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🎙️ The Creative Life — with Jim Kroft
This podcast is for creatives who’ve chosen the long road.
Each week, I take one aspect of the creative life — a breakthrough, a challenge, or a tool that’s helping me — and share what I’m learning from the inside.
I started the show because I couldn’t find what I needed: a companion for the real challenges of making art while building a life around it.
The podcast swings between the psychological traps we face and the practical tools that keep me going. It moves between mindset and method — but always comes back to how we keep showing up.
I’m Jim, your host. I’ve lived a long life in the arts — full of meteoric highs and humbling lows.
Here are a few stops from the journey:
🎸 Released 7 records — from major labels to van tours
🎥 Filmed 6 feature docs, screened at 200+ festivals
🧠 Built a creative business in Berlin since 2013
✍️ Top 1% on Substack for weekly consistency
📈 Raised nearly €100K for refugee & Ukraine war efforts
🎧 The Creative Life has hit the Apple Podcast charts
Thanks for being here,
Jim
🔗 Listen & Follow:
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When You Feel You Have Nothing to Give
Hello everyone, and welcome back to The Creative Life. I’m your host, Jim Kroft — and for anyone new to the podcast, I thought it might be good to introduce myself so you know who you’re dealing with. And for those of you who’ve been with me for a while, this is episode fifty — which feels like a real milestone. Thank you for all the energy and support along the way. It’s been an amazing journey, from speaking with people like Jay Clouse to Berlin musicians like Kid Be Kid, and it means the world to have you here.
I started out as a musician in London, touring all over the UK and Europe in the back of a van before eventually settling in Berlin. I rose through the underground here, signed a worldwide major label and publishing deal — and then, in 2013, lost it all.
That collapse forced a complete reinvention. I went back to zero, pivoted into filmmaking, and hustled my way through Berlin’s art scene without speaking a word of German. Over the next years, I made six documentaries that screened internationally — including The March of Hope during the refugee crisis and The Conversation of America during the rise of populism.
Since then, I’ve built a more stable creative life behind the camera, working with clients from Rolling Stone to Sony — while still making my own music, films, and long-form work.
So I know both sides of this path: the breakthroughs, the wipeouts, the rebuilding, and the daily grind. I still feel very much in the trenches with you — and this podcast is where I share that journey week by week.
Today’s episode begins with something very personal, and it’s really a companion piece to the last one — but where that episode was spontaneous and unscripted, full of raw ideas in real time, this one is more structured and goes deeper into the themes underneath.
It starts with a moment recently when I walked into my creative space and felt I had nothing left to give. But that difficult feeling unearthed something in me and pushed me to look more deeply at why we drift from the Self — and how we begin the return.
This episode is for any artist, writer, or creative who feels blocked, overwhelmed, or flooded by the pressures of modern life. Along the way, I draw on Jung’s sense of the block as a signal of psychic transformation, and on Joseph Campbell’s reminder that stuckness is often the threshold to a new direction.
We’ll explore three things:
Why what feels like emptiness is often the Self withdrawing energy from a life lived too externally.
How the societal and technological layers around us seep inward and flood the inner chamber.
And how returning to the centre — naming where we truly are — begins the map back to meaning and momentum.
If you’re going through a period of resistance or searching for the thread you’ve lost, I think today’s episode is going to be really helpful.
Finally guys, if you have a moment to rate and review the podcast, that will help me keep going for another 50 episodes!
Let’s dive in.
[Main Episode Content]
1. The Doorway Back to the Self
Yesterday I arrived in my creative space and felt I had nothing to give.
There were a dozen things I could do, but I needed to step back from all of it and examine the feeling.
What, after all, is the point of doing anything if you are not connected to it?
Now, I know that action creates momentum and that meaning often reemerges once you’re in motion.
But equally, the danger with action for action’s sake is that you ignore something deeper inside yourself.
I didn’t feel depressed and I didn’t feel empty.
But I did have a sense that there was something in my core that was speaking to me, and that, despite being in a positive period, I had not made space to listen to it.
Unusually for me, I abandoned all my usual routines, rituals and habits, and decided to face the feeling. And wrote this sentence on my whiteboard:
Some days, you feel you have nothing to give.
In doing so, it opened a doorway into where I am creatively, what holds meaning for me, and why I am drifting in certain areas.
Today’s letter is about how we can build a map back to the creative Self by having the courage to write a single honest sentence that names where we are.
2. The Difficulty With Emptiness
What jarred me on arrival was that my instinct was to trigger my default: write a list, nudge myself into action, and trust that meaning would emerge along the way.
And yet, a creative life can quickly become dominated by doing.
We’re urged everywhere to act — to rise at 4 a.m., compress our timelines, and cast ourselves as the heroes of our own productivity narratives.
But looking at myself, I realised what was needling me:
Action had become a compulsion — my safety net.
The very capacity that usually propels me forward had, paradoxically, become its own form of blockage.
Since coming back from summer, life has been objectively good. I’ve had plenty of work, satisfied clients, a regular gym routine, and a solid rhythm with my two weekly pillars — this Substack and my YouTube channel.
But what we are doing never tells the whole story. Sometimes what we are doing covers up something deeper — something we want to get to but can’t quite reach.
That was the moment I recognised it clearly:
I feel blocked.
To help myself understand, I wrote the flow chart you saw above.
In it, I:
Named the problem
Expressed the feeling
Suggested a counter
Defined some aims
Clarified the meaning
Useful, yes.
But on reflection, I realised I was merely documenting the sequence of how I got here — rather than addressing the core.
I needed to go deeper into what I might call my psychic telemetry.
So I started again. This time not with a list, but with a circle. In the centre, I wrote “me.”
It felt good:
To relocate Self in the centre
To return to the core
To visualise it with simplicity rather than complexity
From there, I had a true starting point — a place from which I could examine the pushes and pulls of my creative life.
And this was the first real breakthrough:
My shadow side had been using action as a form of avoidance.
3. Mapping the Self at the Centre
The word “me” felt unsatisfactory, and so, in the next iteration, it became “I.”
“Me” was too entangled with society — with identity, wants, jobs, taxes, reputation, responsibility, and the perception of others.
By shifting the language from me to I, I began to build a psychic construct: a layered map of the Self.
At the centre, the essential “I”; surrounding it, the realm where we interact with the world — the pressures, expectations, and roles that shape our daily lives.
I returned to my original sentence — Some days you feel you have nothing to give — and began to question it.
Was it really that I had nothing to give?
Or was something within me becoming dormant or hesitant because of the constant pulls from the outer layers of my life?
I sensed that my inner architecture had been flooded.
Thinking further, I started to consider the relationship between the Self, Ego, Society, and creative aspiration in what it means to be a person in 2025.
There is not just one outer layer, but a second, more pervasive one:
The technological layer — social media, metrics, output, the demand for relentless consistency, and the ever-humming content machine.
Visualising this helped me name what had been unspoken:
This outer tech layer does not just influence the societal layer; it seeps inward, flooding the inner realm.
Only by visualising the architecture of my psyche could I see that I was not empty — I was flooded.
4. The Flooding of the Inner Life
I realised that so much was seeping in from the outside that, on some level, my innermost Self felt overwhelmed — not empty, but flooded.
In the visualisation above, you can see this clearly: all the external input seeping through the societal layer and cracking open the inner chamber. The boundary between Self and world had thinned.
One of the most devastating effects of this flooding is something we now see everywhere: the confusion of identity with performance.
That which I am becomes defined by how what I post performs.
This inversion has made our culture half-mad.
Our internal state is no longer sourced from within but is continually recalibrated in response to perceived reactions from the outside.
I consider myself relatively grounded. I’ve done years of psychoanalytic work and have built strong internal frameworks — yet I am not immune to this vortex. As I wrote in The Comparison Trap, none of us are.
One of the ways I’ve attempted to resist the ubiquity of shallow digital culture (and my distaste for short-form performance content) is by leaning into long-form expression — this Substack, my YouTube channel, and the podcast. These platforms allow me to explore depth, build meaning, and engage in genuine exchange.
And yet, even long-form has its psychic cost.
Weekly consistency just takes time.
Time that must be taken from somewhere.
And if you are juggling freelance work, life responsibilities, and the never-ending flow of modern demands, then very quickly your deepest creative Self can be flooded to the point of drowning.
It is not just output that exhausts us — it is intake too.
We are full on the outside and full on the inside…and there is no room left for the Self to breathe.
Creativity can easily become dominated by output rather than expression itself.
As I worked through these visualisations, I saw the psychic cost of this flooding:
Loss of meaning
Disconnection from joy
Creative paralysis (expressed in my current musical block)
The feeling “I have nothing to give” was not a lack of creativity — it was the Self withdrawing energy from the sense of living on a hamster wheel.
5. The Invitation of the Block
This realisation led me back to Pathways to Bliss by Joseph Campbell — specifically to chapter seven, where he explores Jung’s understanding of blockage not as failure, but as a signal of transformation.
I’ve known this intimately throughout my life. In fact, not one major creative breakthrough I’ve experienced has arrived without being preceded by a period of deep stuckness.
We tend to think we are blocked because we don’t know what to do next. But more often, we are blocked because something deep in the psyche has lodged itself in place and is refusing to move.
It is saying:
You’re on the wrong dam path — it’s time to stop and you will not move until you see that you need to shift course.
In that, stuckness always carries an invitation.
The only question is:
Will we stop long enough to hear what it has to say?
In affording myself the time to visualise things, I realised quickly what had been needling me:
I have lost momentum musically.
After the discipline of writing the songs and releasing six over the course of the year, I hit a lull. It began while I was away, and when I returned, life filled up immediately — client work, production schedules, travel, deadlines. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, I played less and less… until I stopped altogether.
Yuk.
There was a frustration, then a sadness and then just a feeling of total and utter resistance.
In Jungian terms, this is not resistance against music itself — but resistance against the conditions under which I have been making it.
6. The Pathway Back?
I’ve realised over the last 24 hours that I am not creating the conditions in which I can actually be inside my love of music.
I see this in so many musicians who were once full-time, or professional, or who trained seriously and then lost the thread.
There comes a point where the severance grows so wide that you feel—even if you summoned all your energy and focus—you could never get back to where you once were.
And so the outer layers begin to control the inner layer of Self: the part that loves music, that knows there is no other thing which gives such a sense of communion with the language of the universe.
And yet the Persona — the part that has adapted to society, to work, to financial worry, to status, to managing a life — finds fewer and fewer reasons to go back to that inner space.
Or rather: more and more reasons not to.
Those reasons tend to circle two painful beliefs:
I’ll never get back to where I was technically.
There’s no point — if it hasn’t worked by now, it never will.
And yet, when the Self gives in to the Persona in this way, something in you begins to die.
All I know is that, for me, that is spiritually unacceptable.
Which is why, upon arriving at Mahalla yesterday, I felt with absolute clarity:
I need to have a deep conversation with myself.
7. Conclusion: Rebuilding From The Core
It is easy, when we find ourselves blocked, to feel that we are failing or somehow deficient.
It’s utterly gnawing — to love something deeply, and yet find yourself unable to reach it.
But sometimes the block is not a weight. It is a form of the soul’s protest.
And the truth is: you cannot move that block with the same tools that got you there in the first place.
Some things will not be moved by force.
Rather, they want us to listen to what they are demanding we must change.
Returning to yourself is really about whether you have the courage to listen — or not.
With so much flooding our inner space, sometimes the hardest thing is to take the simplest route.
Here’s what helped me begin the return:
Starting with a single honest sentence
Naming the feeling
Building out a few ideas that might point the way
Inviting in new ones, without needing immediate solutions
Having the courage not to fix everything at once
Spending time with the problem, rather than outrunning it
Remembering that a block is not permanent — and that it can be moved
The block was not telling me to stop creating.
It was asking me to return to the centre of what I am really here to make.
I am in a critical moment — the time in a long project when it can drift away altogether, or when you can find your way back to the heart of it.
How I answer that is for the future.
But for now, I am back in my own heart.
It began with a single sentence, and it led to a visualisation of my entire being.
I hope that wherever you find yourself, you can be gentle with your own block.
Because though there is a time for action, sometimes the most important work is what precedes the action:
That is: knowing it comes from your own heart first.