I’ve never seriously pursued any career other than writing and making movies. It’s strange that a decision made when I was thirteen years old, bored out of my gourd, home alone in a rural community completely out of reach of any of my friends’ houses but near a couple movie theaters, has stuck so hard.

If you’re curious, I question this decision every single day. Making a living as a creative person is, uncontroversially, difficult and demoralizing. Success seems alternately impossible or arbitrary, at once entirely out of your hands but also 100% your fault for being the only one who hasn’t struck it rich.

So. Why do I do it? Part of it has to be the simple sunk cost fallacy. I’ve spent my life making varying degrees of a living from creative output, and I don’t mean my time. I mean my life.

I wrote my first screenplay over a lonely middle school summer. I finally entered a social scene by becoming a high school theatre kid. Five minutes after being crowned salutatorian of my class (a thing that, against all logic, matters to me), I moved to Los Angeles to attend USC film school. I spent almost all my potential partying and copulating time in college driving to a prop shop, on a film set, or in an editing lab. Luckily, I eventually met my wife on one of those sets and courted her in one of those editing labs. If I had not, I am certain I would be alone today.

I started working full-time in post production the Monday after graduation, edited a truly unknowable number of videos for free, and eventually became a successful television editor. But during that time, I was getting up early to write for a couple hours before work, and ensconcing at a coffee shop to write for a couple hours after work. Over time this became physically unsustainable, so I quit editing. Now I just write all the time, and don’t know how to do anything else except smoke the occasional rack of ribs. It’s truly been my life.

So you see why it would be a daunting task to just stop doing this. Especially when I live in constant certainty that my best work is ahead of me.

So why do I do it? I’m asking. I’d like to know. I’m certain it can’t be as simple as the fact that I like it, though I do.

One thing I tend to come back to frequently: People are too fascinating to NOT do this. The way people act, especially when they don’t think anyone is watching, is never, ever not interesting to me.

The only unifying principle behind everything I’ve made, in all these phases of my life, has been that I create what I would want to see as an audience member. When it comes out good, I then spend years convincing someone else to give me some money for it.

Now— a scant few people, people like my filmmaking North Stars the Coen Brothers, are able to make a living this way. But almost all the money that changes hands in this business is for creating what the Business wants to see. Sometimes my vision and the Business’s vision are the same. I live for those times. But at all other times, I knock on that door with naught but my unique point of view to speak for me. I spend my days finding out what the Business wants, or trying to convince the Business what it wants, and trying to get the Business to hire me. This is how I spend my time, and frankly, it’s not a bad way to live.

It’s just not why I do it.

Tell me you’ve made a big budget four-quadrant action-romance epic, I will certainly add it to the list of movies I feel like I should see. But point out a teenage couple in a Six Flags parking lot having a tear-fueled fight about the unknowable inky darkness of their future together, while she holds a giant carnival-prize teddy bear and he actively eats a funnel cake? Hook. It. Up. To. My. Veins.

Because that’s life, baby. That’s the good shit. I guess that’s why I do this. I write and shoot and edit and make web sites because people cry in parking lots and that’s fucking interesting. Why on earth would you make up a story about an assassin being drawn out of retirement for one last job when there is so much life out there?

To be clear, I do enjoy writing things about assassins being drawn out of retirement. I’m totally down. And a lot of what I’ve made based on what I want to see COULD be really popular and profitable to whoever buys it. I’m not fucking NICHE, I’m just myself, at great personal cost. But should you want to talk about Business, my representatives’ information is above, and we’ll come to a real nice price that works for us all. That IS what I do. All day. It’s just not why I do it.