How to do things for their own sake?

I do things because I like being known to have done them or to be seen doing them.

This blog gets less than a visitor a day. No one knows it exists. For a period, I considered promoting it by tweeting post links out to the world. I even tweeted one recent general purpose post which got retweeted and liked. Very few people visited my blog as a result but it had the side effect of pushing my average daily visitor count closer to 1 😳!

Should the audience define the worth of art? (Minor segue - my blog is my art. I put a piece of me into its existence. It is an extension of me. It's art. By me.)

For 38 years, until today, I used to think "yes". As a social animal, art for its own sake seemed oxymoronic.

Lately, something has been stirring inside me. It feels stressful to chase an uninterested audience. The heart rebels when, every day like the day before, no one knocks on my door.

So, the titular question remains - How to do things for their own sake?

There are glimmers of hope. I read a recent post on creativity which had the following exercise.

1. Find a quiet spot.
2. Imagine a perfectly red apple.
3. Imagine it floating in space unattached to the ground or to the sky.
4. This is your apple.
5. Add yellow streaks of ripeness to your red apple.
6. Now change it to a color no apple has ever been. Make it a fiery orange or a regal purple, if you want. It's your apple.
7. Add texture to the apple.
8. Give it a finish.
9. This is your apple. There are many billions of apples in the world but this apple of yours no one else has.

This exercise helped me make a basic purple apple, smooth and unremarkable minus the unexpected purple color. A day later, I can still see the purple apple in my mind's eye. I made it and it's mine. No one, except now you, the reader, knows it exists. Well, it doesn't exist but it seems quite real to me.

I take pleasure in the existence of the purple apple. It made me see my blog as my other purple apple. It made me see myself as a purple apple.

Even if no one knows of the blog, no one knows of me, we both exist in this world. There are a million blogs and a billion people but we exist too and our existence is its reward.

So, the answer to the titular question is to accept your place in existence. It took me a few minutes spent one afternoon imagining a purple apple to feel self-realized and self-corporal. I hope you find an activity which makes you feel self-real also.