The joy of NOT creating
What one child-free weekend taught me about taking the focus off myself
Good morning and welcome back to Creative Parenting Club.
About a month ago, the leaders of CPC took a team-building trip to Fusion Festival: one of the most unique and special large-scale creative environments in Europe.
got the crowd excited on the last night with one of his signature interactive live sets.For
, it was a different type of creative experience.In this week’s essay, Matt talks about how going to Fusion helped him turn his creative lens away from his own projects for a few days… and reflect on what makes making things so special to begin with.
Escaping the creative ego trap
By
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What if the key to restoring your creative spark was to create… nothing at all?
Recently, I had the opportunity to attend Germany’s annual Fusion Festival as the artist +1 of Kinder Rave and Creative Parenting Club co-pilot
aka Ain TheMachine, who was in the lineup.For our readers based outside of Germany, Fusion is like Glastonbury, Tomorrowland, Lollapalooza, and all of those other big festivals around the world… if those other big festivals had no sponsors or commercial presence, no VIP sections or aggressive crowd behavior, strongly discouraged phones and picture-taking, and didn’t announce their lineup until a few days in advance.
It’s like going to the club in Berlin, but at the scale of a 70,000 person festival.
Since arriving here nearly a decade ago and getting immersed in the club culture (as one does), I’ve always wanted to go to Fusion. But I never really tried that hard. Eventually the pandemic came along, and so did my kids. I kind of forgot about it for a few years.
So when my family techno party-throwing business and creative partner called me up one day in April and asked if I wanted to accompany him this year, there was really only one answer.
(After “wait, let me check the family calendar”).
Times have changed
The version of me that went to Fusion in 2025 is pretty different from the one who would have showed up in 2018… but not in the way that’s obvious.
The biggest difference? Back then, I would have simply been there to enjoy the music.
If you’ve been reading CPC for a while, you may know that this project has its roots in my own creative journey: a pandemic-era New Year’s Resolution to learn how to DJ which quickly snowballed into throwing illegal family park raves and building what would become the Kinder Rave community. Along the way, I met some pretty cool parents, and the idea for this newsletter was born.
In the turbulent years of early parenting, these and other creative projects became a major anchor for my sense of identity and self-worth.
But there’s also another side of creativity that I think a lot of creative people are sometimes afraid to talk about (I know I am).
By the time I finally got to go to Fusion, it had been a long time since I let myself experience something creative without immediately wondering how I could be involved.
Comparison is the thief of joy
Hands up if you can relate to this scenario: you’re a creative person who enjoys making stuff. You go to a concert, exhibition, panel talk or the like, and watch somebody else make stuff. You find it inspiring, maybe even take a few good ideas away. But you can’t stop thinking about your own situation. For many creatives, the joy of watching another person succeed comes with a fresh layer of insecurity:
“What they’re doing is cool. What am I doing?”
Over the past few years, I’ve caught myself doing this constantly. At gigs, at galleries, scrolling through friends’ reels. The more time spent being creative, the more my love for art and music kept turning into self-measurement.
Nothing kills inspiration faster than looking at someone else and wondering if you're doing enough.
But comparison is like any bad habit. It’s easy to know it’s bad. It’s hard not to do it anyway.
When I was learning to mix, a well-established DJ friend gave me a dark warning:
“This is going to ruin the dance floor for you.”
He was half-joking, but it’s also a little bit true. I used to be able to get lost for hours in music that I loved. All of a sudden, I had a hard time dancing to electronic music without wanting to be the one playing it. I had a hard time going to parties without wanting to be the one throwing the party.
Ultimately, this led me down a two-year rabbit hole of chasing gigs and co-founding a nightlife party collective in addition to work, family, the Kinder Rave, this newsletter, and everything else.
A lot of people in my life observed in various ways that I might be doing too much.
This Spring, I finally burned out.
A summer resolution
In May I took a step back from nightlife organizing. I also made a resolution for the summer: I wanted to spend more of my personal time enjoying creative activities this year, rather than organizing them.
So as I danced at Fusion Festival and watched my friend and business partner make interactive live techno music with the rest of the audience, I was hit with a feeling that I’ve felt all too seldomly in recent years.
I was having fun, and for once I wasn’t thinking about my own creative success or perceived lack of it.
I was able to appreciate how cool it really is to mix raw sounds live on stage, get the audience to contribute, and turn it all into an amazing music performance.
I was able to remember how beautiful art and music can be when we unhook from our ego and let ourselves disappear into the moment.
I still love to make stuff. I still want to be the one playing the music (sometimes). I still want to organize cool events.
But at one of Germany’s creative meccas, I was able to detach from all of that for a couple of days. I was able to truly enjoy the creative efforts of other people whom I admire and respect.
I was able to experience the joy of not creating.
Out of my head
There is a fine line between creativity and narcissism. If you think you’ve got something worth sharing with the world, it can be pretty hard to zoom away from focusing on yourself.
It’s also definitely a little bit ironic to sit down later on and write a 1000 word essay about the joys of not making anything.
But as a creative person, my goal isn’t to actually stop creating.
It’s for creativity to feel more fun, less stressful, and to tone down my bad habit of comparing myself to others.
Let’s call a spade a spade: being creative has many virtues, but it’s also a deeply self-absorbing act.
Sometimes, by stepping away from our creative selves for a few days, we can rediscover what it means to simply appreciate the creativity that surrounds us — and remember what it is that makes us want to make things in the first place.
"Nothing kills inspiration faster than looking at someone else and wondering if you're doing enough." 💯💯💯💯
Matt, I love it bro! Very raw and vulnerable and wise! Funny you haven't told me any of that and I'm discovering it here :) For more fun and less overthinking, for more hips and less brains!