Creation and Consumption

If you’re watching a movie, you’re consuming something. But someone else – many people, probably – were involved in the creation of the movie.

Take this article. I’m the one who created the content. You are consuming it.

So man-made things typically have a component of creation and consumption. Someone created them, and others consume them.

There’s nothing objectively good or bad about creation and consumption. It might sound like creation is always better than consumption, but that’s not true. You might get more value from reading (consuming) a great book or watching an awesome documentary than you would have gotten from (creating) writing a blog or uploading a video on YouTube.

Everyone consumes some content or the other, and most people (hopefully) create at least something.

So, just like everything else, it’s a personal choice whether one prefers to spend time consuming or creating content. I call this the creation-consumption ratio, the ratio of time spent on creating and consuming.

I already said there’s nothing objectively better about creation than consumption, but value judgments are never objective, and neither is this article.

Many people don’t seem to be aware of their creation-consumption ratios. A lot of time is spent in consumption – and a lot of that consumption is mindless.

It’s not even a fair fight. In a world where quintillions of bytes of content is created every single day, we are bombarded with options to consume. It’s not surprising it’s easy to consume something or the other – in fact, you’ll often hear that it’s supposed to be hard to resist.

And on the other hand, the act of creation is among the hardest you can do. Even something as simple as writing this article requires thought, time, effort and energy.

Even worse, much of the content seduces us into consumption, wearing the guise of “productivity”. Many documentaries and books (especially non-fiction) make us feel like we’re spending our time doing something useful – even though that’s not always the case.

Consumption serves two purposes – happiness or usefulness. Either it makes us feel good – and that, I think, is a sufficient reason to engage in it. Or it is a means to an end in that it helps us in our own creations. So you might like reading or watching movies, and you might also leverage the ideas you derive from them to produce something of your own.

I’ve never understood why people whine about spending their lockdown or holidays watching TV shows or “wasting” time on FB/Instagram. Why do it if it doesn’t make you happy? And if it does, then why whine about it?

It’s mindless consumption when you go on consuming without stopping to wonder why you’re doing what you’re doing.

If you’re in the habit of doing that, remember that there’s only a finite amount of time you have on this Earth: The content you consume is consuming you.

The act of creation is what adds something new (not all creation, obviously). Whereas, consumption, no matter how good, can never bring anything new by itself. Regardless of how great a book you read, you are still consuming ideas already created by another person – unless you add on to them, which requires you to create something yourself.

If we classified the factors behind economic inequality very simplistically, we could categorize them as Systemic and Individualistic.

Systemic would be everything beyond the control of the individual – caste, gender, accident of birth, nationality and so on. They play a major role in creating and shaping inequality.

But even in a world free from all these ills, we’d probably never have perfect equality.

That’s because individualistic factors would still differentiate people. Not everyone can earn the same amount of money, and not everyone wants to.

But I’d guess that a major difference between the rich and the rest would be their creation-consumption ratios. Wealth is typically (again, unfortunately not always) made by creating value. A Mark Zuckerberg makes billions of dollars because he created the idea behind Facebook. A large chunk of youth, on the other hand, spend hours consuming whatever Facebook offers them, and perhaps even get negative value out of their consumption.

The point of this long post on a very abstract topic is simply to help you be aware that there is a difference between creation and consumption. There’s nothing wrong with either and you can’t avoid either one entirely.

The difference between the two is visible every day. It’s the difference between eating and cooking, between singing and listening to music, between reading and writing, between watching a sport and playing it. All of these might be enjoyable, and some of them are synergistic – reading can improve your writing, just as watching professionals play tennis can help you with your game.

So, nearly every time we engage in anything, we make a choice. If you know the difference between these two, you’ll at least be aware of what you are choosing to spend your time on, and hopefully what you’re choosing is what makes you happy.