A lot of people today have forgotten the joy of making things.

The world today is filled with more and more means of consumption.  Social networks allow you to connect with your friends and family, and even meet new people from time to time.  News flows to you in a dozen or more different ways every day, and entertainment comes knocking on your door from hundreds of sources.

A lot of these things require maintenance, as well.  You feel an obligation to respond to posts on Facebook, to clear your email inbox, go through your subscriptions, and answer any text messages you may receive.  You may also be “required” to look at the latest picture, post, or other content from your friends.

All of the consumption of inbound information and entertainment combines with all of the “maintenance” to shadow and conceal one of the things that is most likely to bring true happiness and satisfaction… making something.

Three Kinds Of Energy – Physical, Mental, And Emotional

Emotional energy is the fire inside of you… your drive, your motivation, your passion.  When your emotional energy is high you feel satisfied, maybe even happy… like you can handle anything.  When it is low, you feel stressed, drained, depressed, and overwhelmed.

Emotional energy is different than the other two kinds of energy, physical and mental.  Emotional energy isn’t used directly… it’s consumed or produced as a result of using physical and mental energy, both of which are used directly, and can be used either actively or passively.

• Physical EnergyPhysical energy is the energy that you use to physically do things.  That can be anything from simply being awake to running a marathon.
• Mental Energy
  
  Mental energy is a little less clear cut, but it is what you use to process things mentally.  It is what you use to figure out solutions to problems, learn new things, and any other sort of work that is not directly physical.

Active use of energy is when you are actually focused on output of that energy in order to yield a desired result, whether mental or physical.  Passive use of energy is more like a leak… energy drains away, but there is no real desired result.  Active use of energy yields more emotional energy than you started with, particularly if you achieve your desired result, while passive use of energy ends with less emotional energy than the starting point.

How Using Mental And Physical Energy Affects Your Emotional Energy

There are basically three different “modes” of directly using energy:  consumption, maintenance, and creation.  Each one tends to have a certain profile of physical and mental energy use, active or passive, and therefore affects your emotional energy differently.

• Consumption Consumption is input… when you watch television, or eat, or read the news, you are using energy in the consumption mode.  You are accepting things inward, which uses mostly passive mental energy and mostly passive physical energy.  This passive use has a negative effect on your emotional energy, which in turn has a negative effect on your total limit of physical and mental energy.The drain on emotional energy is directly related to the amount of consumption.  An easy example of this is the difference you feel after eating (consuming) a large meal, versus a light meal… the more you eat, the more “drained” you feel.  This can lead to a particularly vicious circle, too, as many people turn to eating to deal with the feelings that result from low emotional energy, causing an even greater drain, leading to more eating.Life in the developed world today tends to center more and more around consumption, particularly the digital kind, whether it’s news (either traditional or Facebook “news”), entertainment, or something else.   There is a corresponding growing drain on emotional energy, leaving people less and less happy.

  Consumption can turn into an act of creation  if it is done with a specific goal… that may be a chef coming up with a new dish while eating something, a sports player watching television to learn the upcoming opponents tactics and strategy (and use this to come up with a strategy to beat them), or anything else where something comes out of it, rather than just consumption.

• MaintenanceMaintenance is the middle ground between input and output, usually involving a little of each.  Maintenance includes things like exercising to maintain your health (exercising to lose weight or build muscle CAN be creative), sleeping for a normal six to eight hours, or, for someone like me, fixing bugs in programming.  There are a ton of different things that can be maintenance, depending on what you do… if it falls between consuming and creating, it’s maintenance.Maintenance generally uses passive energy of one form, and active of the other.  Exercising to maintain health, for example, uses active physical energy, but passive mental energy.  Fixing bugs uses active mental energy, but passive physical energy.The imbalance of active and passive energy basically cancels out the impact on your emotional energy, but still uses up some of the limited amount of physical and mental energy that you have, meaning that you won’t get ahead.

  Like consumption, maintenance can  become an act of creation when done with a specific goal… reaching a goal in exercising, for instance (losing 10 pounds, increasing the weight you can lift by 20 pounds, etc.) or fixing a bug that is actually keeping things from moving ahead.

• CreationCreation is all about output.  It always uses active mental energy (otherwise it’s maintenance), and nearly certainly uses active mental energy… look at someone when they are making something, and you can see the focus in their body.Creation can be nearly anything… and something can be consumption or maintenance for one person, and creation for someone else (see the chef example above, for instance).  Creation generates emotional energy, and the more closely it aligns with what you love to do, the more energy it creates.For me, for example, creating something out of wood or creating a new program generates a lot of emotional energy.  Creating a new page on an existing web site doesn’t produce the same amount of energy, nor does creating an article produce as much energy as creating a story (I’m still waiting on creating a book… I have to find more free time to finish it).

  Creation can also become maintenance, if you do the same creation over and over, like adding the adding of a page to a website that I mentioned earlier.  When this happens, the act loses its ability to generate emotional energy.

The Joy Of Making Things

The amount of maintenance in the world is not going down, while the amount of consumption is going up.  That leaves less and less time and energy for creating.  The process is so gradual, though, that it’s very hard to notice, even for people who are more self aware than the general population.

As you spend more and more time and energy consuming and maintaining things, your emotional energy keeps dropping further and further.  This has a double impact, because not only do you feel worse, but your level of emotional energy is directly related to what sort of activities you look for, with low emotional energy focusing you on consumption, draining yet more of your energy.

This reminds me of a quote from the Bible:  ”For everyone who has will be given more, and he will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him.”

There are two ways that you can turn this around… you can reduce your consumption, and you can increase your creation.  While either one by itself will certainly have an effect, when you do both the effect is not just added, it is multiplied.

And then you will rediscover the joy of making things.