Choosing creativity as your vocation
Plus: Be sure to get your tickets for our February CreativiTEA workshop
Over the holidays, we were catching up with some folks about the various goings-on in our lives. I’d been talking about some of the creative projects I was proud of in 2025 and the plans I was excited about in 2026. In response, one of the folks strongly implied that it was nice that I could spend my days gloriously carefree just painting and playing.
In essence, it was nice that I had a hobby.
It’s not the first time that I’ve encountered this sort of attitude, usually from folks who have more traditional salaried relationships to work. Certainly, there was a time when labelling my creative activities as a hobby would have generated an internal spike of raw indignation and outrage.
Now, it’s been almost five years since I began my journey as a professional visual artist, and these days I try to brush off this attitude with a measure of grace because I know the life of a creative entrepreneur is a completely alien experience to most people. Frankly, I would be lucky if I got to spend 20% time making art versus 80% time doing all the hustling and administrative work that makes up my days.
Long before that career shift though, I made the decision to choose creativity as my vocation and, in doing so, I found a much more stable platform to relate to making my work.
A healthier creative framework
Using the term Vocation comes from Elizabeth Gilbert’s YouTube video “Hobby, Job, Career, Vocation” in which she describes these creative paths in an incredibly useful way.
In brief:
Hobby - Something you enjoy that doesn’t need to make you money and you could live without if you had to. Examples for me would be trying new cooking recipes and keeping my plants alive.
Job - Something that needs to make you money, but doesn’t matter to you on a deeper level. Example for me was my previous day job as a web developer.
Career - Something that needs to make you money and deeply matters to you as an expression of your creative practice. Examples would be a professional artists, writers, musicians, etc who want their primary income to come from their work.
Vocation - Something that matters deeply to you, but does not need to be your primary source of income. Example is someone whose creativity is essential to their way of being and would make art regardless of whether anyone ever pays for the results.
I think the reason that the Hobby label stings so deeply for some folks is that their creativity feels incredibly essential to them personally while it isn’t perceived by others in the same way.
To be clear, there is absolutely nothing wrong with having a creative hobby. If you have a take-it-or-leave attitude to making things for pleasure, then Hobby is probably the best way to describe what you’re doing.
The dangers of a transactional relationship with creativity
That said, many creatives believe the very best of all pathways is that of Career.
I mean who wouldn’t want to do something that you love, that matters deeply to you and get paid for it. It sounds like the absolute dream scenario.
Unfortunately, if you refer back to my diagram above, Career is that intersection between “Matters Deeply” and “Must Make Money” making it the most stressful of all the options.
Some folks thrive on that kind of stress, while others are absolutely crushed by it—just as I was in my early years as a creative.
The biggest problem I see for new creatives or ones who have struggled with blocks is that the Career pathway encourages self-editing at a time when one should be focused on freedom and discovery. Rather than being open to the imperfect messy nature of the creative process, they’re asking:
What’s going to get me more followers on social media?
What does my audience want to see?
What’s the latest trend in my field?
What are people buying?
Creatives often become frustrated because they wanted to spend their days doing the thing they loved, but end up spending all their time making work that isn’t as personally satisfying to them but pays well.
The secondary seductive trap is that because the Career path promises money, then the time spent on the creative work itself feels more justified in our productivity-minded culture.
The benefits of creativity as vocation
Gilbert often uses spiritual language when describing the creative process, which fits with my image of Vocation as a person who chooses a spiritual or religious calling.
I am not a religious person, but I do think that it’s an apt metaphor for understanding this kind of creative path.
Imagine a time when most folks toiled under backbreaking jobs—farmer, factory worker, manual labourer and so on. Like today, it was a time when society put a strong emphasis on using our time in productive ways.
It was, however, also a time when people set down their tools and put on their best clothes to go to church on Sunday. They found small moments throughout the day to take time to connect with their chosen divine power through ritual or prayer.
Not because it was productive.
Not because it would immediately bring them fame or fortune.
Because it mattered to them on a deeper level as a human being.
What makes relating to creativity as a Vocation so powerful is the recognition that your practice matters deeply to you in the same way that a relationship to divine matters deeply to others.
At the same time, there are no earthly stakes.
You can pray just as devoutly as a beggar or as a rich man.
You can make art using thousands of dollars in supplies or with paint made from coffee grounds.
You can write your novel on a fancy laptop as you luxuriate in a beachside retreat or in brief quiet moments in a notebook after your children go to bed.
The only thing that Vocation requires is the quiet declaration that my creative practice matters to me.
Once you firmly believe that, then your creativity can never be taken away from you. Not by a job loss or fluctuations in trends. Not by folks who think you’re wasting your time.
If creativity is your vocation it matters to you.
Now go make something.
Our January CreativiTEA workshop has now sold out, so we are announcing our next workshop for February.
Presence through Painting is an introductory painting workshop that emphasizes the use of painting as a tool for mindfulness by centring one’s focus on working with the paint in the present moment.
In the workshop, I call on over 20 years of experience in painting and to teach participants the basics of tracing a design onto a canvas, applying paint and blending colours. This method of working encourages participants to push past the hurdle of the blank canvas, allowing them to fully enjoy the benefits of experiencing a painting practice.
The inspiration for this workshop came from my experience with using a paint-by-number kit to create a soothing, healing environment after a seizure scare in 2021. Using painting as part of my recovery reinforced my belief that by focusing people on the process of painting—as opposed to the final product—one could create a highly beneficial tool for mindfulness and emotional regulation.
Each two-hour CreativiTEA session includes:
A guided creative activity with all art supplies provided
Socializing and discussion with tea and delicious goodies—also provided
Sound like fun?
Athena Cooper splits her time between being a fine art painter and a creativity coach with Tilted Windmills.