My 12 Favorite Problems...This Year
I use physicist Richard Feynman's problem-solving method to tackle my biggest questions about the future of the arts
“You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say, ‘How did he do it? He must be a genius!’” — Richard Feynman
If you don’t know who Richard Feynman is, you need to look the guy up as soon as you finish reading this article because my summary isn’t going to do more than scratch the surface of his genius. He was — in no particular order — a physicist who worked on the first nuclear bomb, introduced the concept of nanotechnology, translated Mayan hieroglyphics, figured out the origin of the NASA Challenger shuttle disaster, and, in 1965, received a joint Nobel Prize in Physics for “fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics with deep-ploughing consequences for the physics of elementary particles.” Part of the reason for his intellectual prowess was his “Twelve Favorite Problems” – a problem-solving algorithm that has since become popularized and recycled by any number of brilliant thinkers and writers. Ted Gioia published a fantastic one two years ago. I’m going to follow in his footsteps here at Substack today.
So, here’s how this works. By focusing on a small number of important questions – questions you find important – significant progress can be made in your field. That’s the theory, at least. On the other hand, too many problems overwhelm us, scatter our attention, and prevent us from making the smaller breakthroughs that blow those much-bigger problems wide open.
Again, these questions aren’t intended to only be the most consequential questions in your field of work/study – really, life. They’re meant to be the ones that you find most compelling and, if answered, could lead to those bigger revelations.
Below, you will find my “twelve favorite problems”…this year. They’re a constant work in progress, of course, just like life. I’ve answered many in the past, or at least answered them to my satisfaction. Others have evolved with the times. Still others have become obsolete because my field – the arts – has changed so much the questions are no longer relevant.
I’d love to hear your thoughts about what I’m working on, but also some of your own “favorite problems” at the moment. Be sure to jump into the comments with both!
1. If AI is going to “democratize” art, drowning the internet with slop and soulless simulacra of the human experience, how can real art not just survive but thrive and continue to inspire people in the way their souls require?
Members of the arts community tell themselves a lot of reassuring things about the future of art, but I often worry that’s a mask hiding a deeper fear that the vast majority of people lack the motivation to prioritize real art over fake art. That fear isn’t hyperbolic, I think, because there is no way of knowing what percentage of humanity will prefer the Matrix to something authentic. Thus, it seems necessary to begin discussing and imagining new, more real-world ways for people to experience art and new ideas. If “going global via the digital” was the story of the first 25 years of the 21st century, could “going local, going real” be the story of the next 25 years?
2. How do we challenge and change the perception that art and artists aren’t vital to our world and, further, see that they’re financially supported as necessary social resources the same way teachers, law enforcement, and scientists are?
I live in Australia, which heavily invests in the public’s ability to create and interact with art. There are similar cultural resources in many other countries. There’s basically no access to it in the United States, which means capital alone controls what kind of stories are told and who tells them. But all this said, even in most countries that prioritize the arts in some way or another, the artist is not seen as a necessary part of society – even though I would argue they are. They’re directly responsible for deciphering our culture for us, for resisting the powerful, for inspiring us to demand more from ourselves and the world around us. Why shouldn’t they be funded as robustly as other vital social roles are?
3. How can Hollywood’s stranglehold on cinematic creativity and success be broken in the United States and replaced by new, more democratic distribution models that don’t only involve video sharing platforms like YouTube?
Between media company consolidation and streaming’s assault on traditional film distribution, Hollywood increasingly seems like a problematic route for emerging filmmakers or filmmakers interested in more “art house” fare to both get their work produced and distributed. This impacts what kind of stories are being told. Another way to put this is, capital – which seeks only to protect itself in the current Hollywood ecosystem – dictates what kind of stories are being told. Another way to put this is, the rich and powerful alone are more inclined to produce propaganda than art.
Be sure to follow producer Ted Hope for more a lot more on this subject.
4. Can art be a form of direct action, or is that a moral cop-out that safeguards the artist from putting themselves at physical risk?
The definition of direction action, as borrowed from Wikipedia: Direct action is a form of activism in which participants use economic power or political power to achieve their goals. The aim of direct action is to either obstruct a certain practice such as a government’s laws or actions or to draw attention to and create a dialogue in order to solve perceived problems.
Direct action can take various forms of immediate resistance – violent and non-violent. Examples include political violence and arson on one hand and civil disobedience and sit-ins on the other. But art exists in a nebulous place here, as direct action is disruptive. It’s now. It’s standing in the way of some kind of tyranny and saying, “Not today, asshole.” Are artists, such as myself, who prioritize cultural resistance to existential threats necessary and valuable or is that some kind of equivocation? If we are, how can we do more as global culture becomes further strained in the 21st century?
5. Can beauty and aesthetic be a form of social resistance in a world governed by mass production?
The world is an increasingly ugly place. And I don’t just mean spiritually, politically, or the like. I don’t mean the ghoulish faces that populate Mar-A-Lago like some sort of science-fiction alien freak show either. I’m talking about a decades-long slide away from beauty for the sake of beauty toward a beige society that looks like it was ordered from a catalogue and arrived in flat packs. From pre-fab suburbs, to coffee shops that look the same wherever you go in the world, to the flattened “design” of our automobiles. Fuck, even the White House now qualifies, which has been turned into a parody of Las Vegas’s own parody of wealth. Meanwhile, we all travel to cities still drowning in history and wonder why every feature of them designed and erected before the 1950s feels timeless. It’s impossible not to feel like every attempt to reject this dependence on the homogenization of everything – in favor of the unique, the curated, the real – is a tiny act of rebellion.
6. Does anything I create matter in this quickly decaying world and, if not nearly as much as I want it to, shouldn’t I be spending more time with my family and “living”?
It’s a simple question for me as an artist…and yet I’m nowhere close to answering it. As I struggle with it, I grow older and closer to the day I start talking about all that time I didn’t spend doing what mattered most…whichever one that is. I guess I’ll know the answer for sure then.
7. If one’s only drive in life is to create art but market realities limit how they can do that, is it selling out to create within available options (and what is “selling out” anyway)?
Every industry that has paid me to create art for it has inevitably also told me some version of, “Well, if you want to pay your bills, you should just write X instead.” For example, if you’re a versatile author, there is a very good chance some agent, editor, or so on has advised you to write romantasy in the past year or two. “It’s the only thing that’s really selling.” Once upon a time, I was told “big action feature scripts” were all that was selling in Hollywood and TV was a waste of my time. A few years later, it wasn’t just that big action films based on original ideas were dead, all features were now a waste of time and TV was my only chance to maintain my income. These days, Hollywood is yet again telling us big commercial features scripts are the hottest commodity and TV is impossible – just read my friend Franklin Leonard’s recent essay that touches on this. Every market in every country has its own variations of what I’m describing.
But through all these permutations of my career, the ongoing debate remains: what is “selling out”? Because if the only way to both be a writer and pay your bills is to make concessions to market forces, then it seems inevitable that all of us except an elite handful will never have to “sell out”.
