What Cutting Out the Noise Taught Me About Creative Work

I’m not the only one to feel the loudness of the modern world.

Leading a creative life, like most creatives do (juggling more than one job to sustain it), adds an infinite amount of complexity to the daily routine.

I’ve felt this contrast keenly over the last month as I’ve taken a break from painting and working on my online business, using my spare time outside of my job to focus solely on applying for a new full-time position — something to pay the bills.

My current routine consists of working full-time in a gallery, so my days usually look like this:

6:30am – Wake up, make coffee, and head straight to the studio (or the living room I use in our shared temporary house) to make sure I paint for at least an hour before work begins.
8:30am – Go for a quick run.
9:00am – Have breakfast, get dressed, and head out the door to work.
5:30pm – Come home, rest for an hour, and then turn my attention to blog writing, course building, and figuring out SEO tools and email automations.

Weekends are for exhibition open call applications, teaching art classes, writing grant proposals — and, when I can, PhD applications too.

Monday, I start all over again.

The week is full — and while my creative work generally doesn’t feel like work, it still means I’m left with very little time to rest or do anything outside of this cycle.

Some weeks or months require a particular focus in one area just to push it forward, and other elements inevitably fall by the wayside.

Like last summer, in July 2024, when I had my first solo show in London — exercise and other commitments really went out the window while I squeezed in triple the painting time outside of my day job just to get everything finished.

Day-to-day life feels like a true balancing act — trying to hold it all together and ensure that each element moves forward steadily, albeit at times painfully slowly.

So when July 2025 rolled around and we had just purchased our first home in Glasgow, and I’d handed in my notice at the gallery job I’d grown to really enjoy, I had to put all my extra time into finding a new job that would cover bills in this new city starting in August.

And anyone looking for a job in 2025 will know (if you were born in the ’90s or earlier)… looking for work just isn’t what it used to be. We're faced with a tremendously oversaturated market, made worse by AI screening and "easy apply" buttons. Candidates apply to hundreds of roles, often half-heartedly, without fully understanding what they’re applying for — partly due to exhaustion and desperation — leaving employers with stacks of irrelevant CVs to sift through. As a result, many of them just get deleted.

The outcome? Employers ghost most applicants. Good candidates miss out on opportunities they’re a great fit for — and employers miss out on people who would be perfect for the job.

I learned more about this with further clarity in an interesting YouTube video I stumbled on last week by Ramin J. Amani, which was both sobering and eye-opening. 

This is the third time I’ve entered the job market in recent years, and the cycle is always the same: long, draining, and discouraging. It’s a battlefield out there.

Knowing how this process goes — that I’ll likely need to devote months to land something — it’s safe to say that despite my experience and degrees, they often feel useless. (I don’t fully believe that, but it can feel that way.) It’s fair to say that while not entirely without value, degrees just don’t carry the same weight they once did in this market.

To tackle the monumental task of securing a job, everything else had to be put on hold so that all my spare time could be devoted to it. (Two months on, and I still haven’t found one.)

Cutting out all of the numerous roles I usually hold in my day-to-day life made me realise just how much extra work I impose on myself to sustain a life as an artist. It didn’t take long for the restlessness within me to creep back in and push me to paint — because I’m genuinely not okay if I don’t. But for a few weeks, I did feel the space in my day. I got a glimpse of what it must feel like —to NOT have other work-related purposes outside of a day job — or perhaps to love your day job as your main working passion, and then have the rest of your time to devote to rest and family life. What a life that would be!?

In the beginning, I thought cutting out the noise would help me focus on work.
And it did — just not in the way I expected.

The quiet revealed something else: just how much invisible noise I carry all the time just to keep a creative life afloat. It's not just distractions I’ve been cutting out — it’s parts of myself I constantly divide into roles, tasks, goals, and deadlines.

Maybe the real challenge isn’t how to block out the noise — but how to live with it, or choose which parts are worth carrying on any given day.

I haven’t figured that all out yet — and I’m sure it requires consistent attention.

But for now, I’m listening.