Art, Accessibility, and the Social Constructs of Relevance

I find myself feeling the burnout of content creation. Consistent writing, video and social media content drains you.

It’s not a dramatic collapse. It’s more like a slow leak. Each post feels a little heavier than the last. The energy needed to keep up starts to feel disproportionate to any tangible outcome.

There’s a fight for relevancy that never ends.

It’s a constant balance of quantity and quality, but here’s the thing nobody talks about: quality is entirely subjective.

The Invisible Battle: Quality vs. Quantity

When you work in design spaces or anywhere in the art world, subjectivity becomes the biggest barrier to relevance.

You can pour your heart into something. You can follow every principle and execute flawlessly.

It can still fall flat because it doesn’t resonate with whoever is watching.

Meanwhile, something hastily thrown together can find an audience. This happens because it landed in front of the right people at the right moment.

I focus on accessible design.

When Accessibility Meets a World Designed to Exclude

My entire professional identity centers around creating spaces of inclusion in the digital world.

There’s an irony that keeps me up at night. How do you make a space truly inclusive? The systems you’re working within are designed to exclude.

Algorithms reward sensationalism over substance. Attention is commodified and gatekept.

The people with the loudest voices aren’t necessarily the ones saying the most important things.

Art is a social construct.

Art, Money, and Social Relevance: A Story Worth Telling

Years ago, I met an artist who sold their work for fifteen hundred dollars. It was a large white canvas with a green circle at the bottom. That was it.

Twenty minutes of this person’s time equaled more money than some people make in a week.

The piece wasn’t technically difficult. It wasn’t groundbreaking in concept.

It sold because the artist had cultivated relevance through years of networking, gallery representation, and cultural positioning.

Anyone could have made that painting. The technical skill required was minimal. But that’s not really what art is about, is it?

Art is about social relevance.

It’s about being positioned in the right spaces. It’s having the right connections. It’s also about existing within a context where people have decided your work matters.

It’s about narrative and perception as much as it is about execution.This realization used to depress me. Now it’s oddly liberating.

Relevance is largely manufactured rather than earned purely through merit. When you accept this, you can start to think differently about your own work.

You stop trying to create the perfect piece that will magically find an audience. Instead, you start thinking about consistency, visibility, and connection.

Why ‘Doing What You Want’ Isn’t Just a Cliché

Creating quality outside the status quo means accepting a different kind of success metric.

It’s not cliché to say “just do what you want.” It’s actually true. This only works if you reframe what success looks like in the first place.

Life is scrolled through in twenty-second clips now. People are constantly chasing a status that’s impossible to obtain because it keeps shifting.

The goalpost moves every quarter, every algorithm update, every trend cycle. You build an audience in one niche and suddenly that niche is oversaturated. You develop a voice that feels authentic and then worry that it’s not performing well enough.

You study what works and by the time you implement it, the landscape has already changed.One week your posts do good. The metrics look promising.

People engage, comment, share. You feel like maybe you’ve figured it out. Then the next week, similar content falls completely flat. Different time of day, different platform algorithm, different collective mood of your audience.

People like it or they ignore it, often for reasons completely outside your control.You can’t win. Not in the traditional sense of winning.

Creating on Your Own Terms in a Spinning Content Machine

The game itself is rigged because the rules aren’t transparent and they change without announcement.What you can do instead is commit to consistency.

Not toxic productivity or burnout-inducing posting schedules, but showing up regularly with things you believe in. You can prioritize accessibility in everything you create.

This will make your work more useful to more people.

You can be honest about what you’re making. You can explain why you’re making it.

This honesty becomes a form of currency in spaces saturated with performative content. And maybe most importantly, you can be happy with what you create.

Not in a naïve sense where everything feels good regardless of response. Instead, in a grounded sense, you’ve decided that your work having integrity matters more than it having virality.

The burnout I feel isn’t really about the work itself. I love art. I love making videos. I love the visual problem-solving that comes with design. The burnout is about the constant measuring.

It involves algorithmic anxiety and the feeling that you’re never quite doing enough. Or that you’re not doing it right.

It’s the voice that whispers that maybe you should chase trends instead of creating according to your values. It’s the comparison that happens when you see someone with less experience getting more visibility..

When I feel frustrated that my content doesn’t perform as well as something more sensationalized, it’s a reminder. I am working in opposition to algorithms. These algorithms are designed to reward engagement through provocation rather than substance.

The content machine of relevancy will keep spinning. It will keep demanding more, promising visibility, shifting its criteria for success. But you don’t have to let it dictate your entire creative practice.

You can make things that matter to you. You can show up consistently without sacrificing your mental health.

You can measure success differently than the platforms want you to measure it. And you can create work that’s both technically solid and genuinely useful to the people who need it.

That might not be fifteen hundred dollars for a green circle on white. But it’s something. It’s enough.