What's the point to creating your own things, if no one else is going to read it, watch it, look at it, listen to it, etc.? Is the purpose of creation to serve another person with your thing created? Ideally yes, but for the most part, I say no. Of course you want people to marvel at your long-suffered-for masterpiece, but that doesn't mean you should stop creating if no one is looking.
The live Dungeons and Dragons sessions of Critical Role started as some friends wanting to play DnD and stream it, doing it for themselves more than any audience. The best movies and books are where the creator writes for themselves, not trying to please any audience wants. For example, Harry Potter essentially started the "magical school" genre; there have been copycat series, but nothing comes close to the original. Lord of the Rings really started the high fantasy series, and I argue that nothing can match its depth. These were written by people who just wanted to write a story; the copycats are written by people trying to reach an audience and play to their whims.
Even a lot of the famous paintings seen in museums, they were commission by a specific family, really only meant to be in that family's home. Their friends would have seen it, and I'm not a good enough art history student to know about exhibitions, but overall, the artist created it for one person or family, not a huge audience. I guess orchestral compositions are a different matter, because those often really are written for audiences. In a more modern sense, like a screen play, someone does write a musical composition first, with the hopes of it getting an audience - so once again, writing for themselves.
All this to say, even if no one ever reads my blog, watches my Dungeons and Dragons show, A D8 With Fate, or watches the upcoming song parodies I'll be putting out on YouTube, I choose to operate under the line I learned from actress Debra Wilson earlier this year, "Everything I create has a vibration." Just like my earlier blog post too about the Holocaust prisoners that brought their instruments with them into the camp in pieces, I must keep creating. It doesn't matter if no one is reading, watching, or listening. I do this for myself and my friends and family.
Of course I want to make others laugh or enjoy my work! With it being Hanukkah now, one of the themes we talked about at services recently was "how do you want to be a light in the world?" I want to make people laugh. I want to make people be human and buy less stuff, care about each other more... but this is harder to do, so I'll focus on the laugh part. I'll work on my parody videos. I'll write these blogs, with the hope that someone reads it and sits back and thinks on it for a bit. Even teachers say that if they reached one kid in the class of 20, it is worth it.
But I can't influence others forcefully. I could not even get a past roommate to use less water when washing dishes in the sink. She said I shouldn't be telling another adult what to do (*eye-roll*). So I can only make my stuff, hope the messages (if there is one; there doesn't always have to be) are heard but not forced, and just go on creating. So what's the point of me even writing this? I do it for me, to get my thoughts out, to leave a trail of things that I wrote to prove I existed, to have some SEO perhaps, to have vibration from my words. What's the point of recording and uploading my Dungeons and Dragons stream to YouTube? The practice of film editing, to have a fun project with friends, to hopefully make others laugh.
The new year is almost here, and it's still Hanukkah. How will you be a light? What do you want to put out in the new year? Or if nothing creative, what do you want to accomplish? What's the point of anything, if we're all going to die one day? Well, we're here now, so why be bored and do nothing? Why not have a good time, maintain good healthy bodies through exercise, or strive for a promotion? Rather than let existentialism set in and the depression that comes with that "I'm so small in this universe" feeling, let's just do things in spite of that. Yeah, I'm small, but I'll keep creating anyway, because if I'm lucky, I have like 70 more years on this planet. Why would I want to be bored?
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