Consumer
to Creator
You were never hungry but you were still being fed…
A four-week programme for anyone who's noticed they take in far more than they make, and would quite like that the other way round.
Four Weeks. One hour each. One small experiment a week. Created to turn the tables on wasted time and give you your spark back, ready for the winter nights.
Let's start with something nobody says out loud but I know everyone is struggling with, to some level, right now
You've got tabs open you're never going to read.
There's something in your basket you don't need. There's a course you bought and didn't finish, and a book on top of it, and another book on top of that. You know your screen time number and you'd rather not say it out loud. Or you’ve stopped looking, because you feel embarrassed. And somewhere in the last week you stood in your kitchen at eleven at night eating something you didn't actually choose.
And underneath all of it, the same aching feeling. Full, and not remotely nourished.
You've probably decided this is a discipline problem. Most people do. So you've tried the app that locks your phone, and the no-spend month, and the detox, and each time it worked for about nine days and then stopped.
Then you started to blame willpower. Guess what? It’s not willpower either…
You’ve not go low willpower or discipline. You're outnumbered.
For almost all of human history, the limit on how much you consumed was how much there was. We literally couldn’t consume more than we could take on. It was impossible.
Then, over the last century or so, that flipped and the wanting itself became the product everyone started selling. Not the thing being sold anymore, like it used to be. The appetite for it. This is where marketing comes in.
This has dates. It has names, and paperwork, and receipts, and minutes of meetings, billions of pounds in research, and psychologists, lots of them. In the 1920s a group of lightbulb manufacturers agreed to engineer bulb life downward, and got fined for making bulbs that lasted too long. In the 1970s a psychophysicist was paid to find the exact formulation at which people stop getting bored of a food, because getting bored and stopping was identified as the obstacle to selling more food… In 2006 somebody invented infinite scroll, and now says he regrets it.
None of that is a conspiracy theory. It's documented industrial history. It is the real world you currently live in.
Then you spend the majority of your day beating yourself up for not having willpower or dedication, whilst all the time, the immoral techniques used on you every single moment of the day, don’t get noticed. Brushed under the rug. It’s YOUR fault, not theirs, REALLY!?
When you find yourself forty minutes into something you don't remember starting: that isn't a personality flaw. That's a product working exactly as designed. Tested on millions of people, refined against your precise response, funded far past anything a single person can out-discipline.
You cannot out-discipline an environment. Nobody can. That's not weakness, it's arithmetic.
But you can learn to see one. And something shifts the moment you do.
The bit that surprised me
Here's what I didn't expect when I started pulling this thread and going down this rabbit hole. Hello, 1 line!
Dopamine, the chemical we’re mostly talking about here, isn't the happy chemical. It's the wanting chemical… a completely separate system from the one that does liking and satisfaction. Which explains something you already know in your body: the next video is always more interesting than the one you just watched, and the thing you saved up for feels less important the moment you get it in your hands.
The arrival, that feeling of completeness, was NEVER designed to happen. Why? So you keep wanting more.
And that means just consuming less won't fix the current loop you’re in. Actual diets are a good example of why this just doesn’t work. Consuming less is a diet, and diets fail, because you're asking a system to want nothing while leaving the wanting completely unfed.
So we're not going to do less… We're going to do different.
The medicine for consumerism is creation
Not as a nice idea. For four specific reasons.
It runs on effort, not ease… so it doesn't need escalating doses to keep working.
It makes time thick instead of thin. Two hours of scrolling disappears. Two hours of making leaves a mark.
You'll value what you made past all reason. There's a well-documented effect where people rate things they assembled themselves far above their objective worth. It’s called the IKEA effect.
And this is the one that matters most: making is the only thing on the list that cannot be done to you. Everything else in your basket can be delivered. Not this. It requires you, specifically, and it doesn't happen without you.
That's not a small amount of power. That makes YOU powerful. You just haven't been realising that the magic lies at your fingertips…
What actually happens
Four weeks. One hour. Live, online, small group.
Week One: Force Fed Nation
We look at what you already consume. Not a lecture… a reckoning, in your own hands, with your own numbers. Then the metaphor that gives the week its name, which I'll warn you now is confronting: the foie gras goose isn't hungry. It's being fed. And that force fed goose eventually becomes the product that’s profited from…
This week is about one question: where in your week are you the goose?
Week Two: Machine Fed
This is where the shame comes off. The hundred-year history, the neuroscience, and the three costs of overconsumption - what this does to your body, your mind and the world you live in. Then the part that makes it personal: the Nine Appetites. Nobody over-consumes generally. Everyone over-consumes somewhere specific, and for some reason, and the somewhere has a label. You'll find yours in about ninety seconds, and you won't be able to unsee it once you’ve been confronted with it.
Week Three: The Dressing-Up Box
You're not going to be asked to become a creative person. That's far too big an ask and it invites the argument you always win when you instantly clap back at me and tell me “but I’m not creative!”. So instead, you'll borrow somebody… one of sixty-four characters, and make one small thing as them, for seven days, and then give them back to the dressing up box.
Why a costume? Because if it's bad, or you don’t like what you create… it's their bad work. Not yours. That's what makes it powerful.
Week Four: The Making
Everybody reflects on what they made. Then we work out how you specifically did it - when you started, how you worked, your rhythm, where it actually happened - the environment that really supported you… so it's repeatable rather than a nice fortnight you had once.
What you get
- Four live hours, in a small group, online
- One experiment a week. One. Not a workbook, not a module list, not homework you'll feel guilty about
- Which Consumer Are You? the Nine Appetites, with a twelve-day noticing log
- The Dressing-Up Box… all sixty-four characters, and your commission sheet
- The recordings, if you can't make one live
- Something you made. Which is, in the end, the actual deliverable
Honestly, who it's not for
If you want a productivity system, this isn't it. If you want to be told you're addicted, I'm not going to do that. And if you're hoping for four hours of interesting information you can take away and think about, that’s not it either. You'll be asked to make something badly and show it to people, and the whole thing falls over if you don't want to participate and just wanted to well… consume.
It is for you if you've felt that full-and-empty feeling and you're tired of concluding it's your fault. If you used to make things and somewhere along the way stopped. Or if you've never thought of yourself as creative and quietly suspect that might not be the whole story…
The price
£88 early bird until 20th September · £99 after that.
Four live hours, all reflection materials, recordings included.
I've priced it where I have deliberately. This is a programme about not buying things to fix how you feel, and it would be a bit rich to charge you three hundred quid for it. Places limited to keep the container naturally intimate like all my offerings.
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No. Genuinely no, and the programme is built around you not being. The whole point of borrowing a character is that it removes the need to already be someone who makes things.
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No. Everything works from your own noticing, and nobody will be short of anything. If you have one, you'll spot where a couple of things line up — and if you're curious afterwards, that's where the more precise version lives. But it's not a prerequisite and it never will be.
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You'll get the recording. But be honest with yourself about which week — Week Three is where you pick up your character and Week Four is the showing, so those two really want you in the room.
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One poem. One dish you invented instead of followed. One object. One drawing a day. One three-hundred-word thing. Small enough to finish in seven days, by hand where possible. If you're already planning something ambitious, don’t. That’s not the point!
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Yes. That's not me being modest, it's the design. This is a programme about overconsumption — building something that demands five hours a week of your attention would rather undermine the point.
