Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
The Terrible Creative is a storytelling podcast for photographers, designers, and creative professionals working through the parts of the creative process no gear review or business course ever covers.
Each episode is 30 to 40 minutes. Solo. Story-driven. Built around mental health, artistic identity, and what honest work costs in a career rewarding performance over truth.
This is not a photography podcast about cameras, presets, or client strategy. This is a podcast about the inner experience of being a creative professional, made for the mid-career photographer or designer who has mastered the technical side but lost the thread.
Hosted by Patrick Fore, commercial photographer, author, and former lead photographer and brand designer for Taylor Guitars. His work has appeared globally for clients like Nike, Petco, and Verizon. He built this show because none of the podcasts he found addressed the real problem.
If you are a photographer or creative professional who feels competent on the outside and quietly lost on the inside, you are a Terrible Creative. This is your podcast.
There’s a show called Alone. You’ve probably seen it scrolling past on Netflix, but if you haven't, the premise is a social experiment disguised as a survival competition. They drop ten people in the harsh and unforgiving wilderness, miles apart, with zero contact. No camera crew.
No safety net. These people have to film their own isolation and their own slow starvation. You stay until your body breaks or your mind snaps. The last person left takes half a million dollars, but the money eventually feels like an abstraction. The show is really just a study in what happens when the floor of civilization is removed.
Season eleven puts that study in Northern Canada, right on the edge of the Arctic Circle. We’re at that miserable hinge point where autumn has died and winter is just beginning to sharpen its teeth. The trees are skeletons, the wind is a physical weight, and the river is hovering right at 31 degrees—a slushy, indifferent barrier that is just waiting for you to make one mistake.
This is where we find a man named Dub. He’s forty days in. He’s starving. And he’s about to realize that being an expert is only half the battle.
He’s standing on the bank when he sees it. A giant bull moose on the other side. A mountain of protein. This isn’t just a meal; it’s the win. It’s the $500,000 walking on four legs.
Dub knocks an arrow. He’s got the shot. But then... he stops.
Between Dub and the moose is a freezing river. If he shoots and doesn’t get a clean kill—a heart shot, a lung shot—the moose runs. It dies slow, painful, and unreachable on the other side. It’s a waste. It’s unethical.
So, starving and desperate, Dub watches a fortune walk back into the treeline.
And right then—exactly when the moose vanishes—the universe decides to twist the knife.
It starts to snow.
Dub keeps moving. He finds a beaver run. He sets a trap. He slips. Both boots go into the river. 31-degree water. Now he’s not just hungry; he’s a candidate for hypothermia. He’s looking at losing a toe or a foot.
Dub looks at the camera and says, "The moose was rubbing it in my face."
This isn't actually a story about the wilderness. It’s about a specific kind of sequence.
It’s not one "bad thing." It’s a cascade. It’s the opportunity that was real but unreachable. It’s the ethical choice that costs you everything. It’s the universe punctuating your loss with a snowstorm, and then—just because it’s not done with you yet—tripping you into the river.
Every freelancer knows this sequence.
You don't have a moose; you have a client who "loves the vision" but loses the budget. You have a project that was 90% signed that suddenly goes dark. And then, while you’re still processing the heartbreak of the "almost," your car won't start. Or your kid gets sick. Or an invoice goes 60 days past due.
You didn't fail. You didn't lack the "expert skills." The river was just between you and the thing you needed to survive.
Today, we’re talking about what they don't teach you in the early years of building something from nothing. It’s not about the craft. It’s about the invisible forces. The shots you won’t take because you have a soul. The snow that starts exactly when you're down.
And the specific loneliness of standing in a storm that nobody else can see.
⸻
THE HANDSHAKE
[Music bed settles under. Delivery: faster, lighter, host-mode. Roadmap the episode clearly then slow back down.]
My name is Patrick Fore, and this is The Terrible Photographer — honest conversations about creativity, identity, and discovering your voice. Today is Episode 55. I'm calling it "Cosmic Cruelty."
Today we're talking about three things. Skills. Wilderness. And the invisible forces nobody puts in the brochure.
To do that, we're going to spend some time in the Canadian wilderness with a man named Dub and a moose that had absolutely no interest in cooperating. Then we're coming back to the specific terrain of the early freelance years — the part that has nothing to do with your skills and everything to do with your capacity to keep moving when the math doesn't work and the snow starts falling and your feet are now wet.
Because being excellent at your craft is not a shield against bad luck. This is a conversation about why talented people actually quit—and why it’s usually because of external forces they were never taught to manage.
And despite the name, this isn't just a show for photographers. Whether you're a writer, a designer, a filmmaker, or anyone trying to build something real without a net — you're welcome here. The episodes are in no particular order. Jump around. And as always, email is in the show notes. I read everything.
[Slow delivery here. Drop into storytelling register. Let the transition breathe.]
⸻
THE MEANDERING — MOVEMENT 1: THE ENTRY FEE
"There is a gap between the reality of Alone and the way it’s presented. The same gap exists in the independent creative life.
The selection process for the show is a gauntlet. You don't get dropped in the Canadian wilderness because you have a nice beard and a YouTube channel. You or I wouldn’t be selected - we would most likely tap out in 2 days and that wouldn’t be a very good show.
Before they ever let you touch the dirt in Northern Canada, you have to pass the screen test. You have to submit tapes proving you can carry sixty pounds of camera gear and still find the light. You have to prove you can be the protagonist of your own misery.
They have to know that you won’t die out there, that you wont eat the wrong berry that will kill you or put an ax through your leg chopping wood (even though that can happen) or can actually trap a rabbit using a snare.
Then come the psychologists. They put you through a battery of tests to see how you handle the silence—to see if your mind will break on day 20 when the only living things to talk to are the birds taunting you from the trees.. They’re looking for a very specific kind of mental architecture: someone stable enough to not die, but just the right amount of crazy to be interesting to the viewers.
Again the technical skills are the entry fee. They won't even let you on the plane if you haven't proven you can survive.
Which means everyone who makes it to day one is an expert. And yet, most of them still don't make it to day forty.x
When people 'tap out'—and they do, 9 of them every season—it’s rarely because they forgot how to fish or their matches got wet. It’s the stuff the boot camp couldn't screen for. The psychological cost of feedback that only comes in the form of silence. The mental erosion of not knowing if you’re winning or losing. The evergrowing pit in your stomach of missing your family. The way your brain starts to eat itself when it realizes there is no one coming to tell you you're doing a good job.
Freelancing has the same selection problem.
You don't go independent without a portfolio or the skill set. You’ve got the chops, the credits, the client prospects. You proved you could do the work before you made the leap. You thought the 'craft' was the game.
But the craft is just the entry fee.
The actual game is everything the portfolio review doesn't measure. It’s the capacity to make a $10,000 decision at 11:00 PM when you’re exhausted and alone. It’s the specific, vibrating anxiety of an inbox that’s been quiet for nine days. It's the arithmetic of moving money from a tax savings account to pay rent, while smiling on a Zoom call like you’re the most successful person in the room. It’s being able to show up to a job, professional and ready to go, even though you’re sick and haven’t slept in two days.
"The skills got you here. But they aren't enough to keep you here. Because sooner or later, you're going to hit the River.
The River is the thing that sits between you and the opportunity you can practically touch.
It’s the month of back-and-forth emails. It’s the three 'chemistry calls' where you’re already envisioning the shots and planning the edit. It’s the moment you think, 'This is it. This is the one that pulls me out of the ditch.' And then... nothing.
The person you were talking to? They didn't hate your work. Their boss just had a 'vision shift.' Or the department budget got frozen by someone in a glass office three states away who doesn't even know your name. You had the arrow knocked. You had the skill. But the River was too wide, and you’re left standing on the bank watching a $20,000 contract walk into the treeline without a backward glance.
Then, there’s the Weather.
The Weather is the external force that doesn't give a damn about your 'year-end goals.' It’s the economy shifting mid-quarter. It’s the car's transmission dropping onto the pavement on the same morning you have a high-stakes pitch. It's the Industry itself changing the rules of the game while you're still playing.
You didn't cause the storm. You didn't make a bad decision. You just looked up and realized it started snowing.
And finally, the Wet Boots. This is the psychological 'ghosting.' It’s the silence that follows a great meeting. In isolation, a ignored email is a minor annoyance. But when you’re already hungry—when the 'Moose' just walked away and the 'Weather' is closing in—that silence feels like a personal indictment. It’s the small, stupid, compounding failure that lands on top of the big ones.
It’s your boots filling with 31-degree water.
Now you aren't thinking about the big career win anymore. You’re just trying to keep your feet. You’re just trying to stay in the game one more day without tapping out.
I want you to hear this: If you’re standing on that bank right now, shivering and staring at a quiet inbox, you didn't fail. You aren't a 'terrible' anything. You’re just experiencing the indifferent geometry of the independent life.
You’re just in the woods. And it’s winter.
-
There is something specific that happens to the human brain when the 'Wet Boots' start to compound.
When you lose one client, it’s a bummer. When you lose three in a row—all ghosting you for no apparent reason after you did everything right—it stops feeling like math. It starts feeling like a punishment.
You start to look for the 'Why.' You look for the sin you committed that brought on this specific season of bad karma. You wonder if the universe is trying to tell you something—that you’re an interloper, that you’re not supposed to be here, that you’re being punished for the audacity of trying to build something of your own.
This is the cruelest part of Cosmic Cruelty: It feels fucking personal.
It feels like a vendetta. You’d almost prefer it to be a punishment, because at least a punishment implies that someone is watching. At least a punishment has a logic. The alternative—that the universe is just a vast, indifferent machine that occasionally drops a mountain of snow on you for no reason at all—is much harder to stomach.
When you start seeing patterns in the static, you're experiencing something called Apophenia.
It’s a glitch in our human hardware—the tendency to see meaningful connections between unrelated things. It’s why we see faces in the clouds or a 'message' in a string of bad luck. And it exists because, for about 200,000 years, being paranoid was a survival trait.
Imagine you’re an early human in the tall grass. You hear a rustle. Your brain has two choices. You can assume it’s just the wind—that's random noise. Or, you can assume it’s a tiger—that’s a pattern.
If you assume it’s a tiger and you’re wrong? You’re just a little embarrassed and out of breath. But if you assume it’s the wind and you’re wrong? You’re lunch. We are the descendants of the people who always assumed it was a tiger. We are biologically biased toward the 'False Positive.' We would rather see a threat that isn't there than miss one that is.
So when three clients in a row go quiet, your 'tiger-circuit' lights up. Your brain refuses to accept that it’s just the wind—that three separate people in three separate companies all had three separate, boring, internal reasons for ghosting you. That feels too random. That feels unsafe.
So your brain invents a tiger. It tells you that you are the common denominator. That you’re a failure. Because 'failure' is a pattern you can theoretically fix.
But on Alone, Dub didn’t lose the moose because he was a bad person or a 'terrible' survivalist. He didn't have bad karma. He just had a river.
In the freelance life, we spend an incredible amount of energy trying to find the 'lesson' in the disaster. We want to believe that if we just work harder, or stay later, or get 'better,' we can earn our way out of the bad luck. We try to use productivity as a shield against the randomness of the world.
But you can’t outwork a snowstorm. And you can’t 'skill' your way around a client's budget being frozen three states away.
Sometimes, weird, ugly patterns emerge that make no sense. They feel like a message. But most of the time? They’re just the terrain. They’re just the weather.
And the weather doesn't give a shit about you.
MOVEMENT 3: THE SPECIFIC LONELINESS
[Music fades slightly here. More intimate. Quieter.]
On Alone, the isolation is literal. You can see it. When a contestant sits by a fire on Day 37 and cries over a Polaroid of their kids, the audience gets it. The loneliness is legible.
But the loneliness of the independent life? That’s invisible. And I think that makes it heavier.
You aren’t alone in the literal sense. You have people. Friends who grab a beer with you, family who wants you to win, a community that asks 'How’s business?' and actually waits for the answer.
But almost nobody around you can see the Interior Weather. They see you at the Saturday BBQ, but they don't see the arithmetic running in the background of your brain like a noisy refrigerator. They don't see the 'Moose' that just walked away or the 'Wet Boots' that are currently freezing your resolve. Describing it to someone with a salary and a 401k feels like trying to explain a color they’ve never seen.
"There is no rest for the weary, because for us, there are no days off.
There are only hours off. Even when you aren’t at your desk, you’re scanning the horizon. You’re wondering if the silence in your inbox is a fluke or a trend.
This is a phenomenon called Attention Residue.
Your brain doesn't just switch channels like a TV. When you step away from a high-stakes problem—like how to pay rent next month—a massive part of your consciousness stays stuck to it. You don’t leave the office; you just drag a ghost of it with you into the rest of your life.
You are living in a permanent Open Loop—what psychologists call the Zeigarnik Effect. Back in the 1920s, a researcher noticed that waiters could remember unpaid orders perfectly, but the second the bill was settled, the memory vanished. The brain refuses to let go of an unfinished task.
But for us, the 'check' is never fully paid. The bill stays on the table 24/7. This is why your brain stays in triage mode even when you're supposed to be 'off.' You are at the party, you are saying the right things, but you are actually operating on a fragmented processor. You’re somewhere else entirely, running the math that never stops.
And because that internal noise is so loud—and because you’re desperate to finally close those open loops—you do the logical thing: you look for a map. You reach out to the people who have already made it across the water to ask for directions.
But this is where the isolation gets a second, heavier layer.
You talk to a mentor. Someone who 'made it' twenty years ago. They’re standing on the far bank, shouting instructions back at you across the rapids. And they give you technically correct advice for a world that doesn't exist anymore.
They tell you to 'play the long game'—because when you have an established reputation and a decade of referral equity, the game actually feels long. To you, in 2026, the game is the next forty-eight hours. They talk to you about 'brand positioning' while you’re trying to figure out how to handle a client who just replaced your project lead with an AI prompt-engineer.
They describe problems you’d be grateful to have. They aren’t being cruel; they just can’t see the river between where they are and where you’re standing. They’re looking at a map of a forest that burned down five years ago.
And when you talk to the people closest to you. They see the tension. They notice when the quiet in the house is 'the wrong kind of quiet.' They want to help, but they can't. And in that gap—between seeing the pain and being powerless to fix it—a frustration builds.
On Alone, the contestants eventually realize that no one back home will ever truly understand the texture of the experience. You can show them the footage, but you can’t make them feel the specific weight of Day 41, when the fish aren't biting and a wolverine just stole your last bit of fat.
That’s the loneliness I’m talking about.
It’s not the absence of people. It’s the presence of people who love you, but cannot follow you into the room where the hard things live.
⸻
THE PIVOT
For a long time, I thought the primary stress of this life was the financial precarity. The jagged math of month-to-month survival. The silence between the invoice and the deposit.
The hard part is the high-stakes triage you have to perform in total isolation. It’s making a pivot-or-perish decision at 2:00 AM with no one in the trench with you. Not because you’re unloved, but because the trench is invisible to everyone else standing in the room.
And if you do this long enough, you develop a very specific, very dangerous skill: You become a professional performer of 'Okayness.'
You get good at the 'everything’s great' smile. You master the pivot in a conversation where you’re present in body, but your mind is three weeks out, staring at a dwindling bank balance. You learn how to absorb the loss of the moose, the sting of the snow, and the squelch of the wet boots—and then you walk into a client meeting looking like a million bucks.
That skill is useful. It’s how you stay in the game. But it’s also quietly, dangerously expensive.
Because 'performing' isn't free. It’s a high-interest loan against your soul. And if you’re only ever the performer—if there is no one who gets the unedited, unwashed version of your reality—the tab accumulates in a place you aren't watching.
On Alone, the data is startlingly consistent. The contestants who tap out between day 30 and day 45 rarely quit because they’re cold or hungry. They can handle the cold. They can manage the hunger.
They quit because they lose the psychological thread. They hit a Tuesday with no food, no feedback, and a phantom pain in their gut, and they realize they can no longer answer the question: 'Why am I still doing this?' It’s not that the answer doesn't exist. It’s that they’ve been performing 'Survivalist' for the camera for so long, they’ve forgotten where they put the person who actually wanted to be there.
The contestants who last the longest on Alone share a specific trait. It's not the best shelter. It's not the most sophisticated trapping system. It's not even the best caloric strategy, though that matters.
It's that at some point they stopped trying to win and started trying to not lose today.
They narrowed the frame down to what was actually manageable. Not the whole game — the whole game is unknowable, you can't see the other contestants, you can't control the weather, you can't make the moose cross the river. But today's fire. Today's protein. Today's camp. The small, completable, survivable version of the larger thing that would otherwise eat them alive.
That's not a motivational framework. It's not "think small to achieve big" or any of that. It's a survival mechanism. The nervous system needs something it can finish. Not the arc — the arc is too long and too uncertain to provide any real sustenance. The day. The week. The invoice that clears. The project that delivers. The episode that gets recorded and exists now where it didn't this morning.
The freelancers I've watched last — not the ones who got lucky, but the ones who are genuinely still standing seven, ten, fifteen years in — almost all describe a version of the same shift. Not the moment they figured out the business. The moment they stopped measuring themselves against the whole game and started measuring themselves against yesterday.
Did I survive yesterday. Can I survive today. Is there a version of tomorrow I can get to from here.
That's not giving up on the bigger thing. It's recognizing that the bigger thing is built entirely out of days. And the days are built out of small floors. And the small floors are the only thing you can actually construct when the weather is doing what the weather does and the moose walked past and your boots are wet.
The invisible forces are real. The compounding is real. The cosmic cruelty of watching the thing that would change everything stand just out of reach on the other side of the river — that's real, and it's not your fault, and it doesn't mean you picked the wrong life.
It means you're in the part nobody photographs. The part between the decision and the proof. The part that looks, from the outside, like nothing much is happening.
Something is happening. You're still here. On day 41, with wet boots, having just watched the moose walk away, making camp anyway.
That's not nothing. On most days, that's everything.
If you're in the early years right now — if you're in the part where the skills are real but the floor isn't built yet, where the math runs underneath every conversation including the ones that are supposed to be about something else, where the isolation is invisible to everyone who loves you and that almost makes it lonelier — I want to say something directly.
You are not doing it wrong.
The moose is not a sign. The snow is not a message. The wet boots are not the universe telling you to go back to the thing with the salary and the predictable Friday. They're just the terrain. They're just what the early years of this actually look like from the inside, which nobody showed you before you started, because the people who made it through don't fully remember the weather anymore. Memory compresses the hard parts. The footage doesn't.
The loneliness is real. The invisible trench is real. The performing of okayness and the cost of that performance and the way it accumulates somewhere you're not watching — all of it is real, and you're not weak for feeling the weight of it, and you're not broken for needing someone to witness it even when there's nobody available who can fully see it.
What I know about the people who make it through isn't that they were tougher or more talented or better at the math. It's that they found something to hold onto that had nothing to do with winning. A reason to make it to tomorrow that wasn't about the prize. The work itself. The thing they were building. The person they were becoming in the process of surviving the terrain.
Find that thing. Hold onto it on day 41 when the moose walks away and it starts to snow.
Make camp anyway.
—----------
So, here is what I’ll leave you with. Not a framework. Not a ‘five-step plan.’ Just an observation.
If there is someone in your life right now who is in those early, lean years—the ones quietly running the math behind their eyes, performing ‘okayness’ at the dinner table, driving home with the weight of a 31-degree river they can’t explain—check on them.
But don’t ask 'How’s business?' That’s just asking them to perform for you.
Try something closer to this: 'I know the wilderness you’re in is invisible. I just wanted you to know I see you standing in it.'
That isn’t a solution. It doesn’t make the moose cross the river or the snow stop falling. It’s just Witness. And sometimes, on Day 41, when the 'Performance of Okayness' has finally hollowed you out, Witness is the only floor available.
If that person is you—if you’re the one standing on the bank right now—know that the terrain isn't a verdict or punishment. The tiger isn't real. You're just in the woods.
Make camp anyway.
So Next week, we’re staying in the trench, but we’re looking at a different kind of survival.
We’re going back to 1839—to the afternoon a painter saw the very first camera and declared that his entire medium was dead. He was wrong, of course. But he was wrong in a way that perfectly mirrors the anxiety we’re all feeling right now.
We’re going to do a different kind of audit. We’re going to look at the work we’ve been making for the last decade and ask a question that’s been keeping me up at night:
Were a lot of us already operating like AI long before the AI actually arrived?
That’s next week though, until then
Stay curious. Stay courageous. And yeah — stay terrible.
SHOW NOTES
Podcast written, produced, and hosted by Patrick Fore. Music licensed through Epidemic Sound & Blue Dot Sessions. Episode photography from Adobe Stock & Unsplash. Recorded from my garage in San Diego, California.
Website: terriblephotographer.com
The Book: terriblephotographer.com/the-book
Support the show: terriblephotographer.com/support
Newsletter (Pub Notes): the-terrible-photographer.kit.com/223fe471fb
Instagram: @terriblephotographer / @patrickfore
⸻
PRODUCTION NOTES
The Dub scene is from Season 11, Episode 9 of Alone (History Channel / Netflix). The moose detail, the ethical shot reasoning, the falling into the river, and the quote are all confirmed from the episode. The snow starting immediately after the moose walks away is confirmed. Verify the 31-degree temperature detail before recording if citing it specifically.
The Jeff archetype and the phone call are kept archetypal throughout — no names, no identifying details. Both are framed universally so the listener inserts their own version.
The 'day 30-45 tap out' claim about Alone: this is directionally accurate based on viewer observation across multiple seasons but is not a cited statistic. Either verify before recording or soften the framing to 'most contestants who tap out do so in the middle stretch, not the beginning and not the end.'