The Protein-ification of Creativity

Somewhere along the way (imperceptibly, incrementally, in the way all cultural shifts happen before they’re nameable), the language of making things started sounding like the language of building a body.

Input, output. Efficiency, gains. System, process, cadence. People stopped saying I made something and started saying I produced content. The creative routine became a supplement stack: morning pages as pre-workout, mood boards as macros, “batching” your creative sessions the way you batch meal prep on a Sunday. Even rest got rebranded as strategic downtime. A deliberate reset, so you can come back stronger, leaner, more productive on Monday.

I’m dubbing this the protein-ification of creative expression. And I think it’s making our work worse.

To be clear, I’m not anti-structure. Structure, when it's yours (when it grows out of the actual way your brain works and not out of what some productivity influencer told you your brain should work like) is genuinely useful. I have a folder on my desktop called “JUNK” that contains, probably, seventeen subfolders, each named some variation of “New folder (2).” That is my system. It works for me. I’m not preaching liberation from organization.

What I’m raising is something more specific: the colonization of the language of making by the language of optimization. The way creativity, increasingly, gets framed as a performance metric. The way the conversation has shifted from what did you make to how much are you making, how often, and what’s your engagement rate.

Here is where the protein-ification comes from and how it found us: hustle culture got a rebrand, not a funeral. It got a nice new aesthetic and a calming sans-serif font, and suddenly grinding wasn’t grinding anymore; it was intentional. It was aligned. At its core, the same gospel: produce more, produce consistently, treat your creative output like a business with KPIs. But now it came with a diffuser and a grounding exercise, so it felt like self-care. The protein industrial complex swapped the hustle bro for the wellness girlie and kept everything else the same.

And yes, I’ve done it, too.

The protein-ification doesn’t make a grand announcement of being a cultural force you can push back against. It just seeps into the decision-making - the part that happens before anything gets made. I’ve talked myself out of projects because I couldn’t figure out where they’d go. I’ve chosen the justifiable brief over the interesting one. I’ve abandoned ideas mid-formation because they were shapeless and I couldn’t see how to metabolize them into something an audience would recognize as intentional. That internal audit - does this build toward something, does it fit the direction I'm supposed to be moving in - is protein-ification at its most effective. And sometimes the answer to those questions is a legitimate no, and the idea deserved to get cut. I don’t want to romanticize every half-formed thing I’ve ever abandoned. Some of them were, indeed, bad.

The problem isn’t that the audit exists, but that the criteria it’s running on belong to the protein industrial complex, and not to me. Worse still, it doesn’t feel like an external pressure when it's running. It feels like good judgment.

Spencer Silver, a 3M chemist in the late 1960s, was trying to make a superstrong adhesive and accidentally created the opposite: a low-tack, pressure-sensitive formula that held two surfaces together but could be pulled apart without a trace. A solution without a problem. For years it kicked around the company doing nothing, until a colleague used it on the bookmark of his hymnal, and eventually that useless, wrong, failed adhesive became the Post-it. The protein industrial complex, had it been running in that lab, would have killed it in week one. Wrong outcome. No throughline. No evidence of optimization. Just a guy who made the “wrong” thing and had the good sense not to throw it away.

The audit doesn’t just thin the herd. It thins it in a specific direction: toward the legible, the pitchable, the already-recognizable. Which means the longer the protein-ification runs, the more our creative work starts to look like creative work that already exists.

Scale that up and you get a sense of what the protein industrial complex is doing to creative culture at large. When enough people are running the same pre-emptive audit - when enough ideas are getting flagged as too shapeless, too uncommercial, too unrecognizable before they've been allowed to become anything - the output starts to converge. Everything begins to rhyme. The aesthetic vocabulary narrows. The range of what gets attempted compresses toward the center, toward the already-proven, toward the work that looked like it would work before it was made.

This is what the protein industrial complex is murmuring, in the voice of every productivity post you've ever read: your creative life should be legible. Pitchable, narratable, optimized for recognition. And at the individual level that might just feel like discipline. At scale it’s a slow homogenization of what creative work is allowed to look like - not through any mandate, but through a million private audits all running the same criteria, all selecting for the same qualities, all thinning the field in the same direction.

But here’s the thing: protein-ification works. Not in the way it promises (it doesn’t make the work better, or more original, or more yours), but in the way that actually gets people to keep showing up. To me, that’s not nothing.

Making things is frightening in a way that’s genuinely hard to explain to people who don’t do it. The uncertainty doesn’t go away with experience. If anything, it compounds: the more you care about the work, the more exposed the work feels, and the more a bad run or a dry spell or a project that didn’t land the way you hoped starts to feel like evidence of something permanent about you. Protein-ification offers a way to stay in motion through all of that. If you have a system, you’re doing it right even when the output is bad. If you have a cadence, you showed up even when nothing came. The framework doesn’t protect the work but it does, in a real way, protect the person making it. And maybe that’s the thing that needs protecting most sometimes.

It’s not cynical or delusional to want a structure that keeps the fear at a manageable distance. That’s just a very human response to a very uncomfortable thing. The protein industrial complex didn’t manufacture that need out of thin air; it found a genuine anxiety and built a product around it, which is what it does, which is why it’s so good at what it does.

The question isn’t whether we should want that. It’s whether the structure we reach for is actually ours, or whether we borrowed it from someone whose creative life looks nothing like ours - someone optimizing for different stakes, a different audience, a different definition of what the work is for.

The thing about using a body as a model for creative work is that a body is supposed to be efficient. That is the whole design of it. The machine improves. It gets leaner, stronger, more optimized over time.

But art is not supposed to be efficient. Art is, categorically, a poor use of resources. It takes longer than it should. It produces nothing you strictly need. It fails constantly and the failures rarely teach you anything that would transfer cleanly to the next attempt. The entire premise of it is that something got made that didn’t exist before, which is an absurd and wasteful and completely human thing to do.

I’m not outside protein-ification. I’m still running the audit on my own ideas more than I’d like to admit, still reaching for the protein vocabulary when I’m trying to describe what I do to someone at a party, still lowkey relieved when an odd project turns out to have a legible throughline I can point to. The protein industrial complex is good at what it does and what it does is make optimization feel like self-respect.

All I’m saying (and I mean this genuinely, not as a manifesto) is that a body optimized to its limit is just a very good machine. And a very good machine is not the thing I got into this for. I don’t think it's the thing you got into it for either. So maybe every once in a while, let something be shapeless for a bit longer than feels comfortable. See what it becomes before you decide whether it’s worth becoming anything at all.