“To fear is to live in the future.
But those who live in the future never arrive.” — Alan Watts
Overthinking is mental quicksand.
I know, because I get stuck in it constantly.
It burns my creativity, triggers my nervous system, and wastes energy I’ll never get back.
And I bet you do it too.
Why? Because we’re divergent thinkers. We intellectualise everything:
Our futures
Our feelings
Our tiniest decisions.
The ego is the villain.
It hates being wrong. It craves certainty, judgment, and demands control.
But here’s the paradox: we waste hours overthinking, trying to solve problems that don’t even have solutions.
No one can predict the future.
It doesn’t exist. It’s a mental trap: a loop that keeps us chasing answers to questions that have none.
We can navigate life two ways:
Curiosity
Fear
Our egos (inner critics) tell us we’re wasting our time, the creative project will fail, and we’ll embarrass ourselves.
This is egoic thinking, which manifests as fear:
Fear of failure
Fear of rejection
Fear of being cringe
But that’s not the truth.
It’s only one potential version of reality.
Another version?
What if everything works out?
What if your project is groundbreaking?
What if sharing your ideas sparks a career filled with meaning, purpose, and financial freedom?
There are an infinite number of potential outcomes between these extremes.
But when we focus only on the fearful one, the project never gets off the ground.
Or the idea is watered down to mediocrity, safe from criticism, but ignored entirely.
Our work gets limited by the fears our ego projects as “the future.”
Fear is an illusion.
A Fugazi of the mind.
Born in the ego, delivered by the inner critic, keeping you spinning your wheels in irrelevant “safety.”
This is why creative geniuses create like a child (flow state) and edit like a scientist (logic).
A landmark study found 91.4% of worries never come true.
Nine out of ten of your fears?
Pure fiction.
But 100% of the stress and anxiety created by those fears was real!
“I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.” — Mark Twain
We know all this.
And yet… we still loop.
Why We Loop
Because our minds try to make decisions in the future.
But the future doesn’t exist.
The past is gone.
The only thing real is now… this breath, this present moment.
And still our brains try to:
Guess which one of our ideas will guarantee success.
Second-guess how the audience will react to our work.
That’s future-based thinking.
It keeps us stuck — not in reality, but in our thoughts, going round and around.
Conclusion
Fear is the biggest problem for creative people.
It’s why most creative people go to their graves with their songs still in them.
Unexpressed creativity doesn’t vanish.
It rots within.
Like me, you’ve probably read the classics:
Steven Pressfield calls fear Resistance in The War of Art.
Julia Cameron calls fear creative blocks in The Artist’s Way.
Rick Rubin calls it interference in The Creative Act.
Me? I call fear the ego.
👉 Pressfield’s answer is grit and determination.
👉 Cameron’s is to soften fear with Morning Pages and Artist Dates.
👉 Rubin’s is to reduce pressure with his “audience comes last” approach.
All very valid.
I’m a huge fan of their work.
But what happens if we apply the spiritual wisdom of Alan Watts, Eckhart Tolle, Michael Singer, Lao Tzu and Zen Buddhism to creativity?
“Fear is born from trying to hold on to life. When you stop grasping, fear dissolves like a dream” — Alan Watts
Your thoughts are not you.
They are stories your creative ego tells you.
Instead of trying to overcome or mitigate our fears, what if we deconstruct the creative ego?
What if we pull back the curtain on fear, and see it’s just a Fugazi — anxious thoughts about a future that doesn’t exist?
“If you are anxious, you are living in the future. If you are at peace, you are living in the present.” — Lao Tzu
What if we were to combine thousands of years of non-duality spiritual awareness with creative philosophy?
I’ve spent 33 years helping creative people get unstuck.
I’ve tried it all:
Grit, play, process, discipline and it all works but requires bucket loads of grit and determination.
It’s hard creative labour!
But dissolving the creative ego? Pulling back the curtain on the illusion of fear?
This is your natural creative state.
This is my hyperfocus: deconstructing the creative ego.
I hope this helps!
Jake ✌️
We don't know each other but thank you Jake. Love you for this. Rotting in this for a while and this brought an out of the woods moment. Thank you.