Lynch is referring to a mental load. It’s about reducing the amount of decisions that keep you from doing the things you that you want to do.

The secret of his movies is in his hair.

the thing with van gogh is that he didn't make his art becuase of his suffering, he made it in spite of his suffering

I think suffering can inform your content or subject matter, but I personally need order and contentment (a certain level of happiness) to be creative and want to produce "art".

Maybe the disturbed visions that fueled his art were just mercury poisoning.

I think part of what Lynch was talking about was the idea of simplifying basic survival needs in order to give yourself mental room for creativity. I can relate to that as someone with ADHD and autism, things like figuring out what to eat and such takes up so much mental real estate. Mental energy per day is a finite resource, and so it makes sense to reserve mental energy where you can for the things you actually wanna spend most of it on. Like sure, I have to eat thrice daily, but that should be made as simple as possible so I can move on and focus more time and energy on art.

“I like things to be orderly,” Lynch told a reporter in 1990. “For seven years I ate at Bob’s Big Boy. I would go at 2:30, after the lunch rush. I ate a chocolate shake and four, five, six, seven cups of coffee - with lots of sugar. And there’s lots of sugar in that chocolate shake. It’s a thick shake. In a silver goblet. I would get a rush from all this sugar, and I would get so many ideas! I would write them on these napkins. It was like I had a desk with paper. “

The overall thesis of this video is excellent, but I wish to elaborate on what David Lynch said of routine at the beginning of the video since I don't think it was explained here.


What Lynch tried to communicate there is that routine frees your higher functions from trivial and demanding decision making that is necessary to maintain yourself. It provides a permanent answer to the obnoxious question of "what should I eat today?".


Routine brings us to do these tedious daily tasks mechanically and without thinking, this freeing our higher faculties for creative and intellectual pursuits.

This is rare media. It challenges popular conceptions, asks us to reconsider ourselves, and suggests the avoidance of egoist indulgence. It's the opposite of the advertising thesis of "validate the audience's behavior". I just dropped a lot of bad habits while rebuilding myself after shutting down a project I've worked on for years and was the creative "mastermind" of. I'm very lucky to have stumbled onto this video. I'm going to log off and get back to work now. Thank you Lofi Cinema.

I believe art is the process of digesting human experiences. Meaningful art, the stuff that really moves us, comes from "realness". Only artists who are connected to their heart and stare at BOTH our darkness and light can produce work like that. It's not about whether they've suffered personally, it comes from their raw emotional capacity to see the best and worst of humanity with clarity. They are saying, "this made me feel this way, do you feel it too?".

I am an artist and I have had 50 years of suffering - and I can safely report my artwork has suffered because of it!

"The trouble is that we have a bad habit of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain." Ursula Le Guin

People confuse order/discipline with limitations. And uncontrolled impulsivity with freedom. When you control yourself and your environment, you now have the freedom to do whatever you want without your urges, impulses, negative desires, outside forces getting in the way and greatly distracting you and pulling you away from your art. TAKE all the chaos and unhappiness, remember them and then go to a quiet place that you can concoct something with those things. Or make art while in chaos because we all cannot wait for perfect/privileged circumstances to make great things. Don't be so fragile.

Here’s a little of my life story. I’ve always been creative. As a kid I was great writing creative stories. I also faced a ton of trauma as a kid. I’ve been diagnosed with a dissociative disorder. When I was 18 I started self medicating with substances and realized I was more creative than I thought. At 22 I made my best art and i was determined to pursue a creative profession. I even purposefully suffered more thinking it’d make me more creative because I heard that all the greatest artists suffer. Turned out to stunt my creativity big time. But alas all those years I persisted in my creations, making song attempts and writing attempts. All these years suffering mightily abusing psychedelics which caused me psychosis at some points I had no business taking any more!  Then at 35 (this year) I got sober and started meditating every day. My life is no longer insufferable in any way. I have absolutely zero depression and radiant mental health compared to the past when I was suffering. I’m going through a phase of reading and knowledge expansion as well as a focus on exercising and health, 108 days sober today, I just wanna focus on my mind and getting back to baseline after 17 years of abusing drugs. But when I do write a song or create something it’s some of the best writing I’ve ever done. I’m going through this period of mind expansion and exploration emphasis right now, but I know when I switch back into creative mode and write another book or make more songs it’ll be the best it’s ever been. Hope I didn’t bore you with my personal story but I think it relates to the video. 😂😂

Charles Bukowski has a line where he says something like “I don’t understand why they say artists have to suffer. In my experience suffering always just impeded the art.”

There's a famous short film called "David Lynch Cooks Quinoa." It's about 25 minutes long. The first seven or so minutes show Lynch describing, in meticulous detail, precisely how he cooks his nightly dinner of quinoa and broccoli. Lynch knew that every night, he'd have an eight-minute window in between adding the broccoli to his boiling pot and dinner being ready. In the short, while his food is cooking, he fills that eight minutes telling a vividly detailed story about a trip he took to Greece in 1965. The details are pure Lynch, and the movie practically starts playing in your head while he's talking. Then at the end of eight minutes, dinner's ready and he eats it.

To me, the point was clear: having rigid structure in your daily routine gives you time and mental bandwidth to dream, imagine, and be creative. Lynch wouldn't have had time to dream if he'd made something different every night, because he'd have  to pay attention to what he was doing and couldn't go on autopilot mode. Instead, he did the same thing in the same way, which allowed him time to dream for eight minutes every night. I wonder how many ideas he came up with in those eight minute windows.

The thing that's always left out of this conversation is that there's a world of difference between someone for whom the choice is between being a tortured artist or a non-tortured artist choosing to try and be a tortured artist, and someone for whom the choice is between being a tortured artist and being a tortured non-artist (e.g. because of horrendous incurable illness or living in a warzone) choosing to try and be a tortured artist.

I wouldnt say that suffering is needed for art, but restriction.
Restriction forces to think outside the box and find CREATIVE solutions. Many movies that got produced on a shoestring budget were forced to think creatively.
And it shows.
Variety kills creativity.
Its the same with having all the colors in the world and trying to paint - its a pain in the neck.
My best pictures were painted with a total of 10 colors and turned out to be much more captivating.
Also fasting is fascinating when it comes to creativity.
I once had a writing sprint of almost three days and didnt eat anything.
I had laser focus, no hunger, no fatigue, just pure creative outpour.
I guess suffering can fuel creativity as a motivation to start. To transform certain themes or feelings and turn it into something better.
But I dont think that its required to be creative.

I learn the most about myself through my pain and suffering, and I always make art about my subjective experience.. but I think honesty is the hard thing that you have to impose to make beautiful works of art, not suffering. facing the truth, not intentionally creating a difficult truth to face.

this is super healing for me.
the key I am taking away from this is that I do not have to CREATE my own chaos and suffering and live in it to produce art.


i actually get to live in stability and resonance where I'm in a far better place to delve into my emotional state
and create from my feelings and rawness
(and to be able to observe suffering and chaos in the world without making myself a slave to it.)