What’s up with these intense motivational desktops? 🙈

Using intense, freaky vibes to motivate me to make something a bit nicer. 🌷

Hi! How are you?

🌜 Let me share a fun story with you.🌛

When I was in university, I took a class called “Animation and Motion Graphics.” The class was fine, if a bit slow. I don't think I learned a lot in it, but it was a nice excuse to animate a robot with my name coming out of it's head – that was fun!

The only reason I bring this class up is because that class was technically from a different program than mine, and so it had a bunch of people in it who I hadn’t met before. It had a really different energy compared to the classes I was used to.

In that class, I sat next to a person who I would come to realize was a particularly Intense Graphic Design Student. He had a lot of opinions about things, and he was very motivated to express them in class in a way that felt... well, also very intense.

Maybe you know someone like this. Someone you might also call an “Intense Graphic Design Student” (or IGDS, for short).

I didn’t really think about him or his energy much, until one class where we were sitting in the dark watching and discussing some animation work shown on the projector. It was dark, but this guy was extremely well-lit by his laptop screen. And while he was delivering an opinion I promptly forgot (if I heard it in the first place at all), I noticed something startling on his bright, glowing MacBook Pro screen.

His wallpaper (as I remember it) was a bright white background with huge bold Helvetica set "perfectly" on it.

It said “Work fucking harder.”

A simulation of the desktop in question.

I can really only describe my initial reaction to reading this as a visceral, instinctive, primal “YEEEEESH.” I knew right away, deep down in my core, that I did not like that wallpaper, but it was such a gut reaction that, at the time, I don’t think I could have articulated why it bothered me so much.

Eventually I forgot about it. Until the memory came rushing back.

There’s a YouTube woodworker I really love named Frank Howarth. He makes incredible, intricate, laborious things and applies a similarly intricate, laborious effort to his documenting of his work. His videos are just really relaxing, really fun and have a wonderful artistry to them. He’ll add flourishes of stop-motion animation to show a project magically assembling itself, add tiny little sound-effects to emphasize moments (like squeezing a piece of wood into a joint with a squeaky cork sound), and has seemed to find infinite ways to re-frame the action of cutting a piece of wood to be endlessly fresh, entertaining and engaging. It’s cool stuff!

But one day, I was watching this video from Frank and spotted an extremely familiar-feeling desktop on his computer in the video.

It said the same thing as the Graphic Design student’s wallpaper from so many years ago (without the bonus intensity of the big swear word).

WORK HARDER

That was where my YEEESH from years ago metastasized in my brain, and I started to realize why I had such a strong reaction to that desktop the first time I saw it. To me, Frank’s videos always represented this meditative, joyful, aimless creative force. His projects are at times unapologetically functional (a deep dive into building storage shelves for his pantry, say) and at other times entirely “useless” pieces of art (like a wood-turned spherical eyeball).

Either way, his videos and his approach to the work always embody this artistic, playful feeling. But seeing that work re-contextualized under the dogma of hard work... it created a kind of energetic dissonance in me that I couldn’t shake.

To be clear, I’m not trying to shit on either Franky H or the IGDS – they aren’t bad people for putting some words on their computer screen. But they made me realize something I don’t like about the way we all talk about work.

📊 Productivity, 🗂️ Efficiency & “Hard Work” 🥵

How often do you tell yourself you aren’t working hard enough?

Who is it in you saying that?

Something I loop back on in my head all the time is that I really have this strong feeling that we aren’t examining our own patterns of thought enough. Why do we hold up hard work, efficiency or productivity as virtues? And why do we see the solution to our short-comings so often as the simple need to “work (fucking) harder?”

Value isn’t created by being a hard worker who produces a lot of productivity (productivity that is proven by the time-sheet that quantifies your production of productive moments). Filling every moment of your day with activity and work for the sake of filling every moment of your day with activity and work isn’t a virtue in and of itself. Motivating yourself to do things by shaming yourself for not doing enough things – not working hard enough. All of this feels like a symptom of a deep societal corruption (and I'm quite sure the powers that be like it that way).

Your value as a person is inherent to you. You don’t get more valuable the harder you work – your life doesn’t matter more if you work an 80 hour week – any more than someone else’s life doesn’t matter less if they don’t work at all (we all seem to value baby lives and they don’t do anything). And so this assumption that hard work is valuable and that it is the answer – that it’s the default solution to the challenging points in our lives – it really freaks me out.

That can't be it, right?

😇 You don’t need to hate producing things to question the cult of productivity. 😈

I love making things. It’s something I think is fundamentally human and I feel closer to the core of my being when I create. I love making things with purpose, too. Some of the most frustrating moments in my artistic practice are when I feel the drive to make something, but I don’t have a strong motivational reason to give the making meaning. We need a problem to solve, a desire to fulfill, or a person to please to give our making energy and spirit.

I think having constraints around art making and creativity inspires deeper creative thinking, and having a reason to make something beyond just making something – anything – just for the sake of it gives your creativity direction. Making just to make feels just as futile, I suppose, as working just to work. It’s practice, honing skills, filling time – but to what end? What’s the energy you’re putting into that saying?

This is part of why I think so many people are driven towards creative industries. We want to make art for a living not because we fundamentally want to make money, and we think art is a great way to do that. We do it because we want to make things – make art. Having a life-sized constraint of: earning a living, buying food and shelter, not dying, etc. is a pretty strong motivational force to apply to your art making practice.

🌱 Work less hard. 🌿

Okay so I didn't like that desktop, but I do like making things – I do like working hard on things that feel meaningful. So what can I do about it? Other than just talk about it to myself, of course. 🙊

I decided it would be fun to channel some of this angst into making my own motivational desktops that counter the dogma of the "work (fucking) harder" desktops. It's a nice constraint, and it helped me figure out more of what I actually felt about this mentality.

So what could my wallpapers say? What's my motivational message to myself and others for when we are in a place where a "work harder" wallpaper is meant to help motivate us into action? To help us overcome something internal by just... getting over it?

"Work Fucking Harder" is saying "if you want to achieve your goals, you won't get there unless you push." It's saying "your energy level isn't enough. You need to put more in." It's saying that if we're tired, if we're wondering what the point is, if we are bored with something and want to switch gears, change things up, or just take a break, that we should dig deeper and just work harder. Have faith, give more, ask for less, pray for a reward later.

I want to say something else.

If you really just want to check off a goal, you could just lower the bar for yourself.

If you are bored with what you're doing for work, you could make work more fun.

If you are questioning what you're doing, you could Stop Working. And maybe take a nap or go for a walk if you want.

I took these mantras for self-compassion and anti-grind feelings and made these wallpapers. I don’t think they’re the best things I’ve made but I decided to just be finished with them so I didn’t need to stress about it.

You can download them and use them for yourself if you want!

My goal with each was to explore a different visual technique – so there's an illustrated one, a more abstract one that I made using simple shapes and blurs in Affinity Designer (which I'm slowly learning and enjoying), and a more "parody" one that I hope maybe that guy from the motion graphics class might consider using from time to time.

❌ Challenges with this project ❌

The actual art making of these wasn't that much work – the surprisingly challenging thing with this project was this part – writing about it and sharing it!

That was the hard work, and I literally spent weeks slowly chipping away at it, procrastinating and almost abandoning it. I did other stuff, too. Have you been watching the new season of Survivor?

I want to do this part more, so maybe I should lower the bar for myself a bit and make these posts a bit shorter and less ambitious?

Wrapping up: Why do I care about all this?

Personally, I want to try to live a more values-oriented version of my life every day. I want to be defined by the things I believe at my core and I want that core to drive what I do and how I do it. I know that I don’t believe at my core that everyone would be better off if we all just worked fucking harder. Because we already work so fucking hard all the time andd that isn't always making things better (lots of the time it's really bad and it’s actually killing us).

You can absolutely do great things and feel deep, accommodating compassion for yourself at the same time. You can accomplish amazing things, make great art, and live a fulfilling life without grinding yourself into a miserable dust. You can be kind to youself and your loved ones, take it easy and still be valuable and worth something. I really need that to be true or I’m fucked. ☠️

…I'm not going to try to come to any deeper conclusion here, or push myself to write something really profound or articulate to wrap things up. This isn't a complete thought, it's a fragment of an idea that spun out of the reaction of "yeeeeeesh" to some black text on a passionate (if a bit intense) person's laptop screen. I think that's enough for now.

I dunno. What do you think? Do you think you'd be able to achieve all your goals, dreams and ambitions if you could just find it in yourself to work fucking harder? Or do you maybe just want to stop working hard for a second, lie down or maybe go for a walk and look at a tree?

When does the "hard work" end and the "enjoying being alive" begin? Or do they happen at the same time?

Have a great day!

Lots of love,
Simon 🐵

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P.S.

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Okay I’m actually done now. Have a nice day!