the reinvention project week one
on being an insatiable art monster
I’ve started a new website, The Reinvention Project, where I am journaling my explorations that I hope will lead to a new career. My goal is to post daily. Then I will be publishing a weekly article with links to the daily posts here. This is week one of the 52-week project.
Relatedly, I’ve been enjoying articles from Optionality, a community of seasoned professionals like myself seeking new ways of working. This week, in Dropping our Work Demons, Optionality cofounder Jory Des Jardins writes about shedding your shoulds at work. Her shoulds closely parallel my own:
I should be making at least as much or more money in every new role. With this as a should it’s very hard to find, or create, fulfilling work. I often found that higher paying opportunities often included a “stress tax” in the way of more pressure, more hours, more politics. Or was that just how I justified taking highly-paid, unbearable roles?
I should get a “job-job”: that’s my term for a corporate role, with benefits, versus the more entrepreneurial opportunities I often found myself attracted to.
I should have stuck it out/made it work at (insert soul-sucking role here). Some say I have impulse control issues; I don’t have a huge tolerance for stagnation, boredom, or any whiff of being exploited. But looking back I can’t really say my decisions to jump, or even when I was pushed, landed me in a worse place.
I should work straight through my life until I hit retirement age (whenever that is). It never occurred to me to not work, or to not be in pursuit of work until I was incapable of working. Thinking through this Should I’ve concluded: This is really stupid.
What ties all these together? Maximizing financial outcomes at the cost of almost everything else.
In Monday’s post this week on The Reinvention Project blog, I wrote about how I want to cultivate satiability—the ability to get to a place of feeling that I have enough. Our American culture encourages an endless pursuit of material goods and money to get more of those material goods. While I’ve never thought of myself as particularly materialistic, my unwillingness to let go of work that pays well but leaves my soul sucked dry (see should number three above) says something about who I am.1
creative insatiability
The one area I do not want to ever feel satiated with is my creative pursuits, including writing, painting, and generally putting goodness out into the world, in a way unique and authentic to me. I am reminded of a quote from Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation:
My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never became art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things.
Well, I did get married and have kids (just like the main character from Offill’s novel) but the mundane thing that has stopped me from being an insatiable art monster has lately been my ongoing pursuit of more money. I don’t even really want more stuff that money can buy. I have a lovely home, a nearly new car, all the clothes I need to work from home (that is, not many clothes!), and decent enough furniture. I have a generously-sized retirement nest egg. I worry about financial security, but far more than I need to.
My mother will tell you I was always insatiable.2 As a toddler, I was always hungry. She would fill up multiple bottles with formula and line them up around my crib. I would drink one and once I finished it, throw it out onto the floor. She would hear “thunk” throughout the night as I finished one after another.
I would stand up in my crib and cry out for bread. “Bread… bread… bread!” As though I were some starving child not living in American plenty.
I was insatiable as a high schooler too, insatiable for boys and romance. I was the boy crazy girl. I spent all my time in high school and college thinking about and chasing after boys. I could have been using my prodigious mental powers to do something useful in the world, but no.
Once we were grown up my older sister Allison said, “I couldn’t understand you. You had so much libido. You were always climbing out the window to go meet a boy.”
It’s not surprising to me now that the targets of my chases were men who were very very smart. I was displacing my own need for intellectual production onto them. Later in life I found that using my own intellectual power felt a lot better and was, yes, satisfying in a way than catching a smart man flexing his intellectual muscles wasn’t.
In retrospect, I was metaphorically hungry because I was always consuming the wrong things. I don’t know who said, “you can never get enough of what you don’t really need” but they were right—to a point.
you can get enough of what you don’t really need but also
You can never get enough of the things you truly love. When I said goodbye to my old dogs Smokey and Lucy post-pandemic, I felt bereft. There wasn’t any length of time I could have had them with me that would have felt like enough. Of course it’s similar for all my family members, not just pets! But since the lifetimes of pets are so short the losses hit acutely.
I also don’t find that any amount of creative production satisfies. Writing makes me want to write more. Painting makes me want to paint more.
Sometimes I hesitate before priming a new canvas because I have already painted so many. How can I possibly keep producing more?3 I keep going because I love to paint. I love the start, priming a canvas with a gorgeous off-white. I love the initial laying down of marks and shapes and colors. I love the editing process where I take what’s good and emphasize it, take what’s not so good and eliminate or rework it, and bring it all together in a composition and contrast that works to my eye. I am insatiable in painting.
I feel insatiable in writing too.4
An ex-boyfriend of mine had a mother who was a painter. He and his brothers didn’t know what to do with all her paintings. There were so many. She couldn’t stop herself. She was an Art Monster.
Have I ever been insatiable in my work life, as a technologist? Indeed. I love to program. I love to investigate problems. I love when I have a really meaty project to work on. Today I don’t have to work at my half-time job with The Mom Project, because my schedule calls for me to work only on Mondays, Tuesdays, and half of Wednesdays. But I have a hard time leaving it alone. I want to see what’s happening. I like to be involved. When it’s going well, I want to keep going. There is some satisfaction in it, of a job well done. Then doing the job well makes me want to do more.
I remember when I got my first job as a software developer, right after completing my master’s degree in statistics. I would wake up so excited to go to work and write some more code, make some more things happen! All I thought about at that time was code.
finding satisfaction and satiability
I was thinking earlier this week that my goal should be to find what is enough, to cultivate the ability to be satisfied. Now I’m thinking that’s not my goal. I don’t know what is though. I don’t want to just fill up my basement with paintings and fill up the Internet with my thoughts on various topics.
I did a painting workshop last year and met Marthe McGrath, an artist who is in her 60s or possibly her 70s. She had been a rug designer before retiring and starting a daily painting practice. She told me that she sold enough art that she could do as many painting workshops as she wanted. Her painting more than pays for itself.
Here is one of her gorgeous pieces. The field of yellow supports subtle yellow-orange scraped-on shapes and white brushstrokes. She knows to use only a little bit of periwinkle blue for interest. Shadows of black show through.
There it is—the reason I want more money is to support my art monsterhood. But I think I have it the wrong way around. My plan has been to keep working, working, working at jobs I don’t really like so that in five or ten years I can just devote myself full-time to being an art monster (where my art is not just painting, but also writing, and also possibly continuing doing technology work in some fashion). I keep putting it off, instead of figuring out how to make the leap now, and make it financially sustainable.
I don’t think that means I need to leave tech entirely. If I do keep doing tech work, I want it to be the kind that engages me so much that I feel drawn to do it, day after day. I want to find work that is as compelling as painting or writing is to me. I want to do something that makes me a monster. A tech monster perhaps.
this week’s posts
I have a rough idea what kind of post I’ll do each day of the week. Sundays are for planning, Monday for money, Tuesday for ideas from books, Wednesday a piece of advice, Thursday quotes from reinventors, Friday a “flash” of insight, and Saturday a practice to do to guide a reinvention.
Here are this week’s posts (no Saturday yet, as I started on Sunday):
Sunday (sunday planning): Where will I be a year from now?
Monday (money monday): Cultivating satiability
Tuesday (book club): Quasi-quitting
Wednesday (Q&A): Should I leave tech?
Thursday (thursday thinker): What motivates Martha Stewart?
Friday (friday flash): Art monster
Also I’m planning to write at least one AI/ML article each week to keep that muscle strong. I published one about model and systems evaluation yesterday. As for painting, my goal this week was to paint a bunch of abstract florals. I have done that, and hope to have something worth putting on my website in the next few days.
Here is one of my first tries, on paper, inspired by a photo of pink poppies I found online:
Until next week!
Anne Zelenka is a painter, a mother, a writer, a data scientist, and a serial career reinventor. She occasionally writes about AI. She lives in Highlands Ranch, Colorado with her 20-year-old daughter, 80-year-old mother, four cats, and a puppy.
It could, of course, be about feeling financial insecurity. It’s difficult to plan for a multi-decade retirement knowing I might be unable to find a job or unable to work for other reasons if I need to.
I was probably hypoglycemic, but this serves as a nice introduction to who I was later.
I do intend to start putting them up for sale soon. While you may look at them and think, “my five-year-old could have done that,” I am hoping there are some people out there who might find some of my paintings appealing enough to purchase and hang on their walls.
Maybe if I do blog post every day for a year I’ll reach my limit.