In front of them, the same products move along the conveyor belt: caramelized macadamia nuts, veal liver, feta cheese. Both take out their cards, both enter numbers into the device. Both pack their bags and step out into the evening. In the sequence of actions, everything is identical, and yet they carry different concepts of time with them.
One sees the coming days as a sequence of appointments, projects, tasks that are already written into a calendar. He knows the rhythm of his month, knows what awaits him, expects what is to come. The other sees no fixed line. For him, the next day is open, unplanned, a space that only fills once he is inside it. Both shop, both walk the same path through the aisles of the supermarket, yet the structure in which they perceive their future could hardly be more different.
Whoever creates does not know what will come of it. Texts, paintings, music arise from experiences that one processes and then makes sensorially accessible to the outside world. Such experiences can be, for example: a fragment of a sentence overheard on the street, spoken only in passing. The speed at which it rains. A child asking an obvious yet unheard-of question. A dream at night. The rhythmic cracking of an old heater in the dark. All of these are beginnings, and the artist decides what happens to that beginning. For this reason, the future is unknown to him. He knows the beginning, chooses one possibility among many, and creates another beginning. In making art, life happens live.
What is the difference between creating and producing?
In the realm of work, the structure is different. Presentations, reports, contracts are produced according to criteria that follow from a previously defined goal. Produced documents are meant, for example, to inform, persuade, frame, or provide proof. Because goals exist, the steps that lead toward them are not independent decisions but have already been determined in advance. The present is used to reach the future as quickly as possible, a future whose best-case scenario is already known. This is why a standard of evaluation arises immediately for what is produced. It can fulfill its goal very well, well, satisfactorily, sufficiently, or inadequately.
Parents say: “You can’t always be on your phone, you also have to do something in the real world.” But what is this real world that children experience? For many, it primarily means school. And school means: producing. Every task has a predefined outcome, and every outcome can meet the previously defined goal very well, well, satisfactorily, sufficiently, or inadequately.
Scrolling through a feed or watching reels is neither creating nor producing. It is consuming. It pursues no goal and carries no system of evaluation within itself. Watching a video is not “good” or “inadequate.” It has simply happened. That is precisely where its appeal lies. For children whose everyday life consists almost exclusively of producing and being evaluated, the digital becomes a liberation from a present that otherwise serves only to arrive as quickly as possible at a future. And perhaps this explains why the “real world” feels natural and normal to many adults, while for many children it contains hardly anything they experience as alive.
In consumption, something new is constantly arriving. The feed is endless, each reel a different tone, a different image, a different surprise. This constant variation creates the feeling of being in a flow, even though one is shaping nothing oneself. Yet consumption is no substitute for creation. It is an intermediate space. It only removes the pressure of evaluation. Consumption remains passive: what comes next arrives from outside, not from within oneself. One scrolls, one watches, one listens, and waits for the next impulse to be delivered. In producing, by contrast, one knows in advance what the future should look like. One never knows the future completely, because reality is always co-created—by other people, by chance, by nature. But the goal is fixed. Everything that deviates from that goal is immediately considered a failure. And even if the target is reached exactly, nothing remains open: it is only what was predetermined anyway, or a negative deviation from it. This raises the question: What is all this for?
Why live a life that oscillates only between fulfilled requirements and failed requirements?
The meaninglessness of producing is made bearable by consumption, but it does not turn into freedom. Freedom does not arise from the mere absence of evaluation, but from the experience that the next step is open and is determined by a choice we make. This choice disappears as soon as a goal is fixed: then it is no longer about choosing a possibility, but only about fulfilling a requirement. This is where the real difference lies: whether time is experienced as a prescribed sequence or as a space in which one begins oneself.
When time is experienced so differently, life itself changes as well. Space and time are the foundations within which every experience unfolds. Those who experience the future as a fixed requirement move within a different reality than those who experience it as an open space. They share the same place, but not the same world.
Perhaps this explains the distance that sometimes remains perceptible, even when people sit next to each other, eat the same dishes, drink the same water. They speak, they laugh, they pay at the same checkout. And yet they perceive the foundations of our reality differently. One present moment is a transit station, the other is a stage. And sometimes these differences do not run between strangers, but through the very closest relationships. Between parents and children who sit at the same table, who share the same everyday life, and yet have a different experience of time, of freedom, of life itself.
© Ema, 2025. All rights reserved.
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