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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.
Your Content Sucks
Subtitle: How creativity got hijacked by clicks, algorithms, and marketing funnels.
I hate the word content. There, I said it. It’s the most soul-sucking, art-flattening word we’ve let into our creative vocabulary. Content. Filler. Noise. Stuff to keep people scrolling.
I didn’t become a photographer to create content. And if you’re listening to this? You probably didn’t either.
Welcome to The Terrible Photographer Podcast. I’m Patrick Fore, and today we’re talking about how creativity got hijacked—and why I’m done playing the content game.
[SEGMENT 1: The Rise of the “Content Creator”
Length: ~6:00 – Bourdain-style observational rant, full of imagery.
Remember when we were artists? Storytellers? Creatives? Now, we’re “content creators.” A phrase that means nothing and everything at once.
YouTube, TikTok, Instagram—they don’t want your art. They want your output. Your volume. Your attention. They want your creativity packaged as product. Predictable. Digestible. Monetizable.
And we’ve bought in. We’ve embraced it. We’ve made calendars and schedules and funnels. We’ve started treating our ideas like commodities, measuring their worth by clicks, views, likes. As if a like is the same as being seen.
When did we stop making photographs and start making content? When did we trade our curiosity for consistency? When did every moment, every project, every tiny spark have to be captured, curated, and published for mass consumption?
I can tell you this: it wasn’t when we were at our best. It wasn’t when we were making something we actually believed in.
And look, I’m not immune to this. I’ve been sucked in too. There was a time when I couldn’t stop scrolling. TikTok, Instagram—every swipe, a tiny hit of dopamine. I deleted TikTok off my phone because I could feel it—this addiction to distraction, to consumption. And the worst part? I wasn’t just consuming it. I was contributing to it.
Do I really want my work to be just another drip in someone else’s dopamine feed? Another scroll-past moment that doesn’t stick?
There’s a quiet guilt in realizing you’ve helped someone waste their time. That you’ve made something that didn’t ask them to feel or think—just to keep moving.
[SEGMENT 2: What We Lost When We Became Content Creators]
Length: ~7:30 – Critical, but with humor. Honest reflection with data.
Here’s the cost: we’ve stopped making things for the sake of making them.
We’ve started producing, not creating. Measuring our worth in analytics, not in how we feel about the work. Asking “Will this perform?” before “Is this real?”
You know those YouTube influencers. The gear reviewers, the funnel hackers, the “10 Secrets to Blow Up on Instagram” folks. They’re not selling creativity—they’re selling the performance of creativity. Selling to other photographers, not clients. Not viewers. They exist to keep the machine running.
And we let them in. We let them define success.
And what did we lose? We lost the weird ideas. The personal projects. The time spent experimenting. The shots that don’t “fit the feed.” The stuff that maybe didn’t get likes but stayed with you. The stuff that cost you something.
Here’s some data for you. Social media studies show that posts with bright colors, faces, sunsets—simple, happy, high-contrast stuff—perform the best. Quick videos? Always at the top. Not because they’re good. Because they’re fast. Easy. Disposable.
Thumbnails? Bright, expressive faces, bold text, ridiculous reactions—that’s the formula. Not depth. Not nuance. Just a dopamine hit on the way to the next scroll. YouTube says that 90% of their best-performing videos use custom thumbnails designed to grab attention, not to say anything real.
Now, thirst traps—let’s be honest. Perfectly lit portraits designed to tease, to hook, to gather followers not because of the work, but because of the skin. Instagram’s algorithm eats them up. They get pushed to the top. Not because they challenge you, but because they’re predictable. And they work.
It’s easy. It’s effective. It’s cheap. And yeah, it brings in likes, followers, engagement.
But art? Art does something different.
Could you imagine walking up to Richard Avedon, or Irving Penn, or Diane Arbus and calling them “content creators”? They’d laugh you out of the room—or maybe just hand you their camera and say, “Here, try making something that matters.”
They didn’t create to fill a schedule. They created because they had something to say. Because they saw something no one else did—and couldn’t let it go.
[SEGMENT 3: Fast-Food Art and the Middle Finger to the Algorithm]
Length: ~6:00 – Rant elevated to a manifesto.
Fast-food art. That’s what this is. Quick, easy, predictable, tastes okay—but manufactured for an algorithm. Designed for clicks, not connection. Engineered to feed a machine, not your soul.
The algorithm wants happy. It wants simple. It wants fast. And we’re out here spoon-feeding it exactly what it wants.
I say screw that. Screw fast food for the eyes. Screw the system that rewards sameness and punishes risk. I want to start something different—a middle finger to the algorithm. A call to make something that makes you feel something different than what a thirst trap can give you.
Make something that lingers. That sticks. That makes someone stop—not just scroll.
Art isn’t efficient. Art isn’t optimized. Art is messy, and hard, and sometimes weird as hell.
And we need more of it.
We are not dopamine dealers. We’re not here to keep the scroll going. We’re here to break it. To offer something real.
You can be successful without being a slave to the scroll. You can find your people without losing your voice. But first, you’ve got to stop feeding the beast.
[OUTRO / CREATIVE CHALLENGE]
Length: ~2:00 – Grounded, actionable.
Here’s the move this week: Don’t make content. Make something you don’t post.
Shoot something weird. Something risky. Something you keep to yourself.
And if someone asks if you’re a content creator? Say no. Say you make photographs. You tell stories. You create art.
That’s it. See you next time—and stay terrible.