The Art of Self Expression During These Hard Times
There is a natural urge to seek explanations for what we do not understand. We are taught to operate the world around us based on facts. When we are hungry, we know we are supposed to eat. When we are tired, we know we are supposed to sleep. These are easy examples of things that can be explained with defined and verifiable data. However, there is an entire side of the human experience that has nothing to do with what is known, and everything to do with what we feel.
Everyone has been in pain. It’s a physical thing our bodies universally experience, but it’s also a feeling we all share. So let’s start there, and acknowledge that feelings can hurt just as much as a physical injury. Healing those two kinds of pain is not the same process.
Physical injuries are what the Western world has mastered. An observable divergence from the body’s nominal state, where the solution applied can be directly and visually verified. Mental illness isn’t that black and white. Neither is spiritual wellness. These call for a different kind of intelligence, and wisdom isn’t learned from books alone. It’s earned by living and becoming more familiar with our feelings over years, then decades, and even lifetimes.
Art is the greatest visible, verifiable proof of emotional intelligence. The historic record of what cannot be explained, yet somehow continues to save billions of humans from losing their grip on what we call reality. When hardship cannot be physically remedied, we turn to alternative therapy: painting our feelings on canvas, strumming them out on a guitar, writing our complex thoughts into poetry or song (or articles). Where doctors fail, the creation and appreciation of art heals. The act of self expression becomes therapy.
Everyone Wants Answers
The world right now is not built for sitting with our feelings. The status quo benefits most by distracting us from self reflection. Social media rewards attention, not intention, and certainly not the process of arriving at an informed conclusion. Many of us have the knowledge of the world on pocket sized devices, yet our perception of that information and how much of it we absorb are altered by circumstances and emotional states we never fully acknowledge or care for.
When something unsettling happens in the world, the first instinct is to look for a post that already summarizes it, or turn on the entertainment masked as news, and that is the trap we have been trained to both set up and fall into. Explanation feels like relief, but it is a shortcut around the thing that actually does the healing.
Art doesn’t ask me to explain anything before I engage with it. It asks me to look, to sit, and eventually, to feel something I might not have words for yet. Over time, after decades of doing this, that practice has made me emotionally wiser in a way no school room ever could. The world keeps getting louder, but the therapy still works the same way it always has, within my art practice. What changed for me was the pace of it, and thanks to a blockchain called Tezos, I feel like I have received a lifetime of wisdom in less than a decade.
Everyone wants answers, but self expression reveals many truths that cannot be explained.
Expedited Wisdom
People talk about blockchain speed in terms of finality and fast transactions. That’s not the speed that impacted me the most. What Tezos actually sped up was how much of the human experience I could sit with in a short amount of time, and how many cycles of real world emotion I could process without waiting on business hours or locally occurring events.
Creating and collecting art as NFTs increased how often I could be moved by art, process the feelings, and act on the inspiration. On a traditional gallery or venue timeline, meeting the volume of artists and perspectives I’ve encountered through the global network would have taken me a lifetime, not to mention a fortune in travel and gig expenses. Instead, it took a decade of experiencing global cultures through a screen, via decentralized networks of fellow artists and art lovers that are open minded about tech and optimistic about the future.
The initial wave of excitement in 2021 led to some of my first big tastes of financial success, followed by a three year crash course in handling emotions only felt when big financial wins are followed by equal financial loss. Those years held what seemed like decades of life experience, and they built a community that grew closer for having felt it together. My created and collected tab on Objkt during that time compared to now showcases the growth the art has offered me.
TezCon 2024 put me in a room with fellow Tezos artists, many of them I’d never have crossed paths with otherwise, each one carrying a completely different relationship to what art means and why they make it. Miami Art Week and Art Basel in late 2025 rounded out my grasp of digital art with a dose of the traditional art world, and made me aware of how much there still was to learn from non-digital practices. This inspired me to bring more physical art into my own practice and since then I have fallen in love with painting.
Then came TezCon 2026, where the wisdom of a further prolonged bear market culminated once again into a celebration of the art and insight gained from our collective pain. The theme was even around the enshittification of modern society, yet the mood was festive. A community bond strengthened by making art together in spite of frequent hardship.
Tech That Removes Barriers
None of my experience in digital art required me to be technical, though I picked up highly technical skills anyway as a side effect of trying. All it required was an open heart and a longing to expand my own perspective of the world around me. Approach a network this way and people are happy to teach you what they know and express what they feel. People love to feel heard, and being heard is its own quiet form of therapy.
The barriers the tech removed were never technical ones. They were the cost of a gallery wall, the travel costs, the dress code and entry price, and then the price tag that keeps most people from ever owning any of it. Minting on Tezos is accessible, so an artist anywhere can share work with the world and a collector anywhere can hold a piece for the price that works for their budget. Wisdom is not measured on charts, and wealth should not define anyone’s ability to discover art.
The hardest and most necessary part of that process is letting go of needing everything explained every step of the way. Every artist’s intention, every strange or unfamiliar piece, every choice I didn’t immediately understand. My perception eventually changed on plenty of styles I thought I didn’t like, simply because I hadn’t sat with the emotions long enough yet. Letting go is what allowed me to absorb what could only be expressed, not explained.
Self Expression As Therapy
Music therapy exists as a recognized clinical practice for a reason. Rhythm and melody reach parts of the brain and body that are hard to explain yet harder to deny. It’s one of the clearest examples of art functioning as literal medicine, studied and applied in hospitals and treatment centers, not just described poetically in articles like this one.
I have many of my own versions of self expression serving as therapy. A lifelong practice of turning emotions into poetry, then songs. The digital art practices that grew out of promoting my music recordings and shows, which evolved into the multi-disciplinary art practice I have today. That writing and stage experience even manifested into a journalism job and talk show hosting with Tezos Commons. Long form articles have taught me a wealth of unexplainable knowledge in their own right. Hearing the stories and processes of hundreds of fellow artists during Artz Friday very much did the same.
Other forms of art as therapy show up in grief. I wrote at length about losing my cats Maestro and Zigz in Cats Of Tezos, and how the blockchain became the place I could take that grief and turn it into art. Tech enabled painful losses of pets to become permanent art installations honoring their memories.
Self expression is the birth place of art. Anything made with intention and heart can be art to someone, whether it’s a gallery-ready oil painting or a digital vibe coded memorial.
Empowered By Art
People are still creating, sharing, and collecting art on Tezos in a market that would rather tell them it’s over. What keeps people here is that the emotional value doesn’t need to be explained to be real. Nobody’s arguing about resale potential, instead they are brainstorming over the next collaboration. Just art being appreciated on its own terms, by a community actively feeling and expressing the most complex parts of life through art and developing tech that empowers artists.
That’s the actual digital art renaissance happening around this blockchain’s capabilities. Not as much what the technology adds to the art, but the obstacles it removed for us to share and discover all that art can be.
People being moved, feeling something new, sharing it into a global pool of wisdom instead of keeping it to themselves. That’s something historically valuable even without a price tag. I’m wiser because of these lessons learned on Tezos, where I am empowered and encouraged to express myself through art.
A Different Kind Of Sm’ARTs was originally published in Tezos Commons on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.