Where Do All the Teachers Go?

What room is there for the one who teaches, but doesn’t get to do anything with the skills and techniques they teach? The one who learns - masters, even - the things, develops new applications and methods, only to hand them off to others to do interesting things with? Who can indirectly touch millions through their teaching, but only manages to reach a small handful through their own work?

In a forgotten era, we had guilds where masters took on apprentices and shared in the teaching, distribution of work, and so on. Often this resulted in an equality problem with works made by dozens of hands being attributed to a singular mind and skillset - but there was such a role. Today, that seems to not exist on the same level.
(Or perhaps, more realistically - everyone thinks they’re special and these roles and jobs should be available to them, but even in these romanticized eras there was only room for a select few to hold this kind of position at any given point in time; we just apply the “American dream” lens to everything and like to describe it as a fluid system where an aspiring artist becomes an apprentice who works their way up to journeyman and (if they work really hard) eventually becomes a master with their own students…)

In many ways, the net provides a eutopic level of opportunity for teachers of all kinds (and of all crafts, skills, and niches and sub-niches) to touch more minds and amass a following of would-be apprentices than ever before. But in equally as many ways, the current social-transactional structure of the net results in teachers functioning as tools. Not just tools, but communistic, break-less tools that everyone is entitled to continued free education from, and those in such a position ought to be grateful to be there.

Between the behavior tendencies of the masses (who are accustomed to being spoon fed every idea they can imagine, and mostly ones they can’t, for free) and the fact that educational content is not the advertising goldmine that shallow, tabloid-emulating entertainment content is (and thus also continues to be de-prioritized and made functionally more difficult to navigate on modern content platforms); educators are pushed further and further towards being dancing monkeys hawking shining baubles at passerby’s who mostly stumble upon their work by accident, begging for a coin to be tossed their way and an ear to be leant so that a minute or two of education might be squeezed in-between the volunteer marketing segments. These people have long since stopped doing the work they signed up to do and have been spinning the wheels of burnout going against their principles out of a need to survive.
What’s the path for these kinds of people? They can’t all pivot to entertainment - most aren’t equipped with the skills (nor the motivations) for that; education and entertainment are generally very different jobs. They can’t just submit to advertising - most will burn out and leave before long because making work primarily to sell is generally at odds with the goals and intentions of an educator.

One could dream of a new place that could house these creators. A place that respects varying content interests and objectives, both for the creators’ and the viewers’ sakes. One could dream of a new business model, one that allows educators to sustain themselves based on the good will of the viewership, establishing some form of meritocracy along the way. But would viewer behavior enable those places or models to succeed? After a decade of spoon feeding, behavior manipulation, being told “this is what you want”: What evidence is there that such an adoption would happen at scale to make such ideas sustainable?
Fan funding already exists - as Jack Conte likes to remind us about once a year proclaiming to have fixed the internet - and it’s still a popularity contest for someone to see life-changing success. Alternate video sites exist and rarely see use outside of the alienated political extremists. And dedicated learning sites also exist, requiring a particularly motivated viewer to seek out a learning-specific experience, and still requires educators to spend more time marketing themselves than doing the educating.

In another ideal world, teachers would get to continue publishing their own work and pursuing their own passions - with the developed skills to break down and teach on these subjects being a bonus that other artists or craftspersons may not be able to offer and attracting an audience of both enjoyers of their work and fellow creatives hoping to pursue a similar path.

But does this work? Does this happen? Most of my favorite artists rarely share anything into their process beyond shallow flair that might seem neat to the uninformed layperson but does nothing but cause a creative tease to anyone hoping to actually learn from it. And the best teachers I find either don’t publish their own work (or don’t make it obvious) either due to lack of interest, artistic vision, or time. Time is possibly the most crucial factor here: How am I supposed to spend my creative energy developing and achieving creative visions when I spend the majority of my time doing the teaching so I can survive?
Not only does this literal translation of limited time put massive constraints on one’s ability to make anything at all, but it also rewires one’s creative thinking to look at any creative or technical problem as a great opportunity to expand one’s teaching and work in that way (since that’s what actually makes a difference in the bottom line and sustainability) rather than using it to execute an impressive or fulfilling piece. This, of course, becomes a self-feeding cycle, a loop that further pushes actual art creation to the bottom of the priority list.

Creating is often a privilege. Most successful musicians grew up rich, got extensive coaching from day one, and were given significant portions of their life to freely explore their emotions, ideas, and life to turn into their work. Most of us don’t get that.

A common counterpoint to this line of thinking is the parroted quote along the lines of: “If someone is going to create, they will.” They will find a way and make the time. Sure sounds romantic and fluffy and really self-assuring to someone. Thing is, the work educators are doing is creating. It’s a craft, it’s often artistic expression, and creative problem-solving is a key part of it.
So after a full work day of doing that to make ends meet, then left with 20-30 minutes to try and make something - you usually have nothing. Often despite having a massive list of piece ideas or feelings to pursue because there’s nothing left in you to pursue them for the day.

Of course, the artist who made first instead of teaching first usually doesn’t have this struggle. And the creative drain seems to be far less of a problem when working jobs not in your creative field. But making that switch once you’re already there could be the biggest gamble of your life: At least when you’re teaching, you get to work adjacent to what you want to do, and still get to engage with what you love - but if you go do something unrelated, you may not still be able to come back to your work and then you’re just miserable and not creating at all.

And not being able to create feels like death.

Even if you struggle to take any of the millions of eyeballs happy to freeload off your educational material and get them to care about the work you make yourself (or you struggle to generate much output in that work because most of your output is the teaching), you get to immerse yourself in what you love every day from some angle. And that feels a little less like death.

I wrote and concluded this before falling right to sleep with some of the best sleep I’ve had in a very long time - and I am happy with the feeling landed by the original conclusion. But I realized I’ve left out an important piece of this conversation as it applies to myself, so I’m just extending the piece rather than being a good writer and restructuring things. Revising is booooring.

Upon reflecting on what I’ve said thus far, it occurs to me that perhaps the kind of creative and artist I’m describing - the one I happen to embody, myself - is categorically different than many “traditional” artists.
I know/know of many artists or creatives in many different fields and mediums that have little-to-no interest in the technical side of things whatsoever. (Technical as in both pertaining to “technology” as well as pertaining to “technique”.) They have ideas, a drive, a vision, they want to create and they don’t care about the details required to get there. Mastering a medium or “doing it right” does not even occur to them as mattering when they’re just focused on achieving the goal, finishing the piece. These are the people I help with my work. These are the people I teach. (Not to sound too lofty or pretentious) I break down the technological barriers so that these people don’t have to stress the little details and can get to making. There’s value in that - and I try to keep that in mind, even if I feel like the payoff isn’t proportionate to that value; and if I feel less fulfilled when I’m trying to pursue my own works and struggle to get as many people to care.
Beyond the value, there’s also the element of interest. I didn’t get into teaching these things because I wanted to teach. I wound up teaching because I actually enjoy learning new technologies, new gear, new mediums, techniques, and methods and processes and breaking them down and figuring out new ways to apply them.

That’s fun to me. I have entire work days, entire weeks or months (maybe even years) where I just bounce between learning new things and experimenting with them and have the time of my life. Arguably - moreso than creating - chasing the high of learning a new thing or playing with a new tool or method is the most true thing that I wake up every morning looking forward to.
I have no end of ideas for art pieces, creative expression, etc. and sometimes I need to get that out. Sometimes it boils over and I just need to make something or I might explode. Whether it’s a shitty collage, a mess of paint, or yet another overly-verbose post on this blog: I just have to create. But often, my base instinct is to learn. If I discover a new creative tool, have a new idea, my first excitement is to play with it, to learn it, then figure out how I’d explain it to someone else so they could use it. Even when I’m making things for myself, I’m often practicing new techniques or ideas (and recording the process) so I can show it in application as I explain it to someone else. That’s just who I am. That’s what drives me.
Maybe that’s okay?
Obviously there are shortcomings. The first half of this piece was spent lamenting the sacrifices in my own artistic output that are inherent to being a teacher first, and the frustration at the lack of following I can develop on my own work when the audience sees me as a tool rather than an artist.
Another struggle is that it’s hard to establish and own my own personal creative style if - before I even complete a single work, nevertheless a series that might earn recognition or put me on the map - I immediately hand over the keys to any unique idea or solution I come up with. Over the past couple years I’ve had to specifically limit the content I make about creative techniques because I felt like I was onto something interesting that I could leverage for my own unique looks rather than handing them over for the rest of the creative scene to outpace me. It felt like the right idea; I’ve taught for over a decade, maybe it’s time to make for myself and truly earn my place (and hopefully get people to take me seriously). Yet, in all this time, my list of to-do videos on these things has continued to grow meanwhile my actual output using them for myself has not really grown much at all.

Those are downsides, things where I feel like my chosen career path is in direct contradiction to my hopes and dreams, even though it means getting close to my dreams more easily.
But also, this is my creative output. This is my creative expression. This is how I explore art and my creativity and I just happen to teach others along the way.

Maybe I’m not meant to be an artist. A creative. Maybe I’m not meant to have a viral hit set me up for life as I’ve seen happen to so many of my “students.” Maybe I’m meant to be stuck in this specific place - which I can be eternally grateful for and understand is a really great place to be, but keeps me from achieving my true dreams - to keep the drive alive. Maybe if I “made it big” I’d get lazy and lose my push. I don’t know.
But I’ll keep trying.