Your Fear of Being Canceled is Hurting Your Art

Soul Gum

by Victoria Hutchins

Philosophy, Society & Culture

4.9 • 561 Ratings

🗓️ 23 February 2025

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Creatives, I’m looking at you. In today’s episode, I walk you through exactly how I lost my creative spark in the Internet’s sea of opinions and how I got it back. When did we forget that art is supposed to make us clutch our pearls? And how do we remember? If you want to stop praying to the altar of the comment section, this episode is for you. We’ll walk through 4 things that helped me start making chewy, brave art again.

You owe it to yourself to stop sanitizing your art. This episode is a messy, raw field guide on how to do that—from another creative climbing out of the same boat.

00:00 Intro

02:09 Preorder MAKE BELIEVE! Let’s hang on tour!

02:44 Are vulnerability and nuance needed for good art?

03:13 Did video kill the radio star? Will IG poetry kill literary poetry?

04:04 Taylor Swift’s quill, fountain pen, glitter gel pen buckets of art

04:40 Sugarcoated self love: helpful or hurtful?

05:28 Should we think about the audience when we make art?

05:42 Rick Rubin & “the audience eats last”

06:20 Is social media tainting our intentions as artists?

08:13 Art as an offering vs. art as an outlet

08:33 How to gut your art of meaning

09:20 My own experience navigating this, good and bad

11:47 Should artists care about views and engagement?

12:27 Microwaving our art to keep pace with the algorithm

13:52 Having no haters is not a badge of honor

14:45 “Bad takes” vs “good takes” and the erasure of nuance

15:10 Moral imposter syndrome and curated vulnerability

16:55 The big, messy mistakes we don’t hear about

17:33 Stop sanitizing your art

17:57 Ellen Bass & art that makes you clutch your pearls

18:31 Relax by Ellen Bass

19:11 Art for likes versus art for thought

19:36 So how do we take our brains back?

19:59 Break - with a big surprise!

23:47 4 ways to take our creative spark back

23:57 1. Notice the voices in your head

24:57 2. Temper vulnerability with respect for your privacy

26:07 3. Create art with urgency

26:21 A Little Life & commodified art vs art for art’s sake

28:42 Mary Oliver on getting distracted from your art

30:55 4. Get off your phone

32:00 How to start a fire, literally & creatively

33:57 Your art misses you

35:34 I ♡ your thoughts

36:27 Challenge: make something scary this week

37:14 You are not out of good ideas

MY LINKS

EPISODE LINKS

⁠Joy Sullivan’s poetry masterclass⁠⁠ - brought up so much thought and a big breakthrough for me. Dives into what it means to make vulnerable, surprising art.
⁠⁠Taylor Swift accepting Songwriter-Artist of the Decade at the Nashville Songwriter Awards⁠⁠, discussing her quill, fountain pen and glitter gel pen lyric categories
⁠⁠The Creative Act by Rick Rubin⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert⁠⁠ - two of my favorite books on the creative process, both talked about in this episode
⁠⁠Relax by Ellen Bass⁠⁠ - one of my many favorite poems by Ellen Bass, who IMO is the blueprint for writing gutsy, gritty poems. Could not recommend her books⁠⁠ Like a Begger, Mules of Love, and Indigo⁠⁠ more.
⁠⁠A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara⁠⁠ - the novel with the passage I read about commodified art vs art for art’s sake.
⁠⁠Upstream by Mary Oliver⁠⁠ - the book with the passage I read about getting distracted. If you need a reminder of the cost of hiding from your truth, read chapter 3.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Your fear of being canceled is killing your creativity. Let's talk about it.
0:09.3	Welcome back to Soulgum, the self-development podcast with philosophical, psychological,
0:15.6	and literary flair. I'm your host, Victoria Hutchins, and today we are getting real. I fear this will be a red,
0:28.1	hot rant. Some of you know I record this in my closet, and today I have tied my microphone
0:36.4	to the cup holder of this exercise bike that is in here
0:40.0	because I can just tell I'm going to be fired up and I'm going to want to use my hands.
0:43.4	That's the vibe, okay?
0:45.4	I am resisting the urge to start this talk with a disclaimer.
0:51.2	I am feeling a strong urge to try to explain away the different ways I'm
0:55.8	anticipating that it could be misunderstood, but in the spirit of the topic, I'm not going to do that.
1:03.0	I often try to cast a wide net in the things that I talk about. I try to talk about things that
1:08.6	almost anyone will relate to confidence, friendship,
1:12.0	finding your purpose. Today, instead of going wide, I want to go deep. I'm talking to a specific
1:20.5	person today. I am talking to artists and creatives and anyone who is in the business of publicly sharing. And maybe there will be people
1:30.6	who don't fit in that bucket who resonate with this, but I'm just not as focused today on
1:36.2	reaching everyone. Today, I am going to talk about how I think our collective fear of being cancelled is hurting the state and quality of art.
1:49.0	I very much consider myself a part of this problem.
1:52.0	I am a creative who lately has found herself unwilling to really stick her neck out.
1:59.0	So I'm also going to talk about a few things that I'm doing to try to
2:03.7	work on that. And maybe if you're in this boat too, it will help you too. Let's get into it.
2:09.6	But first, this episode of Soulgum is brought to you by me. This is not sponsored. I'll take a break
2:17.0	later in the episode and tell you about a few things
	...

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