Creating While Working a 9-5
The Myth of The Creative Horse
Before October, I published a piece on Substack every week. During this time, I felt comfortable calling myself a writer. Not because I’ve had commercial success (or any success at all really) but because I wrote every day, without exception. This has changed now.
Without going into too much detail, I’ve had a 9-5 since October. Since then, my desire to create and write has been overshadowed by an equally innate desire to lie down, recover from an exhausting day at work, and watch YouTube or scroll Instagram.
I hated myself for it. Every time when it was about to be eleven p.m. and I was lying on my bed watching random survival videos or someone explaining how to cook perfect scrambled eggs I wanted to throw my phone out the window, step out of myself and scream into my face: “DID YOU NOT WANT TO DO THIS WRITING THING? WHY ARE YOU WASTING YOUR TIME?”
Instead, I stayed awake until midnight, continued scrolling and after another hour went to sleep. I didn’t feel rested, only delayed, like I had postponed my day rather than ended it. I felt like I had let myself down.
Stephen King famously says that if you want to call yourself a writer, you have to write every day. The more, the better. The idea of a job coming between you and your creative pursuits is laughable. If you have to wake up at 4 a.m. to write for two hours before work, then that’s what you do. There is no way around it. Otherwise, you’re just someone who dreams of being a writer without putting the effort in.
I think of this idea as the creative horse. No matter where or when, whether through the deep mud of waking up early or the smooth roads of vacation, if there is a creative project tied behind a creative horse, it keeps going. Slow or fast, it pulls. This mindset often seems like the only way to turn your art into a career.
Of course, it is important to push through when something is hard. It’s like self-improvement. You can’t go to the gym only when you feel like it. It’s the human dilemma: leisure vs. work. But the question is not if you should put effort into your creative pursuits (everyone knows you should). The question is what to do when that effort has already been spent elsewhere.
I’ll take my own job as an example: waking up at 7am, the journey to the office, drinking coffee, taking calls, writing emails, teams meetings, lunch, solving an issue, drinking more coffee, sorting files, more teams meetings, and then the journey home. All of this accumulates into a day that lasts from seven a.m. to six p.m. Who could deny me the pleasure of lying on my bed for an hour scrolling through reels now? It’s not like I am a lazy person. I worked all day. After an hour of scrolling, I get hungry, make some food, watch an hour-long YouTube video and suddenly it’s ten p.m. I scroll a bit more and then go to sleep, to do it all over again tomorrow. I haven’t created much, except maybe an hour on the weekends here and there, and I haven’t been to the gym once. What does that make me now?
According to the myth of the creative horse, it makes me someone who stopped pulling. In a way, a horse as well, just with a different kind of endurance. One who’s priority is to work from nine to five. So, is being an artist just about pushing through when the other horses are asleep? Is an artist simply a stallion on steroids?
We like to think of them that way at least: magical animals who are born to create. I think this image is comforting because it lets us believe that artists are different from us, that creation belongs to another species of person altogether. That some people are born with a stronger engine, more stamina, more will. This fantasy does important work for us: it explains why we are tired, and why they supposedly are not. But that idea quickly falls apart when you remember how many people once created passionately and then stopped because life filled the space art once lived in.
My mother used to paint, my father used to play instruments, my uncle used to go out and take photographs. But then there was the job, and the responsibility to take care of others: children, the deposit for the house, furthering your career. This isn’t a story of abandonment but of displacement.
You cannot work on your magnum opus when you have to pay rent and want to spend time with your family. Something has to be sacrificied. Being good at a job takes the very qualities creative work also requires. When you’ve spent the day doing that, it’s not surprising that the part of you that wants to wander, experiment, and fail asks to be left alone.
Here, it might seem that an artist who creates after a full day of work is somehow inexhaustible, that their energy never runs out. This is a misunderstanding of what discipline actually looks like. It’s not that the artist is stronger than us-in the end, we are the artists, and they are us. The difference is in orientation. Work is not the end, but the framework that allows them to return to what matters most: their art. If you asked them what they are, they wouldn’t say accountants, plumbers, or teachers-they would say dancers, designers, or painters, working other jobs on the side.
An example of this is Giancarlo Esposito, speaking about the early days of his career. He explains that he worked as a waiter, bus driver, and cab driver, but he always returned to the work he felt he was meant to do. (I’ve linked the timestamped clip here for reference). He didn’t have boundless energy, but had a commitment to keep returning to what he thought defined him. It’s not about superhuman stamina but about finding ways to reclaim time and energy for what matters to you.
That’s not to say that jobs like plumbing, teaching, or medicine aren’t fulfilling. For some, their work already meets their need to create, to leave a mark on the world, to reclaim something of themselves. A doctor who spends their day helping patients, a teacher who shapes young minds, a plumber who helps a family in need are making, changing, and contributing in ways that satisfy a creative impulse. It’s natural that after a full day of work, all they want is rest, watch TV, or scroll online. Their human need to make and contribute has been met. For others, whose work doesn’t provide that same reclamation, the impulse to create must be found elsewhere. This is not simply a matter of discipline but is shaped by how energy, time, and security are distributed, and by what kinds of fulfillment our jobs can-or cannot-provide for us personally.
In that sense, continuing to create alongside a “normal” job becomes an act of reclaiming yourself. Of resisting a system that would prefer you too tired, too distracted, too algorithmically occupied to remember who you are. Discipline here isn’t about superhuman effort but about making space for what matters to you.
That doesn’t mean that you have to wake up at four a.m. every day. It could be as simple as holding yourself to the standard of going to the theatre once a month, writing one hundred words before bed or reading that book you wanted to read so badly. It helps you to remember who you are.
The fact that you still feel the urge to create - even faintly, even guiltily - is not a failure of discipline but proof that it hasn’t been extinguished. It is your humanity insisting on itself.
To create is a human act. It’s not reserved as the exclusive property of “artists.” I truly believe that most people carry a desire to make something: building a house, painting a self-portrait, tuning an engine. Not because we all want to be artists, but because creation is how we recognise ourselves in what we do. Creation is how effort becomes meaningful. It’s where labour begins to feel like more than endurance.
To be an artist, then, is not to live from art, but to refuse the idea that selfhood must be earned through income or status. It is to insist on being yourself in a world that treats selfhood as a luxury. A thing only permitted to those with enough money, time, or cultural permission.
And even if there are periods where you don’t write, where you don’t end up defeating the hell that is the Instagram Algorithm, discipline can be found no matter where you are in life (maybe even while reading this article). Sitting yourself down and pulling that desire back into view is an act of care. Protecting a small space for creation is how you refuse to be defined by external factors like your job.
Of course you can’t always fight. Sometimes it’s okay to give in. But letting exhaustion silence the desire altogether is doing yourself a disservice. Not because you have to create something, but because you owe yourself the chance to recognise who you are beyond the way you earn money. Because you are human.
Thank you so much for reading! As you could tell I am going through changes but trying my best to post whenever I can. Though this will probably not be regulalry, I still enjoy posting on here, and hope you can relate to my ramblings! If you liked the piece consider subscribing and leaving a comment!
My jaw is currently on the floor. Maybe my new favourite of yours? Capitalism is everything and unfortunately creativity isn't free from its hold. It's hard to separate seeing yourself as a churning machine of creative produce, especially when its counter to the system and how success is perceived.
This is a great piece. I’v been thinking about the same sentiment lately as daily life has seemingly exhausted my ability to think or be creatively motivated. Because of a schedule that is busier than it originally was when I first began art, Iv started being more intentional about time between mandatory activities like work, school, etc… deleting my social medias and getting up earlier to write or read a book iv been dying to finish. I think it’s important to be intentional and not let natural creativity die just because you’re growing up.