#7 Why is it that we suffer (for art and for nothing)?
From David Lynch's meditation practice to mine.
Hi everyone,
Earlier this week, I attempted a break—a deliberate pause that is instigated as a result of and remedy for feeling stretched too thin. By day three, I abandoned it. I quit my break because I realized that this relentless pursuit of productivity characterizing our modern existence has also infected the concept of a break; the “break” has paradoxically become laden with its own set of expectations and imperatives. Counterintuitive to my intent, I had once again tasked myself with something: to do nothing. Take the entire week off! Allow yourself to be lazy! Don’t feel bad about it! But this practice of distancing, although paved with good intentions to alleviate the strain of overextension, proved to be endorsing the very system it sought to escape. It not only rendered “doing nothing” as a goal to be achieved—inaction injected with utility and purpose—but this self-imposed directive also sought for an escape by oscillating between two extremes: a period of putting too much on my plate and then trying to reconcile that with a period of doing absolutely nothing.
Of course, the body—that is not aligned with the pervasive nature of our performance-oriented culture—does not respond to that. So, I realized that what I needed instead was balance—not a break that is one-off, but a more sustainable, consistent practice of respite. In the end, balance itself is inherently a break from the exhaustive, dominant paradigms of ceaseless productivity. While rest is profoundly important, I was made sure that we have a corrupt understanding of it, or that we did not understand the meaning of rest at all.
On Wednesday, which was day three of my failed attempt at a break and day one of a more balanced approach, I garnered the energy to pick up my laptop again and was reading the news when I came across this piece that inspired further contemplation on this topic. As the world was mourning the legendary filmmaker David Lynch, Wallpaper had revisited an interview from October 2010 when David Lynch joined the magazine as a guest editor. The interview was centered on Lynch’s meditation practice, which was also the focus of the issue under his guest editorship. Lynch's editorial decision to foreground meditation over his prolific artistic output—encompassing cinema, music, and visual art—was not merely incidental, but rather a deliberate prioritization of his transcendental practice to shed light on certain misconceptions around creative practices.
In many other posts and articles published this week honoring Lynch’s life and work, I encountered that his dedication to transcendental meditation kept surfacing. Even his family, in the wake of his death, called for a global meditation on his birthday, urging fans to join in the practice that defined his creative and personal philosophy.
Coinciding with my own reflections on balance and mindfulness, what stood out to me in Lynch’s story was how his advocacy for meditation essentially stands in opposition to the archetype of suffering (for art). The article assures that we’d “be forgiven for thinking that David Lynch, renowned for disturbing tales from the dark side, is a tortured soul,” and clarifies, “Quite the opposite. The maverick film director has dedicated the last three decades to the pursuit of happiness and inner peace.” But the real question here is, why are these two considered mutually exclusive in the first place? Why would it be a contradiction to produce twisted, dark masterpieces and be peaceful at heart? And inversely, or more broadly, why is suffering equated with or seen as a prerequisite for artistic creation?
But isn’t suffering the very bedrock of artistic inspiration? This sentence and sentiment, echoed in the article as a provocative prompt and transition to Lynch’s further elaboration, also reflect culture’s very troubling construction of the idea that we need to suffer for artistic creation—a notion that extends to many other forms of work. Lynch asserts that the romanticized image of a suffering, starving artist is a myth. He expands that “suffering doesn’t bring ideas,” far from it, “negativity restricts the flow of creativity, and suffering is not the friend of creativity.” Creativity, for Lynch, flows from clarity and calm—states he cultivated through meditation.
Lynch’s rejection of suffering is an apt and broader critique of how we measure effort and value. The state of struggling is not a resource to be tapped for artistic material or energy, on the contrary, it is so crippling and stifling that no form of production feels possible. And yet, why do we equate hard work with pain, suffering? Why do we feel that we need to suffer in order to deem our work valuable? While this myth is especially entrenched in creative culture—the idea of the “starving artist” or the “tortured genius” as a badge of authenticity—it pervades almost every domain of modern labor.
On these questions, I came across another thoughtful essay. In “How to Feel Bad and Be Wrong,”
, who writes Experimental History, describes a psychological phenomenon called “attribute substitution.” When faced with a difficult, nebulous question, the human mind replaces it with an easy one. An example in Mastroianni’s piece is how the question “Am I working hard enough?” is substituted with “Am I suffering?”:Lots of jobs have no clear stopping point. Doctors could always be reading more research, salespeople could always be making more cold calls, and memecoin speculators could always be pumping and dumping more DOGE, BONK, AND FLOKI.2 When your work day isn’t bookended by the hours of 9 and 5, how do you know you’re doing enough?
Simple: you just work ‘til it hurts. If you click things and type things and have meetings about things until you’re nothing but a sludge pile in a desk chair, nobody can say you should be working harder.
This resonated deeply with me. Especially as a self-employed freelancer, I noticed that I, too, am using suffering as a metric or sign that I am doing enough. And the inverse is true too. If I feel that I’m not suffering (enough)—if I’m not sleep-deprived, spending every waking hour doing or thinking about a project, complaining that I haven’t got enough (free) time for myself—I cannot allow myself to feel satisfied. I will not grant myself success or feel that I deserve it. Even deeper, a sense of guilt will creep in. And the thing with guilt is that it feeds off itself. You will constantly subject yourself to acts that will make you feel guilty so guilt can continue living and you’re stuck in this loop wondering why you can’t break it.
This week, like Lynch, I returned to my meditation practice, and I’ve also taken interest in looking into Lynch’s practice of transcendental meditation. While his perspective offered a compelling alternative to the myth of suffering, I cannot say that I agree with the fundamental principles of this practice. Lynch often speaks of happiness as something that is not “out there” but found and arises from within, yet transcendentalism in essence persists the very binaries that Lynch (or mindful practices in general) undermine. It echoes the Cartesian split between mind and matter, framing transcendence as an external, hierarchical plane to which one ascends. The sentiments of “diving within” lean closer to immanence than transcendence. An immanent critique of creativity, in this sense, would not seek a process of reaching “beyond,” or transcending, oneself, but delving deeper into the complexities and interconnectedness of one’s own existence. And that mind and matter are ultimately not separate; mind is also matter, which is not a detached, passive entity to be mastered by the Mind (or human intelligence) but a dynamic (material) reality to which corporeality in its wholeness belongs.
Perhaps this is where my meditation practice intersects with my philosophical approach. In my meditations, I first burn sage to clear out the ghost of Descartes and the neatly drawn lines and binaries, of mind and matter, and also thinking and feeling. As I sit with my emotions and where they sediment in my body, I try to remind myself that we are not thinking beings but feeling beings; thoughts should not always take precedence over feelings.
My prompt from earlier this week, or the framing of it—of “doing nothing”—was inspired by Jenny Odell’s book How to Do Nothing, in which she proposes doing nothing “as an act of political resistance to the attention economy” and “to question what we currently perceive as productive.” But perhaps in my brief execution of it, I myself have misinterpreted this task. Because my “nothing,” laced with suffering, was still stuck in a capitalist notion of productivity: a quick cheat, an illusion of rest or slowing down in order to return back to work. Or perhaps it is something I still need to go through, to move toward understanding this practice more deeply and integrating it mindfully.
Thank you for reading and I hope you take a moment to feel things this week. As always, I would love to hear from you—on anything from (your) suffering to meditations.
Please like or share this post as it helps me reach a wider audience <3
With love, peace, and gratitude,
Melis
Might be slightly unrelated but;
Today at the office, I noticed a slide titled “this week’s focus” on the shared screen of someone presenting via Google Meet. It made me wonder: do they use the same slide every week? This small observation reminded me once again how plastic and mechanical the world we live in has become. Your piece on “doing nothing” also made me think about how the real question might not be about doing nothing, but about whether the things we do are meaningful at all.
Our minds often operate like a kanban board, where moving tasks to the “done” column provides a sense of temporary relief. But is this true rest? Or does it stop us from questioning whether the tasks we complete truly matter? The act of ticking off a task can create an illusion of lightness, but in practice, it rarely addresses the deeper question of value.
As you pointed out, even the concept of rest has been functionalized in modern life. We turn “doing nothing” into yet another goal. However, true rest might not be about what we do or don’t do, but about reflecting on the residue these actions leave behind. The mind doesn’t truly rest when tasks are exhausted but when those tasks hold meaning—or when they don’t and we acknowledge that.
The real challenge, then, isn’t just to clear our minds but to evaluate whether what fills them is worth it. It’s not about whether a task is complete but about the mark it leaves on our consciousness. Perhaps we need a shift from “task moved to done” to “task moved to meaningful.”
Next time when you try to do nothing, take the inspiration from a cat—effortlessly lounging and basking in the sun's warmth ≽ܫ≼