Words — Nothing Serious

Gym For Art

Curtis Winkelmann February 12, 2026

But the truth is, art isn’t absorbed logically. Now, the idea might need some work, it might even be cut all together by the release of the final piece, but this practice of trusting the initial reaction without analysis has allowed me to release more ideas of greater mystery and resonance than ever before…

Vehicle For Creativity

Curtis Winkelmann September 16, 2025

Cars don’t need to understand us or our destination to transport us efficiently. And it’s the same when we look to help other people channel their creativity…

Music Is a Focused Form of Conscious Feeling

Curtis Winkelmann August 17, 2025

Music is a focused form of conscious feeling. This is music. Cosmic occurrence colonised by human thought. It’s branded bird song, electrified, digitised, remixed, re-rationalised. We are not the definitive reason for music. Notes and tones are natural things, they never rely on our intervention to exist. Rather, were are the ones who realise music, reorganise it, redefine it…

Become a Mirror

Curtis Winkelmann July 23, 2025

How do we define a goodconversation? Well, we tend to know them when we’re in them. We sense some verbal ground broken, or a new dent made in the fabric of the universe, a step toward truth of some kind. Good conversations absorb our being absolutely. We offer up a core part of ourselves to them, and in return, we gain a new way of thinking…

Comedy Is Philosophy

Curtis Winkelmann November 22, 2024

When people are asked what’s important in their lives, they often mention humour. If we go back far enough, we see ancient Greek thinkers like Seneca, Plato, Aristotle, all thinking and writing about humour. And this trend continues throughout the ages, with nearly all notable intellectuals and thinkers touching on the topic at least once in their career, for however a brief a time…

The Smiling Skull

Curtis Winkelmann August 26, 2024

Let’s talk about us for a second. And not us in the sense of our egos and personalities and opinions. Not us in the sense of ourselves and the mental constructions and narratives pertaining to those selves. But us in the physical, the biological. The us beneath our fleshy groomed exterior. The bones of us. The skeleton head. The lifeless human-shaped reaper we all forget is there, propped up behind our eyes like some kind of inanimate stranger assigned to carry our lips through life. Let’s talk about the actual thing of us…

Finding Your Way into an Idea Is Like Falling Asleep

Curtis Winkelmann August 21, 2024

Fellini once described the creative process as trying to recall a dream. Visual bits and emotional fragments hang on the tip of the mind in clouded form, shifting in and out of clarity. Well, what if it was the inverse for those who are trying to enter a dream? What if the resonation with a piece of art, the finding of one’s own way into its ideas, and the forming of a genuine connection with the piece, what if this was just like trying to fall asleep? …

A Crisis of Consciousness

Curtis Winkelmann July 10, 2024

I kind of just stand there, motionless, tongue half-out of a head half-inside the cold fluorescent coffin-shaped box which predates me in this house by a comfortable margin. Behind my dead unblinking eyes a brain simultaneously tries to decide what it is I feel like and what it is I have the motivation to make. But I’m also not really thinking about anything. I’m not even looking inside the fridge. My head just sort of leans up against the side of the door as I gaze out into the middle distance of the kitchen, frozen in the moment…

This Is Nothing Serious

A Manifesto on Modern Existence

Dearest Being, this is Nothing Serious. I have become increasingly aware that my craving to know what is right from wrong is in no way connected to any pursuit of truth. And to accept this means to accept a terrifying bewilderment: I am not now what I sense somehow I am meant to be, should be, want to be. I do not know what I feel at the bottom of my heart. And perhaps, this is the beginning of some kind of personal wisdom. If I can just leave the wound open, stop distracting myself from its emptiness and instead wait in it, then maybe I can heal from the inside out…