Iridescent corvid secrets
by Steve Xoh

Writing about (not) marking the tenth edition of this Substack in the last issue got me thinking about how many I will actually end up doing. I remember writing the first two and wondering if I’d ever stick with it long enough to get to ten. Now I’m realising that I have so much to write about each month that it will likely keep going for at least another 10, 20, 30 issues. I even spent some time working out when issue 100 would come out. (For those wondering, the answer is Friday 19th February 2033. Mark it in your diary!)

Part of my reason for reflecting on all of this is that a key aspect of my creative practice, and something I feel I’ve become good at, is knowing when to kill a project. I pay particular attention to endings. Even though they are inevitable, I can easily develop a pattern of avoiding them. I seem to have found a somewhat stoic approach to endings, even though I don’t fully subscribe to stoic philosophy. My earliest memories of this are saying goodbye to family pets as they left for their final trip to the vets. I remember being about nine, sitting up late with my cat Sally the night before she died. The same was true of my rabbit Skippy. They were very sad occasions and I felt a lot, but when the time came to say goodbye, I felt ready. (My parents had my beloved dog Toby put down while I was away on a school trip, which made that ending much more difficult.) This relationship with endings, and recognising when something needs to come to a close, has carried through into many areas of my life. In my creative work, it has become especially important for me to give as much attention to endings as I do to every other part of its lifecycle.

In his fascinating book The Denial of Death, cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker suggests that because human beings are aware that they are alive and that they will die, we have the unique capacity to experience existential anxiety. This creates a tension that can manifest as a simultaneous fear of insignificance and impermanence, meaning we are caught between fearing both life and fearing death. Becker goes on to suggest that, to cope with this, we create what he calls “immortality projects” - ways of making our existence feel meaningful by leaving a mark that, at least symbolically, transcends death. Many things can take this form: careers, family, wealth, status, creative work - anything that, often at a level outside our conscious awareness, says “I matter and that will continue in some way”. (He acknowledges that his writing of the book is itself part of this.) In fact, Becker suggests that culture itself is simply a system of shared immortality projects.

The fascinating thing about immortality projects is that Becker suggests they are not optional, but psychologically necessary for us to function as a creature that is aware of its own mortality. He doesn’t suggest this is something we should, or even could, avoid, only that it is an important pattern in human experience to become aware of.

It is this existential awareness, which I find exciting rather than depressing, that makes impermanence such an important part of my work. I have a rule of thumb for any new project: it must end intentionally, end well, and end at a peak. Before I even recorded the first episode of the Sound of Silence podcast, I publicly announced that there would only ever be 100 episodes. For my experimental Inexpert conference in 2018, I made it very clear that it would only ever happen once. And for my What the February?! Instagram project, I declared that the fourth year would be the final one, despite thousands of people around the world now taking part in this strange annual tradition.

These advance declarations can be challenging, especially when a project turns out to be something I really enjoy or that really takes off. Towards the end of the Sound of Silence podcast, it was receiving between 8,000 and 10,000 downloads per episode and starting to gather a lot of press interest. Inexpert proved to be an utterly exhilarating and ground-breaking experiment and many people got in touch asking when the next one would be. What the February?! was not only attracting more and more participants, but was also growing my Instagram following exponentially and increasing sales in my online shop. The pull towards the common-sense, perhaps capitalist, instinct to repeat, scale up and grow was very strong. But I knew in my heart that this would be driven by my own attachment to “success”, rather than an acceptance of the impermanence of all things.

One of the dangers that Ernest Becker warns about is that, if immortality projects remain unchecked, they can become dangerously entangled with our sense of identity. The project shifts from something we do to something we are, meaning that any threat to it begins to feel like a threat to our very existence. And, given that everything eventually fades and dissolves, failing to end a project at a peak can result in our sense of identity and self-esteem slowly slipping away. I didn’t want to identify solely as ‘the silent podcast guy’ or ‘the curator of the weird anti-conference’ or ‘the artist who dares people around the world to do weird creative stuff every February’. Although it was incredibly tempting to anchor my sense of self-worth and success in these projects, I knew that at some point they would fade, or I would simply get bored with them, and that this could lead to a significant psychological crash. At the same time, I have to admit that I also just get a kick out of doing the opposite of common sense and ending projects at the very moment society would advise otherwise.

In 1988, musician and artist Fred Deakin co-founded the creative agency Airside. The agency went on to produce ground-breaking designs and interactive art installations for the likes of the V&A, the Big Chill and Bestival, winning dozens of awards from institutions such as D&AD, Design Week and the BAFTAs. Then, in 2012, at the pinnacle of their success, they decided to close.

Fred told me the story of how Airside ended:
“We’d just done an MBA at London Business School and all they said to us was, ‘What’s the exit strategy for Airside: buy, sell or merge? Do you want to buy another company and get bigger, sell the company and cash in, or merge, which is kind of a half-way house?’ We thought, ‘No, we’re not going to do any of those, so screw you. We’re going to have a really big party and go out with a bang, just like all the best bands.

I’ve seen many friends running similar ventures and, at the end of their cycle, they say, ‘Okay, time to sell,’ then stay for another three to five years with the golden handcuffs, watching the beautiful thing they created being slowly tarnished by hack-handed corporates. It’s a common fate, I think, to feel that slow death.

But life is too short to spend years doing things you don’t feel drawn to. There’s that classic Zen analogy: you have to be like a surfer, knowing the wave will inevitably crash. And it’s the art of falling off the surfboard that’s the key, not trying to stay on the wave to the very end.”

But I’m still unsure about this Substack. It feels different to my other projects, and I don’t feel the need to think about when it will end. One reason for this is that I’m still enjoying watching how it grows and connects me with people around the world. Another may be that, as I sort of started it by accident (see issue 1), I never really thought about impermanence. But when I reflect more deeply, I realise the main difference is that writing this every four weeks isn’t a project - it is a practice. A practice that is just for me and, alongside my running, meditation, or sitting by the Thames observing nature, helps me maintain a sense of wellbeing, physically, mentally and maybe even spiritually. I don’t feel the need to predetermine an end point for any of those practices, so I don’t feel the need for one here either.

I find this distinction between project and practice really helpful. For me, a project is an impermanent expression of something, bound within the temporal boundaries of a start and an end. It sits separate from my underlying and ongoing sense of self. It isn’t who I am, but simply a fleeting expression of it. A practice is something else entirely. It is an unending tuning into my moment-by-moment experience, a process that gradually reveals deeper layers of the mystery of who I am and what this bizarre human experience is. And although this too will one day come to an end, I don’t feel the need to decide exactly when.