A Year of Creation

It all began with an impossible vision. A psychedelic sheep - looming head and shoulders over a hastily erected city in the desert - carefully tread across its streets, its uncoordinated googley eyes firing independently roving beams up into the night sky.

I stood atop a shipping container cum bulwark weather fortress. The container’s sturdy walls formed the structure for an enclosed sound stage dance floor. My campmates were throwing our flagship party of the season, but I had mentally wandered off into my own world of rumination, as I am sometimes wont to do.

God dang was it beautiful. And it was absolute nonsense.

I was attending my first Burning Man. I’d heard many a tale of this place and through secondhand stories had developed both every preconception about this event and I simultaneously had no idea what I was walking into. Thankfully I didn’t pay the stories much mind - Burning Man is one of those things where everyone’s got an opinion and very few of those opinions are useful - but I felt a vague pull in the background drawing me to the place. The sort of quiet resonance faintly heard in the wind, one barely discernible when the mind is settled but its rhythm easily lost and forgotten in the inconsiderations of everyday life.

In this summer of 2024 I had met a really great camp. It was a community of folks I wanted to make this journey with and with the enthusiasm of childhood uncovered anew I threw myself in whole body and soul. What I discovered would change the direction of my life.

Fantastical Beginnings

Here I’d spent my first decade as a productive adult thinking I was very smart. That I’d had things figured out. That I understood the world. My career had started in a factually correct manner: as a respectable investment banker at a very prestigious firm. My job as a banker was to opine and remark on the quality of other people’s life work and the businesses that they had built. We were well paid for it, and many people respected us for our very serious and very intelligent judgements. We knew they respected us because they seemed to take us seriously and they paid us a lot.

That pattern of blissfully simple confidence would continue for some time. I joined a tech enabled taxi company. There I led the charge on building its fastest growing and most profitable market in the greatest metropolis in the world - London. Surely, I thought, the outcome should be in part a result of my brilliance. I must be very smart, I thought, and I shall make a great impact on this world.

I tried to apply some of this brilliance and experience to a vertically integrated restaurant without real estate, and then an on-demand real estate business without estate agents. I wanted more - to manifest the dreams I dreamt when I felt atop of the world. I struck out on my own. I adopted a dog and, shaking my head at the state of dog training, I rolled up my sleeves to learn and execute every part of a business that I declared should be a generational company. I company which would endure in the minds of humanity as the very essence of joyful pet companionship.

I failed. Some customers were happy, and some dogs and their humans live genuinely better lives for the work I did through Fido. But I didn’t change the whole world in the manner I’d aspired to, and I told myself I wouldn’t do so if I followed this path. I chose to move on.

In the process of building Fido I found I had unwittingly isolated myself from friends and lovers. My youthful arrogance had been checked and I entered a dark time. But I persevered and I continued to seek the next opportunity for greatness. Searching for my next great venture.

During that period I met someone very special, and he brought me into the fold of his Burning Man camp - the Future Turtles. With these folks I decided to venture to Black Rock City.

And so I found myself there. Standing atop a shipping container watching a nonsense electric sheep cautiously making its way out to the open Playa.

Interrogating Intent

I went on to ask questions about this sheep. Its name is BAAAHS, by the way. I learned that it had been built with passion and that, at least at that point, it was held together by metaphorical shoestring and duct tape. This was an apt metaphor for the Black Rock City writ large, which now I realize often feels like it’s about to come apart and undone at every seam. But somehow it endures and it grows, and both the Playa and BAAAHS bring the biggest smile to my face. And that’s the unlock that changed my life.

You see, my dear reader, I come from the wonderful world of Technology. In tech we often talk of Creation. The process by which generational companies and ubiquitous products come to be. We talk about starting small, with a minimum viable product. We talk about iteration, repeating and tweaking and adjusting and growing and improving over time. I’d just spent a decade learning and relearning and hearing the acolytes of this Religion of Technology speak of these foundational principles at one another, over and over again, like a priest recants the scriptures of his Lord and his congregation quotes those scriptures back at one another and - like an infinite hallway of mirrors - its image warps and loses itself with each passing reflection.

But here, in Black Rock City, that message held pure. Nowhere to that point had I seen a community that lived and perspired these values in the way Burners did out there on the Playa. And heck, these Burners didn’t even feel the need to circle lecture one another ad nauseam!

Here, in the Nevada desert, seventy-thousand people congregate year after year. They build a city - a literal city - and two weeks later they take it down. They dedicate a part of their year to creating a wonderland of nonsense and of love and passion, all to share their manifested inspiration with strangers and to in turn receive the gift of strangers. And then they come back again the next year and they do it all over again, having learned the lessons of experience and aching to make it just that little bit better. To make it truer to their intent.

You think Tech is iterative? Let me tell you, Tech’s got nothing on the city in the desert. A city which is built, torn down, and rebuilt again. Over and over again.

One reason that I’ve been fascinated by business and how businesses come to be is the idea that businesses are, on some level, self-sustaining. Until they aren’t, anyway. Businesses are not alive, but being born within and in between individual humans they take on a life and a purpose and a life cycle of their own.

My dream to that point had been to actualize my life through this experience. To give rise to a business of my own, a business that would be profitable and do some good things and touch some people’s lives. A business that would exist outside of and beyond myself. In some abstract sense I was dreaming of creating self-sustaining life.

Up to that point I thought a sustainable creation meant a business - product, foresight, strategy, execution, and, critically, profit, because without profit there could be no engine of perpetual sustainability.

But here I was atop that shipping container watching living proof with my very own eyes of something which my mind could not comprehend. I was watching a city held together by passion and relentless labor and zip-ties that made no profit. A city which in fact drains its participants of their life force and their savings in the pursuit of creating something greater than they. Something absolutely wonderful. And somehow that keeps happening, year after year. And its participants keep showing up and doing it again driven by a manic fervor to make it even better than the time before.

I was watching a self-sustaining human endeavor of nonsense.

Creation

I said earlier that Burning Man 2024 changed the trajectory of my life. That change began when I paused to detour from my heretofore purpose. I chose to call this detour my Year of Creation.

Out with plans, I decided. Out with pre-solving the commercial trifecta of customer, product and profits using foresight and brilliance. With thinking that if I could just be smart enough - and surely I must be! - and think hard enough, and look ahead far enough, I could line up all the needles and thread them with an elegantly shot arrow.

In with Creating for the sake of creating.

Truth be told, up to that point I’d never have thought to call myself a creative person. I thought creative people were artistic, and I was not artistic, although some teachers had told a young me that I had potential. I never took any of it much seriously, having not given it much thought. I was busy thinking about very serious things, as you know by now.

And so I resolved to spend the following year Creating for no reason other than that I wanted to. The only determiner for how I would spend my time would be that it was something I wanted to create. My only measure of success would be the volume of creative output generated. The validation of others - heretofore at the core of my motivation - was not strictly undesirable, per se, but it was to be disregarded to the fullest extent possible. These were the parameters of my Year of Creation.

I learned a great many things in that year, and I created some things I’m quite pleased with.

I learned that optimizing for volume of output over time meant focusing on input. Specifically it meant focusing on routine and focus and optimizing the intersection of the two. It meant that creating over time meant working sustainably. It required caring for myself, both body and soul.

I inquired as to the nature of purpose. In so doing I set off on a journey to quiz long held mentors and friends as to their own motivation. I compiled these perspectives into a unifying theory of human motivation.

I learned that I’m not interested in prestige or infamy. I don’t know whether I was always this way and I just had to unlearn the toxic side of our interconnected society, or alternatively if the experience of my first Burn and my Year of Creation changed the shape of my soul. It might be some combination of the two. Instead I learned that what I want is personal sustainability, which includes financial sustainability, so that I can continue to follow my interests and my creations as my heart develops and my body allows. That I want freedom.

Inspired by my camp lead, Joel, I created this website. I wanted a record of my contributions to myself. I crafted it with intentionality so as to be a reflection of myself and my values. It’s built from the ground up using a couple open source libraries so that I can control its every element at my will. It’s made to be snappy - I certainly hope this page loaded quickly for you. It’s not made to be flashy. It’s designed to be practical in the first order and to be pleasant in the second order. It’s easy to read without strain on the eyes. It’s me through and through.

I created an electronic sleeve. It was my first and, to date, only hardware project. Taking advantage of an extra-curricular teaching session from Joel I learned about circuit boards and electric signals and power management and putting it all together to program a pattern. I built a simple watch and phone app to track my heart rate and animate a pattern down my sleeve which would give the world a glimpse into the state of my current physiology. A private person by nature, I had created a playful way to literally wear my heart on my sleeve.

I created a sexing camera - although a camera wasn’t my original intent. I had revenge porn on my mind, and the exploration of sexuality and human connection, and those modalities as forms of creativity. My original concept was a file storage and management service, but speaking with friends on the topic quickly their minds diverted towards sharing and sexting. I inquired and researched and that led me to creating a camera that would be absolutely private and feel safe and - hopefully - sexy. I sometimes wonder whether I erred from my mission when I investigated what sexiness meant to others. I found that the more I interviewed humans and reflected on their feedback and incorporated it into product, the more it began to look and feel like every venture backed startup’s shape and form. Maybe the file storage service would have been a truer reflection of the intentions of my year. But I’m really proud of Hotshot. What I solved is a genuinely difficult technical problem and Hotshot is a novel framework for filming anonymized content. I think it’s more thorough and more private than anything else out there.

I wrote. I am a person who lives a lot in his head, a person who loves to play with ideas as a child plays with toys. I rediscovered a love for exploring thought through writing, and it became a part of the corpus of my creative output.

I used my genetic code as a test sample to explore polygenic risk scores, applying the totality of scientific research and computation to mine my own genetic sequence in an effort to understand my physiology in a way that Very Serious Corporations that are regulated by the FDA and accountable to very exacting users simply cannot do. I grew frustrated with the data manipulation scripts and gave up on this venture after a week or two. I’m happy that I did. I was on my Year of Creation after all, and my heart told me to move on.

I created a scheduling app for medical residents. I learned from my boyfriend that all residents at hospitals in the US are scheduled using spreadsheets. I was intellectually outraged. I spoke to chief residents and understood their requirements and built an app which would resolve rules and duty hour restrictions and surface fairness and assist overworked chiefs building legal and equitable schedules. It’s a neat solution, if straightforward.

Reflections

Many of these creative projects are either still in motion or they are shelved for a while or they are paused indefinitely. No productive (read: economic) output came out of any of it. Old me would be have been frustrated to say this. Old me would certainly have felt far too much shame to shout his story out into the World Wide Web as I am now.

Rather, this new shape me is proud of my Year of Creation. Although I have made no progress toward financial sustainability - in fact I watch my personal runway with some degree of anxiety every day - I have deeply inquired as to myself and my motivations and my capabilities and my capacity to do. I have nurtured and grown my spiritual sustainability.

My Year of Creation has come to a close. My second Burn - 2025 - has recently passed. I pilgrimed into the desert and dueled with some demons I uncovered inhabiting my psyche. I journeyed across the Playa and I brought back with me the next subject of my inquisition. My next Year…

…but let’s not get distracted. Creation.

I write these next words with uncertainty. Writing this essay as I am now, reflecting on the arc of my development, thinking back to my Year of Creation and the little passions I found and nurtured along the way; I am overcome with the dual feelings of fondness and nostalgia. On the former, fondness - great. I’m happy to feel satisfied by this last year. But I am jarred by a nostalgia I did not expect and I pause and wonder how I could miss this last year. Didn’t it just end? Why do I think back with longing as if to a time and a life past? Is it truly over? Am I done with creation? Do I not have more?

If I may be honest, holding on to Intent during this past year was challenging. There is an impatience within me, a rush to get to the next thing - the final thing. To prove. I’ve made good progress in constraining him, but the demon that seeks validation continues to live on within me. His voice is just quieter. He’s contained and under some measure of control. But he’s not gone.

I say all this because I went to Burn 2025 thinking my Year of Creation was over and indeed, by definition, it was. A year had passed. But somewhere along the way I think I lost sight of some of its lessons. Or rather I had started looking out to what’s next before it ended. I started planning again; looking at success through the eyes of others; thinking about today’s purpose as a projection and condition of future success. Focused on outputs sought rather than inputs controlled. Wanting to succeed at what’s next.

I will need to reflect and inquire as to what all of this means. There is still more to explore, and more meat left on the bone of some creations. Perhaps my Years should be cumulative rather than phasic. I’m certainly not done creating - I identify as a creative now - the question is how far out over the horizon of the future to hold my gaze. I must remember to focus on the inputs and parameters of my process rather than the validation I seek from its output.

In case it was unclear let me now be explicit. I began this essay thinking it would have some nice and satisfying ending. I love stories. I like nice and satisfying endings. But instead I find myself continuing and wondering.

Maybe that’s the whole point. The point of our humanity and the point of creation. It just keeps going.