How The Tangent of Cognitive Overload Steals Your Soul
HOW THE TANGENT OF COGNITIVE OVERLOAD STEALS YOUR SOUL
And where does our music really exist?
Today I want to discuss how we, as independent artists, musicians, and creators, are working with technology that enables us to create and share a song or video, but which also tends to send us into mental overload because of its ephemeral, immaterial nature.
By that I mean it’s all magic, because without electricity none of it would exist. It doesn’t manifest until we experience it — the combination of the visuals and the sound; our screens emitting photons and sound waves coming out of the speakers in our room that are generating an experience for us from electricity.
Music was never something we could hold in our hand. Not once, not ever. The vinyl record, cassette, or VHS tape, CD or DVD in a jewel case – those were never the music or the movie, just the delivery mechanism. But at least we used to be able to hold something that represented the thing. Every other art form gets an object that IS the thing — canvas, stone, a page. Ours never did. The immateriality was always there. You just used to be able to hold the delivery mechanism and mistake it for the thing.
Now, it’s all just streams of digital data, and we can’t really hold it in our hands or put it on our shelf.
As digital creators, we aren’t creating objects; we’re creating experiences in other people’s nervous systems. We create things that intentionally provide long-distance experiences for complete strangers.
And it’s all magic.
But the social media post that you edited with CapCut to add stickers and captions, creating digital media and thinking about posting and reviewing your social media, sitting at your DAW making music or recording a performance: it’s all very cerebral. All of the things that we work on are very cerebral when you’re on your computer or phone making things and planning things. We’re all up in our minds. We’re definitely not in our bodies when we’re creating and doing the thing.
It’s when we’re not making music and are consuming the world through the internet, spending too much time with the AI, and becoming overwhelmed with it all that it becomes the most insidious for us creators.
And you can’t exist there for too long, because then you get sucked in and you’re swamped by it. And it’s so easy to fall into that trap when you have so many tabs open in a browser and you’re checking the news or weather or your social profiles or interacting with multiple AIs — having a chat in this one, having this one over there create an image, and that one’s working on a video, switching back and forth between all these tasks to create this content, mash it all together, kind of put it into some kind of a package that’s presentable in a way that offers some value to the listener or the watcher, or makes somebody feel something, makes somebody think, adds some value in some way like that. And spending all the time organizing it and planning it and thinking about how you’re going to roll it out and what platforms to do it on and what is what, where, the likes, and statistics!
I just saw a video in which an artist said indie artists may spend as much as 80% of their time on administrative overhead and only 20% on music.
I couldn’t verify whether that was actually true, so he was probably exaggerating a bit.
For me, that violates my own personal rule that music comes first. I always serve the music first.
The only reason my Hope Is Not Enough robot visuals and the animation in my Excuse Me circus-themed video came together so fast is that I was inspired by the story I was telling, and I could figure out how to start it and end it. And if I don’t have a story to tell, then I can’t force one. But I can always create music, and now that I’m really fast at creating good music — well mixed and mastered and out the door ready to go — from scratch to about 60 or 90 seconds of music in about three to four hours, I can pump one of these out a day. And it’s always 100% genuine human-crafted music.
When I was dabbling with AI to create animations to go with the music of my singles, the songs drove the story. But without a story to tell, I’m not really inspired to tell one — unless I’m making up some kind of fiction. When the songs are authentic to me and my story, they’re relatable. Once I step outside that and start making up stories that aren’t driven by the song, I immediately start feeling unrelatable and inauthentic.
A lot of times, a fun challenge is the only excuse I need to get into a creative flow. If I’m going to produce my next single with my white robot pantomiming the choreography, dancing to the rhythm, mimicking my moves — when I move, the robot moves — that is a fun challenge! And it would be authentic to some degree because you’d still be seeing me reflected in the robot’s movement. And even if I make it seem like the robot is singing the song, it will still be my music and voice.
But where’s the relatable story in a song about a robot being an AI? I guess I could just make a documentary-style video so you can watch me learn how I figure it out.
And when it’s done, none of what I made will exist in reality until you actually watch it and have that experience!
I feel like I want to fall back on this idea that—almost as a health warning—as artists, we often sit too long in the cerebral, analytical side of our minds. And I’m especially talking about all the details you need to grasp, all the balls that are in the air that you’re juggling when you’re trying to figure out all the administrative overhead for your songs and art — whether you registered it, distribution and promotion, content and planning, all that stuff… and then executing, following through, and leaving room for experimentation and learning new things and keeping the awe and wonder in your creativity — without getting bogged down by a broken body that’s getting stiff because you don’t move, or you didn’t feed your brain (it needs carbs).
You need to take those breaks and take care of yourself, because we are a body and a mind and a soul. Those are the three aspects of the vessel through which our creativity flows, and we need to nourish all three, especially the body. Because when that craps out, your soul can’t express itself clearly, and you fall flat and get into a funk.
A lot of these practices that we have in our lives are all kinds of forms of meditation — everything that we do where we focus on something for a long period of time is a form of meditation, because you’re just focused on that one thing and your inner critic is quiet. But if you get too deep into too many things, then your mind is holding onto too many concepts at once, and you start losing track; the balls start falling, and that ramps up your anxiety, and higher anxiety increases pain.
And the next thing you know, you’re feeling like maybe you’re having a panic attack, or you can’t breathe. It’s because you’re sitting there, all of a sudden swamped by a million minutiae details that have nothing to do with making music and more to do with interacting with AI for planning and organizing, or struggling to figure out your software, or managing the mountain of files you’re creating, such that it’s becoming more difficult to stay organized or even know which way to go next.
Don't let cognitive overload steal your soul.
You can only take that so far before it becomes too much really quickly, and so you’ve got to start acting on all these things that you’re planning and learning before you generate more stuff that takes you out of the flow and into information overload. And especially within the realm of organization and planning and documentation, what you can get back from AI is astounding — mountains of it — before you know it, you’re swamped in information. We need to be careful of that! But we shouldn’t be afraid of asking AI to help us get organized and plan our rollout strategy. That’s another topic altogether!
I’m sitting here looking at — a 90-day block calendar that shows me 5 sets of 4-day focus blocks and what I should be working on each week and month; I’ve got like a 17-page Brand Agent Document and a Les Konley Universe Bible; I’ve got the North Star of Les Konley guide and the whole story of my recent convergence crisis; and then The Next 5-year Loop, a block-based operating guide for the next five years, that takes me into 2031. All artifacts of planning with AI agents. I’ve written a whole bunch of new documents I can publish on the concept of creative sovereignty in the age of AI. I’m generating PDF carousels for LinkedIn, and learning to use Buffer to schedule posts.
Then I needed a way to help simplify all of this, so I had my AI take a look at everything and create a one-pager — a ‘where do I start’ index, like a guide, a planner. What should I be working on besides the music? Strategy and planning, my identity and voice, building dozens of pieces of social media content — all very, very involved, and nothing to do with music.
All while having awareness that none of it really exists except as zeros, ones, and electrons.
Just before recording this article as a voice memo and having it transcribed, I first had to take time to do 30 minutes of stretching and deep breathing to get myself back into my body, because I was feeling overwhelmed with all the details; I had way too many tabs open and was interacting with too many AIs and looking at too many open documents! I needed to ground myself, get back into reality, get my head out of the clouds. I needed to end the simulation, disengage my mind, and step away. And instead, I’m holding a Sony voice recorder to express myself to you like this… literally by talking to you. And now the words have been transcribed and found their way into your eye holes!
Perhaps my message is for older creators who are feeling the weight of slowing down. And maybe it’s a warning for you younger folks to stay vigilant about protecting your time, maintaining your body, and staying out of those rabbit holes that prevent you from getting your music out there into the world.
Keep your head clear and your body limber, my friends.