Artists Are Children
…which helps explain their puzzling behaviour
In the essay “Why I Write”, George Orwell lists four reasons why prose writers do what they do. The first thing on the list, beating out ‘aesthetic enthusiasm’, is ‘sheer egoism’. If you’re one of my tribe and that one stung a little, just keep reading:
The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they abandon individual ambition — in many cases, indeed, they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all — and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, wilful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class.
If you just lifted the last sentence out of this quote, it would look like Orwell was complimenting his comrades on their specialness. Hey, we’re in a gifted, authentic minority! But in context, his sentiments are much more ambiguous. Also, the dictionary definition of “wilful” is ‘having or showing a stubborn and determined intention to do as one wants, regardless of the consequences’, and it’s a word you normally apply to a child. For Orwell, writers are people who never grew up — self-preoccupied and attention-seeking long past the age when everyone else has accepted that they Live In A Society and decided to devote their time and energy to their community, their children, their pets or something beyond themselves.
It’s obvious to me that while creativity is a basic human trait, there really is such a thing as the “artistic” personality type, people who devote themselves to creativity for its own sake. And I’ve always felt that these people, more than anyone else, live in tune with what’s sometimes called the “inner child”. Artists play. They explore. They’re open-minded, seeing the world differently to other people, always looking for the next idea or sensation. Sensual and imaginative, forever coming at things upside-down or sideways.
Hypersensitive, able to feel both pleasure and pain very deeply. Which is why so many of them numb themselves with drugs. Pursuing things for their own sake, not for some other, more sensible goal. Which is why it’s so hard for them to make money. Thinking and speaking elliptically, laterally, with their right brain, preferring surprising new connections to the predictable linearity of logic or pragmatism. Which is why it’s so hard to make sense of what they’re getting at in their interviews.
They go with their instincts. They do what’s fun now, rather than deferring their gratification. They’re wild, fun and a little dangerous. Many are neurodivergent, their brains not developing at the same pace or in the same way as neurotypicals’. They burn brightly. They charm. They fascinate.
Thinking of artists this way — as children in adult bodies, for better and worse — helps clear up a lot of questions people ask about creatives in general, and famous ones in particular.
Q1: Why do famous artists struggle so hard with addiction and impulse control? Were they already like that, or does the fame do it to you?
As a teenager, reading about the escapades of the rock ’n’ roll heroes of yore with my eyes popping out of my head, I used to wonder whether fame messed songwriters up or they were born that way. Then I got older, went to some open mics, met a rake of poets, songwriters, actors, dancers and dramatists, found out more about my own inner workings, and…it’s definitely the latter. Well, “messed up” is a harsh way of putting it. How about “overloaded”.
Children are full of energy they hardly know what to do with, elated one minute and despondent the next, highly vulnerable, both passionately in love with the world and constantly disappointed by its refusal to be the perfect one they’re always imagining. They’re still developing this thing we call a “self”. It’s fragile.
If you’re still this way as an adult, you’re faced with a double whammy: the emotional/sensory overwhelm has hardly subsided and you’re only slowly improving at managing it, and now people have stopped indulging you too (assuming they ever did). You’re deeply affected by everything around you, minor incidents are forever hurting your delicate ego, it takes you longer than most to recover from every setback, and it turns out nobody cares. How are you supposed to pay your bills, renovate, get up at 7am to commute to work, and do the million other boring things adults have to do when you have to deal with all these feelings all the time?¹
Just have a look at the Enneagram type most associated with creatives, “The Individualist”. Read it carefully. Having this kind of brain is not easy. How much of the overwhelm, depression and anxiety of the Type 4 is inherent to our very existence, and how much stems from attempting to mould ourselves to the contours of a world we fundamentally don’t fit into, a world that demands you grin and bear it, put up with habitual rudeness, incomprehension and insensitivity, make small talk all the time, power through, work to an inflexible schedule, take your time off where you can get it, and generally subordinate your internal barometer to the overriding dictates of the machine?² A subordination you can only ever perform inadequately, resulting in shame, that most ancient of social emotions, that internalised sense of the judgement of others, that nagging feeling that you don’t fully belong to the tribe and never will — the isolation that results from that — and the primal fear of abandonment and death that results from that — well, it’s a lot.
We all react more strongly to negative events than positive ones. If you’re more tuned into both the agony and the ecstasy of life than the average person but this basic ratio remains the same, small wonder that many of us end up feeling the negative emotions so deeply that they become lodged in the system. If your pain gets “stuck” like that, it can dampen down the habitual joy you should be feeling, burying it underneath layers of bitterness and regret and only occasionally letting it up for air. Hence why so many Individualists are sometimes full of life but more often morose. Add childhood trauma to the mix, and you have both the engine powering the greatest artists’ ambition (‘I’ll show the world’) and the fundamental sense of lack that makes it so hard to deal with their fame when it happens.
Because if the vampiric dynamics of fame aren’t the cause of all the artist’s problems, they most definitely exacerbate them. The minders and enablers encourage your executive dysfunction; the constant access to addictive substances and behaviours doesn’t mix well with your impulsiveness and lack of self-control; and the constant adulation from people who don’t really know you, and therefore can never really validate you, makes you vacillate hard between the arrogance and self-loathing you’re already prone to. Parasocial relationships do nothing at all to silence that inner voice that tells you you’re “not enough”.
Q2: So the question now becomes, how do artists get any work done?
Some artists manage to temper their impulsiveness by combining it with a strong work ethic. Others benefit from having a collaborator who provides the work ethic for them — look at Graham Chapman’s reliance on John Cleese, the early Ricky Gervais’ on Stephen Merchant, or the post-1966 John Lennon’s on Paul McCartney.³ There’s often a strong right brain/left brain dynamic at work here too, with hyper-artistic dreamers making excellent idea generators and their more disciplined partners making indispensable idea developers and editors. In these cases it’s like two uncommonly gifted people have contributed half the brain of a productive genius each and fused them into an unstoppable superbrain.
Artists can also charge their batteries by balancing out their rich inner world with a keen interest in the more mundane world around them (McCartney) or a strong sense of social responsibility (Lennon), keeping them in touch with the rest of humanity and preventing their habitual introspection from curdling into myopic navel-gazing.
Finally, many artists who prefer following their impulses to a strict timetable will sometimes get the impulse to do lots and lots of creative work. This is getting speculative, but my anecdotal observation is that autism is extremely common among musicians, actors and poets. It seems plausible to me that some artists benefit from their art being their autistic “special interest” — a passion that animates them day after day, so that it’s never a chore. Meanwhile, artists with ADD may get a productivity boost from occasional bursts of hyperfocus — the phenomenon where people who normally struggle to keep their attention on one thing at a time sometimes get 100% absorbed in an interesting activity for a while.
Q3: How can artists who show such breadth and depth of feeling in their work frequently act so selfishly and irresponsibly?
It feels like people capable of producing penetrating novels, profound compositions, gorgeous artworks and mesmerising cinema should be capable of displaying the empathy and fellow-feeling their creations evoke in the rest of their lives. Instead, great artists are often significantly less thoughtful than the average person, to put it mildly. The disconnect here fuels the fires of all sorts of unhealthy fan dynamics (‘They changed my life, then they let me down!! I’ll never forgive them!’ // ‘They changed my life, so they can do no wrong!!’).⁴
Again, it helps me a lot here to think of children. Picture every child you know who’s made you think of the line ‘When she was good she was very good indeed, but when she was bad she was horrid.’ It’s often the ones who are the sweetest one minute who are the most maddening the next. Whatever kids do, they do to the extreme: the extroverted ones are hyper-social, the introverted ones live in their own world; the exuberant ones are deafening, the sensitive ones delicate as eggshells. They haven’t yet learned to tone down the most unique aspects of themselves to fit in with the mean. But does this make them predictable? Of course not; they change on a dime, flipping from black to white and back again. As I said in an earlier essay, ‘The people who are most extreme in one way tend to be the most extreme in all the others too.’
Children are also capable of making very little sense for hours on end and then turning around and saying the most perceptive thing you’ve ever heard. They experience the world in a direct, relatively unfiltered way, lacking the forces of habit and custom that so often blind adults to what’s really going on. Then there’s the fact that they haven’t fully developed their powers of empathy yet, which makes it even easier for them to see what the rest of us find too uncomfortable to face (‘It can’t be true Jack and Jill don’t love each other any more, that’d be shocking, what would the family think’). Easier to see it, and easier to say it too.
Trouble is, this same lack of empathy makes them all the blinder to the consequences of their own actions. Expertly seeing through your lies and evasions now; telling the tallest of tales, and convincing themselves in the process, later. Calling you out on your shit today; brewing up a shitstorm tomorrow. A lot of what we call “hypocrisy” in great artists boils down to this same short-sightedness: they really, truly ‘know not what they do’.
So: artists are very what they are, yet capable of acting ‘out of character’ in shocking ways; often opaque to even their own understanding; laying waste to hypocrites everywhere, then going against their own principles without necessarily even noticing; constantly breaking eggs, then making such delicious omelettes they’re instantly forgiven. They’re the woman in that Billy Joel song. As I also said in that other essay, ‘the more beautiful, rich, wild and moving someone’s best art is, the likelier they are to have a correspondingly large shadow lurking behind it.’
Another thing about kids: it’s all about them.
What could be more self-involved than the artistic process? You create a great work of art by spending a lot of time alone, shutting other responsibilities out of your life, reaching down inside yourself, rummaging around, holding things up to the light, inspecting them, then working through their implications. I mean no judgement when I say this is incredibly self-absorbed behaviour. Some artists manage to carve creative blocks of time out of otherwise sober, timetabled lives, others don’t; either way, while you’re creating it’s all about you.
The mistake the rest of us make is in thinking we connect deeply with great works of art because of the artist’s gift for empathy. A lot of the time what’s actually happening is that the artist has understood themselves so well that they’ve tapped into something universal, meaning everyone else can resonate with it too.⁵ We’re all one at the end of the day, so the better the creator expresses their own condition, the better they express the human condition in general. This doesn’t mean they themselves have necessarily made the connection between what they feel and what we the audience feel — we make that connection.
It’s not that artists don’t want to reach out to others—but it’s often easier to do it indirectly, via work that does the talking for them.⁶ And to be fair, you can express much more of what you think and feel in poetry and song than you can in 90% of polite conversation: a child wants to be authentically themselves at all costs and tell the truth, and art is society’s way of letting you continue to do that once you’re at an age where it’s socially unacceptable in nearly every other circumstance.
Ultimately, whether you’re a painter or a meditator, it’s much easier to access the True and the Good through art and contemplation than through the tedious, difficult work of caring for others, going the extra mile, understanding where people who differ from you are coming from, decoding the lies you tell yourself and why you’ve been telling them, setting boundaries, sacrificing yourself when it’s called for, putting yourself first when it’s not, tidying up, paying bills, and all the rest. Much easier to find beauty in the world of Platonic Forms, to see nirvana in nirvana rather than nirvana in samsara.
For those 2 hours on stage, you’re reaching out to people everywhere and showing them what it feels like to be bathed in love. For the other 22 hours of the day you have to get out there and do the scary work of actually loving them.
Q4: Why do we expect so much wisdom about everything under the sun from artists, and why do we keep not getting it?
Just like we expect artists who create beautiful work to display a corresponding beauty of spirit all the time, we also expect them to give us profound insights into life, the universe and everything all the time. Again, these are expectations that flawed human beings can’t possibly live up to.
But I also think insight comes in different forms.
Crudely put, some of us are great thinkers and others are great feelers. The ability to put a philosophical argument together, design a just legal system or allocate resources fairly has nothing to do with the ability to write a catchy riff or make a blank canvas come alive — and very few people thrive in both worlds. In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsig describes thinking insight as classical truth, and aesthetic insight as romantic truth. Neither is truer than the other, and the species needs ’em both, but it’s rare for a single individual to really square the two.
The trouble is, when someone shows a lot of romantic insight we expect a lot of classical insight from them as well.
Take music. I’m biased, but I think this artform is particularly good at conveying the sublime truth that everyone and everything is connected. This is such a deep concept, and its effect on the listener is so profound, that it’s natural to think people who can make us feel like that have all the answers. Surely these bards, these griots, know how to arrange society so that we can all feel closer to each other all the time! Surely they can eliminate inequality, heal our divisions and take us to the Promised Land!
Then you watch an interview with a rock star and realise that, while there are honourable exceptions — Bowie, Zappa and Nick Cave spring to mind — many of ‘em are unwilling or unable to talk about human nature, world events or even their own creative process with any analytical rigour whatsoever. Many are inarticulate; others are deliberately trying to appear duller than they are — they don’t want to bare their souls for the camera, and why would they — and then there are the Dylans of the world, who talk in wonderful poetry all the time.⁷ Richly stimulating for the right brain, deliberately frustrating for the left.
I think this is because, like children, artists are plugged into a rich world of sensation and feeling — a world that doesn’t lend itself easily to any kind of speech, and sometimes veers into the outright mystical. Have you ever seen a child who was so full of either joy or heartbreak, or some overwhelming mixture of the two, that they searched in vain for the right words before finally dissolving into tears? With an artist, that outburst is a painting, or a song. It stems from a part of them that they don’t understand any more than we do, and if they did understand it, it would vanish.
Artworks are the words we use to express the inexpressible, to make sense of feelings that refuse to be pinned down.⁸ They’re perfect for this because rational thought can only handle one meaning at a time, while emotion — not to mention reality itself — is wildly multi-layered and self-contradictory.⁹ Art and symbol are capable of supporting many different meanings and expressing lots of things at once, which makes them much better vehicles than reason for expressing our inner worlds.
I just don’t expect great feelers to tell me how to fix the outer world. We all know what the perfect society looks like — everyone having enough and treating each other well — but none of us knows exactly how to get there, and the stronger we feel about it, the more likely it is our emotions will end up clouding our judgement. The political and economic processes that actually bring about positive change are often complicated, boring and tedious, and we artistic types don’t have the patience for all that.
We’re all biologically hardwired to trust people with charisma and “leader” energy, but the more complicated the world gets, the less help these charismatic romantics are. Our massively mechanised, interconnected global supersociety needs more than the wisdom of folk heroes — it needs the practical knowhow of legions of invisible wonks as well.
Q4: Why do so many artists produce their best work young?
Many don’t, of course, but bear with me here.
In the (paywalled) comment section of @Ian Leslie’s fine piece on the childishness of creativity — which inspired me to finally dig out this 3-year-old “ARTISTS = CHILDREN” doc and work it up into a post — I throw out the theory that many artists grow up at a slower pace than others. In the ’60s, it was common for people to marry and settle down in their 20s. What did rock stars do? Spend their time thrill-hunting and trashing hotel rooms like teenagers. (Yes, many of them had wives and children too, but they generally cheated on their wives with abandon, neglected the children and spent long stretches of time on the road.)
Then they hit their 30s and 40s and many of them slowed down, behaving more like their contemporaries had in their 20s: staying at home more, being more present with the children, taking on more responsibility. The ones who survived went on to enjoy a 50s like everyone else’s 30s or 40s, a 60s like everyone else’s 40s or 50s, and so on.
There’s an old cliché that art comes from pain, and when people get content they stop creating great art. There’s obviously some truth to this — when you’re full of hangups they’re almost screaming to get out of your head and into your pen, and when things finally get quieter in there that urgency often diminishes.
But maybe it’s more correct to say that people with families and responsibilities aren’t so much happier than before as less self-absorbed. As Orwell says, living ‘chiefly for others’ and occupied with ‘drudgery’. Art is the product of deep dives into your unconscious, it expresses your thoughts and feelings symbolically rather than literally, and it involves going through a medium rather than communicating directly with the people in your life. When you’re having a disagreement about whose turn it is to take the kids to hockey practice, you’re expressing your point of view directly, literally and specifically — about a particular, and not particularly dramatic, situation. This little scene just isn’t interesting enough to easily translate into great art — and you’re too busy for that anyway.
Maybe when you get better at loving the people around you in a million practical, uninteresting ways, you feel less of a need to proclaim your love of humanity in artistic Grand Statements.
Q5: OK, that’s enough, can you stop picking on artists now?
Oh, did all the above come off as bashing? I prefer to think of it as…dispassionate analysis. I mentioned I’m one of these people myself, right?
And I mentioned children make the world a brighter, more interesting place, didn’t I? Their constant defamiliarisation of everything helps you cultivate your own “beginner’s mind”, doesn’t it? And that keeps life fresh, yes?
After all, everyone retains a spark of that “inner child”, which often lies dormant until you’re in the presence of actual children who give you an excuse to play and be silly again. In exactly the same way, we all possess a thirst for beauty, a hunger for a better world and the capacity for intense emotion — and those things come alive in the presence of artworks: concentrated distillations of tidal waves of hunger, thirst and longing willed into being by those cursed, blessed souls who live in the primordial world of Feeling all the time so you don’t have to.
You’re welcome.
¹ Spare an extra thought for the artists who try to do what they love for a living: the very people least likely to be financially adept or have the patience for bureaucratic wrangling are the ones who feel most called to self-employment. Can we hurry up with the UBI please?
² I used to wonder how much of my desire to hang out with others was based on actually wanting to see them, and how much was just FOMO and a kind of “social competitiveness”. I’d imagine living on a desert island and wonder how long it’d take me to get lonely if I didn’t actually have the means of meeting other people. Then lockdown happened and I got as close as I hope I’ll ever come to that scenario. Turns out my suspicions were right: I love socialising and everything, but an extended period of not being allowed to do it came as kind of a relief.
³ I say “post-1966” because I think the drive that powered Lennon in the Beatles’ early years took a sharp hit once they’d reached the top of the mountain and he realised his problems hadn’t gone anywhere. Take McCartney’s indefatigable work ethic out of the equation, and after 1966 or so it’s doubtful we’d have any Beatles albums at all, let alone in the highly polished form we got them.
⁵ The 2024 celebrity-fan dynamic is another essay, and one I’d rather leave to Freddie deBoer, but I’ve long been curious why famous creatives are so much better behaved today than they used to be. I put it down to the twin forces of shifting societal norms and an increase in accountability mechanisms. In the ’60s, the mainstream press would avoid dishing the dirt on pop stars in exchange for continued access to them; in the ’70s, rock reporters were along for the ride themselves. The rich and famous still get away with a lot today that the rest of us wouldn’t, but the tightening social mores of the post-post-Sexual Revolution era — essentially an attempt to retrieve the baby from all the bathwater the Boomers threw out — and the smartphone-fuelled Panopticon we’ve built around ourselves mean there are a lot more constraints on their behaviour than there used to be.
⁵ I’m not saying artists never create from a place of empathy — far from it — but even here, there’s a difference between sometimes creating empathetic work and being consistently empathetic in your personal life. I’m thinking of children yet again: they can seem unaffected by a lot of the suffering around them, even when they’ve caused it themselves, but then they’ll suddenly be intensely moved by the plight of a character in a film, or a particular item on the news. A lot of protest songs seem to me to be motivated by these spontaneous bursts of intense empathy, including many of Bob Dylan’s.
⁶ Similarly, I think it’s often easier for spiritually-minded introverts to access a feeling of oneness with humanity via meditation than by meeting humans. It takes concerted effort to balance the “going within” side of the process with the “community” side, dharma and sangha.
⁷ Sample quote: ‘Renaldo is oppressed. He’s oppressed because he’s born. We don’t really know who Renaldo is. We just know what he isn’t. He isn’t the Masked Tortilla. Renaldo is the one with the hat, but he’s not wearing a hat. I’ll tell you what this movie is: it’s like life exactly, but not an imitation of it…[In my] next film [the] hero is an arsonist…but he’s not really a hero.’ I love this man so much.
⁸ This is why I’m baffled by podcasters who insist on only discussing songs with reference to what they’re “about”. Surely with most pop songs the music’s doing 99% of the talking — the Beatles’ “Misery” isn’t about misery, it’s about joy! Pretend they’re not singing in English!
⁹ Not really; they just seem that way to the poor rational mind trying to make sense of them.
