What Creators/Innovators Can Learn from Smoke Gets in Your Eyes
Creators and innovators build things meant to outlast a single moment, a body of work, a product, an idea, yet many avoid thinking seriously about their own limits or the finite window they actually have to make something real. Caitlin Doughty's Smoke Gets in Your Eyes describes a culture that hides death behind professional handlers so no one has to face it directly, and the same instinct shows up in creative life as endless deferral, the next project, the next platform, the next version, standing in for a direct reckoning with time actually running out. The book's case for proximity over avoidance offers creators a sharper lens on urgency, originality, and what their work is actually for.
The whole book, compressed
This edition works through 4 core lessons — take them one at a time, not all at once.
What's different for your conditions
Tap whichever ones sound like you. Nothing here is sent or saved — it's just for your own noticing.
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The core lessons, applied to you
The creative field trained to defer the hard question
Just as funeral culture removes a body from view fast, creative culture often removes the question of finitude from view fast, buried under deadlines, launches, and the next idea. This trains creators to treat urgency as a permanent background hum rather than something tied to an actual, limited amount of time.
Creators treat "someday" projects as permanently available, assuming the runway to make them will always be there.
This week, name one project you have deferred indefinitely and either schedule real time for it or consciously let it go.
Sitting with the work instead of managing around it
Doughty found that direct contact with a hard reality produces more honest engagement than distance from it. Creators who sit directly with an unfinished piece, a failed launch, or genuine uncertainty about their direction tend to produce more honest work than those who keep busy to avoid the discomfort of not knowing.
Creators fill time with adjacent tasks, marketing, scheduling, minor edits, specifically to avoid confronting the harder creative or existential question underneath.
Spend one uninterrupted hour this week with the project or question you have been avoiding, without switching to easier tasks.
Platforms and industry incentives are not your incentives
Doughty shows how funeral homes can steer grieving families toward decisions that serve the business more than the family. Publishing platforms, algorithms, and industry gatekeepers operate under their own commercial logic too, and creators who never question what a platform actually rewards can end up shaping their work around incentives that have little to do with their original intent.
Creators assume that what performs well on a platform is automatically what matters, without asking whose interest that metric actually serves.
This week, identify one creative decision you made purely to satisfy a platform's incentive and ask whether it still serves your actual goal.
Memento mori as a creative engine
Doughty frames regular awareness of mortality, memento mori, as a habit that sharpens present priorities rather than a bleak indulgence. For a creator, that awareness can function as a genuine engine, a reminder that the window to make the work that matters is real and limited, which tends to cut through procrastination more effectively than deadlines alone.
The pull toward sitting directly with hard creative questions can conflict with the practical need to engage platforms and audiences to sustain a creative career at all. Full withdrawal into pure intention is not realistic for most creators who need income. The balance is choosing which platform demands genuinely serve the work and which ones are quietly reshaping it, rather than accepting all of them uncritically.
Name one thing, honestly
- What project have you deferred so long it has effectively become permanent? - Where has a platform's incentive quietly become your own creative priority? - If your remaining creative time were visibly finite, what would you make differently?
Good. Now look back at the "Try this" line under whichever lesson feels most connected to what you just wrote, and treat that as this week's actual assignment — not all 4 at once.
The practices from this edition
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Run this for seven days
This week, identify one creative decision you made purely to satisfy a platform's incentive and ask whether it still serves your actual goal.