The Algorithm is Not Your Creative Director
the feeds are drowning your mind
POPULAR NEWS ‼️
As of this week, Popular is officially twice‑weekly: free letters every Friday, Popular Studio every Wednesday.
Popular Studio is the hands‑on side of this—short exercises, new archives, and deep dives into sustainable creative habits. A weekly assignment for your DIY creative education (doable between meetings or in bed). The first Popular Studio went out on April 1.
You can learn more on the about page, or join for $7/month or $70/year.
Write it off as professional education—or get your company to cover it
at $150/year. 🫢
Overwhelmed, Not Uninspired
I don’t feel uninspired. I feel flooded. Flooded with images, references, tabs, feeds, and the strange pressure of seeing what everyone else is seeing at the exact same time.
We have more material than ever. That’s not the problem. The problem is that so much of it is delivered through the same channels, in the same order, with the same logic underneath it. Open Pinterest and you can feel your brain getting pushed toward a consensus. Open Instagram and the app starts telling you who it thinks you are. Spend enough time there and it gets harder to tell what you actually like apart from what keeps getting served to you.
When Getting Ideas Took Effort
Before everything lived inside the phone, you had to go somewhere. You had to walk to the library, wander a bookstore, pull a book off your own shelf, photocopy something, tear something out, print something, pin something up. It took more effort, but that effort was part of the process. You weren’t just receiving images. You were choosing them.
That’s still the practice I come back to now. Not because I’m anti-internet — I’m not — but because I don’t want the algorithm to become my creative director. I want to find things through my own interests, my own obsessions, my own strange chains of association. One image leads to a book, the book leads to a designer, the designer leads to an old advertisement, the advertisement leads to some forgotten corner of visual culture I wouldn’t have found if I stayed inside the feed.
I talk about this process in the first edition of Popular Studio:
Collecting vs. Consuming
Even online, I think there’s a difference between collecting and consuming. If I see something that really hits me, I try to stop there. Screenshot it. Write down why I saved it. Drop it into Notion. Print it later. Let it become a prompt instead of just another image passing by.
The smallest interruption can turn passive looking into actual material. You start building a trail of things you chose, not just things that were recommended to you. That trail becomes its own kind of archive, and that archive is where your real ideas start to show up.
Leaving the Feed, Literally
And when everything starts feeling stale or same-y, I usually don’t need more input. I need to leave the desk. A walk is still one of the only things that reliably clears space in my brain. No podcast, no music, no texting while walking. Just moving long enough for my thoughts to get a little looser and less managed.
I don’t think we need more inspiration. I think we need better ways of finding our way back to what is actually interesting to us. More wandering. More slowness. More private taste.
A Small Assignment For You
This week: pull one book off your shelf, screenshot/save one image worth returning to, and take one walk without your phone.
OR — literally it’s just this easy:
I kept up an Instagram feed for 3 years called The Attention Habit, where I named a single thing at the beginning of a month (eg: Yellow / Corners / stacked) and looked for examples of this item to record every day. Such a great way to 'tune' your eye to things overlooked, and interesting how often the practice went from concrete to abstract during the course of the month. I dropped the practice due to work pressure in 2025, but will return. Soon!
https://www.instagram.com/theattentionhabit