The myth of the perfect, clean workspace

a moodboard on the performance of perfection and the mess of creative work.

I think we seek out and soak up productivity pablum because we’re ashamed of ourselves. We embarrassed that we can’t get our work done. We’re angry with ourselves for slacking off. Why can’t you just send those emails? And so we beg productivity gurus to make us better.

Adam Mastroianni • Excuse Me but Why Are You Eating So Many Frogs

Cleanliness—as the saying goes, and many of us have probably internalized—is next to godliness. To be clean: good. To be messy: bad. While cleanliness might indicate a space free of many things, it’s heavily ladened with value judgement.

We reflect that judgement onto ourselves, resulting in the shame that’s present in that third question in my... See more

The Mess of a Creative Space

But maybe this is who he really is, maybe we go through life never actually being ourselves, mostly never being ourselves. Maybe we spend most of our decades being someone else, avoiding ourselves, maybe a man is only himself, his true self, for a few days in his entire life.

Charles Yu • How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe: A Novel

I was talking to a younger friend about this a while back—your Internet presence is increasingly more valuable than your real-life presence. Which is weird and dystopian and I don’t really know how to think about it. But it’s true, and I think people who are like, I don’t need the Internet , don’t understand the extent to which much of the

Ava • life on the internet

The Mess of a Creative Space

Anne Helen Petersen has written about the “professionalization” of homes, thanks to the “market-reflected gaze,” and I think that this extends to the creative space as well—we base our expectations of our creative spaces not off of how we work best, but what we think creative spaces should look like. That clean and organized aesthetic also... See more