlefronts that resistance uses, is this consumer culture in which we live. So we have to be conscious of that, battle it and keep adding value by doing our work, whatever that is.
Think of how many people, either living or historical, that made an impact on you or the world had very little knowledge of the pop culture of the day. Some were ignorant of the news, some ignorant of the entertainment world, some ignorant of technology, some were just plain ignorant of most things outside of their own house or studio. There’s something to that. These are people that set their own agenda, and kept producing.
So get out there and produce!
I hope you got some value from this. If you did, please feel free to share it others. Also, leave a comment or connect with me and let me know what you think.
Have a great day!
