Brian Eno’s Advice for Those Who Want to Do Their Best Creative Work: Don’t Get a Job

“Once upon a time, artists had jobs,” writes Katy Wald­man in a recent New York Times Mag­a­zine piece. “Think of T.S. Eliot, con­jur­ing ‘The Waste Land’ (1922) by night and over­see­ing for­eign accounts at Lloyds Bank dur­ing the day, or Wal­lace Stevens, scrib­bling lines of poet­ry on his two-mile walk to work, then hand­ing them over to his sec­re­tary to tran­scribe at the insur­ance agency where he super­vised real estate claims.” Or Willem de Koon­ing paint­ing signs, James Dick­ey writ­ing slo­gans for Coca-Cola, William Car­los Williams writ­ing pre­scrip­tions, Philip Glass installing dish­wash­ers – the list goes on.

Wald­man sug­gests that we con­sid­er day jobs not just bill-pay­ing grinds but deliv­ery sys­tems for “the same replen­ish­ing min­istries as sleep or a long run: reliev­ing cre­ative angst, restor­ing the artist to her body and to the tex­ture of imme­di­ate expe­ri­ence.” Bri­an Eno thinks dif­fer­ent­ly. “I often get asked to come and talk at art schools,” he says in the clip above, “and I rarely get asked back, because the first thing I always say is, ‘I’m here to per­suade you not to have a job.’ ”

That does­n’t mean, he empha­sizes, that you should “try not to do any­thing. It means try to leave your­self in a posi­tion that you do the things you want to do with your time, and where you take max­i­mum advan­tage of what­ev­er your pos­si­bil­i­ties are.”

Eas­i­er said than done, of course, which is why Eno wants to “work to a future where every­body is in a posi­tion to do that,” enact­ing some form of uni­ver­sal basic income, the gen­er­al idea of which holds that soci­ety will func­tion bet­ter if it guar­an­tees all its mem­bers a cer­tain stan­dard of liv­ing regard­less of employ­ment sta­tus. But if that stan­dard ris­es too high, might it run the risk of soft­en­ing the rig­ors and loos­en­ing the lim­i­ta­tions need­ed to encour­age true cre­ativ­i­ty? Musi­cian Daniel Lanois, who has worked with Eno on the pro­duc­tion of sev­er­al U2 albums as well as ambi­ent music projects, describes learn­ing that les­son from his col­lab­o­ra­tor in the Louisiana Chan­nel video just above.

“At the peak of my son­ic exper­i­men­ta­tions with Bri­an Eno, we only ever used four box­es,” says Lanois. “That’s when we start­ed get­ting these real­ly beau­ti­ful tex­tures and human-like sounds from machines. We got to be experts at those few tools.” The lim­i­ta­tions under which they worked in the stu­dio may not have fol­lowed from any par­tic­u­lar phi­los­o­phy, but the actu­al expe­ri­ence taught them how a rich­er artis­tic result can arise, para­dox­i­cal­ly, from more strait­ened cir­cum­stances. Since the begin­ning of art, its prac­ti­tion­ers have always had to find inno­v­a­tive ways around obsta­cles, whether those obsta­cles have to do with tech­nol­o­gy, sides, time, mon­ey, or any­thing else besides. As Lanois reas­sur­ing­ly puts it, “I can imag­ine that if you have lim­i­ta­tion, even finan­cial lim­i­ta­tion, that might be okay, man.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

William Faulkn­er Resigns From His Post Office Job With a Spec­tac­u­lar Let­ter (1924)

Charles Bukows­ki Rails Against 9‑to‑5 Jobs in a Bru­tal­ly Hon­est Let­ter (1986)

Bri­an Eno Explains the Loss of Human­i­ty in Mod­ern Music

The Genius of Bri­an Eno On Dis­play in 80 Minute Q&A: Talks Art, iPad Apps, ABBA, & MoreBri­an Eno on Why Do We Make Art & What’s It Good For?: Down­load His 2015 John Peel Lec­ture

Bri­an Eno Lists 20 Books for Rebuild­ing Civ­i­liza­tion & 59 Books For Build­ing Your Intel­lec­tu­al World

The Employ­ment: A Prize-Win­ning Ani­ma­tion About Why We’re So Dis­en­chant­ed with Work Today

Hear Alan Watts’s 1960s Pre­dic­tion That Automa­tion Will Neces­si­tate a Uni­ver­sal Basic Income

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.