Brenden Matthews

I have a deep appreciation for mastery. It takes an extraordinary amount of time and effort to become truly masterful at something. It doesn’t matter so much what that thing is, whether it’s a sport, a musical instrument, a language–spoken, written, or programming computers. In every case I’ve seen up close, it eats years of your life and asks for more.

I was recently banned from Rover, a specialized craigslist website for finding pet sitters and dog walkers. They didn’t specify why exactly, though I know the walker claimed my dog bit her. I find this claim suspicious since my dogs have never bitten anyone before, certainly not hard enough to break skin, and her story contained several inconsistencies.

Yesterday, I took a walk to the Brooklyn Bridge, a notorious tourist trap but also a beautiful and marvelous feat of engineering. I wanted to photograph it (a cliché, I know) so I can make a print for someone as a gift. Hours passed in what felt like minutes. This experience, this immersion in creation for its own sake, is what makes me call myself an artist. So when a friend of mine–who reads this blog–made an off-hand comment critical of the fact that I call myself an artist, I wasn’t offended, but it did get me thinking about: who is an artist? What makes someone an artist? Is it enough to just make art? Do you have to show it? Sell it? Call yourself an artist on your LinkedIn profile?

I was sitting on the subway the other day and glanced up from my book to notice something that shouldn’t be remarkable, yet somehow was: every single person in my line of sight was staring at their phone. This wasn’t the first time I’d observed this phenomenon, but something about this particular moment struck me differently. Everyone had the same blank, thumb-scrolling look, like the train car had gone quiet in a way that felt off.

I’ve been thinking a lot about boredom lately—specifically, how we’ve become so good at avoiding it. We reach for our phones at the slightest hint of downtime, filling every possible moment with scrolling, tapping, and consuming. It’s as if we’ve collectively decided that being alone with our thoughts is some kind of punishment to be avoided at all costs.