So I have this personal concept of my identity that I call my “core themes”. These are simply the consistent themes of who I uniquely am and what lights me up in life. After my personal transformation last year to hedonist, I stamped these out to serve as a general compass for my personal happiness.

There are currently six core themes to my identity, which includes:

- Sexuality
- Deep Connection
- Eccentricity
- Hedonistic Rebel
- Intellectual

Before today, my sixth core theme was:

- Creative Building

However, as I’ve speculated here before, I had a key insight within my “creative building” theme that the “building” aspect isn’t really a core part of me. As an entrepreneur & former purpose driven humanitarian, I was always doing some sort of building of something throughout my life, whether it was businesses, campaigns, brands, websites, strategies, philosophies, documents, etc. So it felt natural at the time to label it with the term “building”. It’s true that I do naturally love being creative, like many people, but I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t really consistently enjoy the experience of building shit in life. I often like the sense of accomplishment & the intellectual challenge that comes with building stuff, but not the monotonous work of the actual building aspect itself. It’s just not that fun to consistently do “work” for me.

Although, even though I don’t enjoy building shit, I plan to be building my whole life. And that made me think about why? What’s the payoff that’s there behind it for me? It’s not for the sense of accomplishment or the intellectual challenge. And it is no longer for the impact or significance, since my transformation. So why is it? I found out that I see myself continuing to creatively build stuff, even when I don’t have to, because it is part of my new replacement theme of “creative self-expression”. My drive for deep human connection is off the fucking charts and I’ve come to see that self-expression is very much tied to that, along with being a pleasurable source of personal happiness on its own. So here is the new sixth core theme that is really what was behind the creative building all along…

- Creative Self-Expression

I’m always obsessing over my identity and love putting shit out in the world that represents me very well, whether it be wordsmithing, media, fun expressions in the presence of friends, etc. Consistently expressing who I am in creative ways is so core to my identity and is something I consistently do to light myself up with happiness. Most of the non-vital creative building of stuff that I will do throughout my life is really just plumbing for the creative self-expression. And of course a big part of what the creative self-expression is all about is my drive for deep connection. For example, if I get into creating music in the future, I might not enjoy much of the tedious process of creating music, but I’ll do it anyway because I’ll be getting off on the creative self-expression contained within the process, performing, & publishing of that music that I deeply identify with.

Here’s the current table of my core themes:

So “creative building” is out and “creative self-expression” is in. It always has been within me, but it now just has an accurate label within my core themes.

Express your fukken self!!

Brian Watkins