This is an excerpt that our creator, Sarah Faith, wrote for her personal newsletter on Substack. This piece is more of a United States-centric, collective overview.  

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Creation Over Consumption 

I’m talking to myself: get off your phone and create instead. Sit with yourself, your own ideas, and generate from there. Take back your imagination! Take back your magic! Reclaim your time!

We’re moving into an era where new classes are emerging: the consumer class and the creator class.

The creator class is comprised of original and critical thinkers, interested in the world within them as much as the world around them, with a refined and unique point of view. They live as sovereigns with presence, shaping their lives consciously. Their expression moves from internal to external.

They learn the tools they need to, but do not get controlled by them. They make media, create ecosystems, and their work evolves organically and originally.

The consumer class is defined by their intellectual reliance on consumption: material goods, specific media they consume, and other people’s opinions that influence their own. These are the folks quoting memes and TT accounts on their social media accounts. They ask AI questions their intuition could—and should— answer.

They might create, but if so, they are tethered by others’ originality: these are the podcasters with content that revolves around pop stars and television shows; it would be challenging for them to come up with episodes solely from their own ideas. Their expression often stays all external, and sometimes flows externally to internal.

The saddest implications for the second class are how little they may truly understand and know themselves in this lifetime, how swayed they are by fleeting trends and others’ opinions, and how creatively dependent they are. If you are reading this, you are in the creator class. Affirm it: get serious about what you are making.

Suggestions for right now: Immediately focus on strengthening your imagination and intuition. Take screen detoxes seriously and regularly. Use technology as tools, don’t let them use you. The best social media platforms right now, IMHO, are YouTube, Substack, and Pinterest. Alongside learning SEO and building your newsletter, pick 1 or 2 of those and dedicate yourself to showing up on them seriously.

Hone your craft, messaging, product, and quality of service. Spend time drawing, writing by hand, and monotasking. Create a style not from a template; start thinking about how you’d like to show up online in a unique way.

Work Is Now A New Shape

In the United States, Henry Ford set a precedent for work that was the norm for many decades: not just the assembly line, but the 9-5. Many Americans gave everything they had to their jobs and had little to no energy or time for life-giving activities, organizing, art, community, or intimate relationships. We were trapped inside a caste system determined by race/class/gender, and had our energy, time, and identities extracted from us by capitalism. For some, but not all Americans, that is changing and will continue. Access to the internet offers up more possibilities for work than ever. We’re moving into a “person first” model. The people in the United States aren’t happy with the work as a modern-day slavery system, and more people than ever are trying to get out of it through creativity, technology, and skills.

The era of “what you do” in a traditional, easily explainable sense is on the way out for many. This is the era of who you ARE, HOW you DO something, and RESULTS. This is the age of the multi-hyphenate.

Think: project-based work, the portfolio career, receipts and proof of your effectiveness, and a quality of work that people can tangibly touch, feel, taste, and understand on a primal, visceral level.

Those who are visionary, those who can lead, those with their own POV and their own specialized style, heart, and genius will thrive. Everyone else will flounder until they readjust, or worse.

If you don’t care about work in a traditional sense, it will be much more acceptable to make money to support your lifestyle.

What that means for you, creative and business owner, is that you can extricate yourself from work being your identity. It’s ok to think of work in terms of projects, eras, or simply a way to pay the bills. Many of us need to take the next few years to change our lifestyles, attend to health, move, caretake, pivot, and so on. It’s ok for “work” to take a backseat for a while. Over the next few years, sabbaticals will be much more normalized, and for many, “work as identity” will dissolve. Our work will shapeshift as we do, around our interests, eras, skillsets, and needs.

Suggestions for right now: Shore up your identity first, outside of career or work. Do you have purposes or hobbies that exist outside of work? Imagine ways to create a lifestyle that your work can support, not living to work. If it’s time to put work on the back burner, do so. If it’s time to name what “era” your creativity or business is in, do so. If it’s time to pivot to a new project, experiment with this all year long.

Because of the economic and geopolitical landscape, you also might want to think about ways to do your work from anywhere, or a portable business that can travel with you for a few years.

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Read the whole essay here.