Art doesn’t have to be grand or grueling.

It’s Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling—and a banana duct-taped to a wall.

It’s anything we choose to call art.

But maybe the better question isn’t what art is, but how we make it—especially in a world that makes it hard to try.

We live in a culture that glorifies hustle. If you’re not monetizing every moment—taking gigs, building your brand—you’re falling behind. In that world, art feels like a luxury.

I used to resent this cultural blitz—not just the mindset, but the way it shows up in real life. Working on art full time indeed has an opportunity cost, and for many people it's a luxury career.

Yes, we can commercialize art, we can take wedding gigs -- but we artists (musicians anyway) have a term for this: jobbing. That's not the art we got into the game for.

Here's the problem: we all have to make bread, and most of the time our art doesn't. So how do we make time for our art?

For years I fantasized about the day when I could spend all my waking hours practicing and writing music. If only I had my days free, then I could be the artist I've always dreamed of.

Years later, I came to understand that dream might never come true. And if it does, it could be well into my old age.

Then one day, it hit me: I didn’t need more time. I just needed to stop waiting for the “perfect time.” I stopped treating art like a reward and started treating it like a daily necessity—like breath or movement.

So my perspective shifted: perhaps making art and making money could still harmonize in some way. Maybe time and energy limits weren’t a burden—but a creative restraint. Maybe I could still make art, even without the luxury of endless hours.

I began to ask myself: how can I make art at every moment? How can I take the mundane and turn it into art? How can my life itself be its own art?

This very blog was the first step. I devoted myself to writing every day -- for at least 5 minutes, and I had permission to write poorly. After the momentum of reaching nearly 340 posts, I began to think of other ways I could create.

I've started collecting random footage of my life -- jumping rope, playing music, drinking coffee, or writing. Mundane b-roll of my life.

As I collected and wanted to share, I worked in video editors. Hated the experience -- so much work to get a video stitched together, so little time.

While this is probably worth a post in itself, I created a tool for myself to get around all that work. I wrote a script that would collect these b-roll videos, stitch them together, and overlay my narration of blog posts on top alongside captions.

Now I can create videos within seconds, which lets me focus less on editing and more on collecting. As the video collection grows, it becomes a set of vignettes of my life. The mundane moments, the daily thoughts, the exercise.

What excites me most: I’m actually paying attention. Every day feels like a chance to collect something small and meaningful. The barrier to creating art just went way down, while still staying mine (instead of outsourcing it to an LLM). It’s helped me stay present—and given me a mission: a fun little project to collect cool things I see, without turning it into a chore.

And I am so excited to see how this grows. The more footage I collect, the more interesting the videos become. I can be reminded of random moments while sharing my thoughts online with others. I can make art every single day, contributing to this larger corpus that will become more and more beautiful and interesting over time.

Art can be incremental. Day by day. We can turn every moment into art.

Maybe the point isn’t to escape the chaos, but to shape it into something meaningful—one little piece at a time.