Why making low-quality, unmarketable trash is the ultimate 2026 flex for your sanity.
You just spent four hours knitting a scarf that looks like a neon spaghetti disaster.
Honestly, it is absolute trash and the vibes are completely rancid, but I am obsessed with it for you. We are living in an era where everyone is trying to optimize their hobbies into a secondary income stream or a high-production video for the feed. It is exhausting. You are allowed to possess zero talent for your favorite pastime. In fact, in the year 2026, making something that has zero market value is the ultimate way to ghost the grind and reclaim your own brain from the algorithm-bait lifestyle.
Living in Northern Ontario means we already deal with enough isolation and starving artist tropes to last a lifetime. There is this subtle, annoying pressure to be the one who makes it out or puts our rural town on the map with some polished, professional masterpiece. But why? Your dignity isn’t found in a gallery contract or a viral post. It is found in the dirt under your fingernails and the sheer absurdity of spending your Saturday making a cursed collage out of old grocery flyers just because you felt like it.
We need to lean into play theory because our nervous systems are pixel-fried. Remember when you were seven and you drew a dog that looked like a baked potato with legs? You weren’t worried about your personal brand or whether the dog was on-model for your portfolio. You were just existing. Reclaiming that baked potato energy is how we survive the long winters without losing our minds to toxic productivity. Make the bad art. Paint the wall a color that makes your landlord cry. Write a poem that is just a list of things you ate today.
The North is full of people trying to be tough and resilient, but true resilience is being kind enough to yourself to fail on purpose. When you stop fearing the ugly result, the act of creating becomes a sandbox instead of a performance. You aren’t a content factory. You are a human being with a pulse and a weird sense of humor who deserves to take up space without being useful to a corporation. Efficiency is for the AI; messiness is for us.
So, keep that lumpy scarf and wear it to the grocery store like the main character of a very confusing indie movie. When people ask what it is, tell them it is a monument to your refusal to be productive. We are building a healthy arts sector here by prioritizing our collective sanity over our digital portfolios. Go ahead and glitch the system by being spectacularly, unapologetically bad at something you love today.
Thoughts on art and the state of the world!
These fragments trace the rhizomatic flow of thought through art, life, and place — scattered impressions from studio corners, fleeting ideas scrawled in notebooks, whispered exchanges at galleries, and observations picked up on quiet northern roads. Some fragments linger on technique, intuition, and doubt; others drift through community, culture, and the subtle poetry of everyday moments. They offer no conclusions, only openings, inviting readers to follow connections wherever they emerge.
Wandering laterally between process, memory, and environment, these pieces map associations across creativity, identity, and belonging. They intersect with humor, failure, resilience, and collaboration, and trace the ways artistic thinking seeps into gardens, small-town rhythms, friendships, and civic life across Manitoba and Northwestern Ontario — and further afield. Each thought functions as a node, part of a living network of reflection, expanding and branching with possibility.
Discover more associative fragments, conceptual wanderings, and artful reflections on our thoughts page.
