What are you going to do now? is probably the one question I have been asked the most in 2020.
After I sold the wakeboard cable in the spring and in particular after I completed our artists' house at the beginning of the summer I have not been busy with one job in the traditional sense, but probably just seemed a carefree bohemian: a man in his prime who has simply become a little too happy doing nothing at all.
When I haven't typically answered creating art or writing but have just treaded water and talked in passing, it's not because I haven't wanted to share my thoughts, nor because I've wanted to keep the cards close to my body. More of a kind of fear of the great unknown, combined with a bit of a bad conscience about not (at the moment) being able to live up to people's legitimate expectations. Because of course we should all contribute according to our ability, and participate in our market economic welfare cabal in a proper way—implicitly play by the rules, or at least just play—
—and what do we do? We who don't quite fit in those fucking square boxes? If money cannot motivate us in itself, but is only necessary to the extent that it gives us the freedom to do what we are really passionate about, subsidiarily waste our time as we ourselves want?
I clearly remember the first time, many years ago, I tried to say that I set out to write a novel.
"Can you make a living from it?" said our local grocer, before he radiply moved on to the next subject. And of course he had a point: If you want to make big money being an artist is far from an optimal profession.
In the good Grundtvigian (and Christian liberal) spirit we've learnt the value of an even and cheerful active life on earth. We know only too well that what we spend our time on, and the stories we each tell, should closely match the narrative we as a society have chosen to assert.
Not least these days, when rather than caring about individual people the state keeps its hand under the economy as such. The very basic premise seems to be that a healthy economy is a growing economy. It follows that what is good for growth and employment must also be good for all of us and each one of us.
The success parameter is money, and the lesson learned during the first wave of the corona seems long forgotten: Concretely, how we choose to earn our money is not that important, as long as we buy the story and tighten up. Efficiency is measured in kroner and ører and property, and the most important benchmark is the ability to optimize the status-laden, but anything but beloved top tax.
What more could we possibly want?
—and what do we do? We who don't quite fit in those fucking square boxes? If money cannot motivate us in itself, but is only necessary to the extent that it gives us the freedom to do what we are really passionate about, subsidiarily waste our time as we ourselves want?
Of course we don't declare ourselves completely like the vagabond who goes back to nature . Although we would like to see the world changed, after all, few of us are willing to pay with our own standard of living and comfort. It is not without costs to settle hundreds of kilometers away in a desolate Swedish forest.
A more pleasant, and also far more common model is to find a reasonably tolerable paid job, and then live with the fact that for a large part of the week we cannot freely dispose of our own time; be good citizens and try to make the best of it. I have been there myself, and it is very possible that it will also be where I end my working life.
However until proven otherwise, I will try to get an alternative on my feet with the title of creative freelancer.
Let me thus—and because the exercise in itself is healthy—define my task, and declare that from now on I will use all my available gunpowder to rework the great late-capitalist social narrative. And even make money from it, come what may.
Running a business as an independent copywriter, designer, decorative artist, communicator and photographer is not necessarily something you get rich from in today's Denmark, but a good alternative (to a real job, sic!) for those of us who are happy just nurturing our creative veins and whose days should preferably not be too similar to each other.
Cross your fingers 🤞 and wish me good luck. I'm going to need that.
