Rethinking the transactional expectations we’ve built around creativity
The Smile Policy
I spent fourteen years behind counters, headsets, and glowing screens where the smile policy was as binding as the dress code. You learn the choreography early: the greeting that catches before it lands, the apology you deliver whether or not anything is your fault, the way you hold your shoulders when someone is hunting for a reason to be angry and your body volunteers to be the reason. “How are you today?” is asked the way a fingerprint technician rolls a thumb — efficient, practiced, barely touching the human beneath. The register drawer snicks open. A barcode bleats. You say thank you for the privilege of absorbing someone else’s weather.
When the Script Follows You Home
In those rooms, politeness isn’t a virtue; it’s a payment method. You make change in apologies. You issue refunds in tone. You clock out and the performance keeps going in your chest, the phantom uniform still trying to please the air. It took me years to realize that when I walked away from those jobs, a significant portion of that choreography followed me into art.
When you begin presenting creative work in public — words, images, objects made by hand — you meet a strangely familiar creature: the customer who is not a customer, the audience member who believes they are owed a performance of deference. They don’t buy a book so much as buy your availability. They don’t read a post so much as audit your etiquette. The transaction isn’t about the piece, it’s about whether you, the maker, are willing to assume the posture of service.
Professionalism and Other Fluorescent Words
That posture looks like this: be grateful for attention. Offer explanations before they’re asked for. Soften every edge. Preempt conflict with disclaimers, and then apologize because the disclaimer might have been the wrong size. Invite feedback but accept it as judgment. When you’re praised, say it wasn’t much. When you’re criticized, smile and promise to be better. Above all, let the other party feel right. You can sell that posture in hourly increments or embed it into your personality like a watermark; either way, you will be told you are “professional.”
Professional. A clean word that smells faintly of citrus and fluorescent light. I’ve been called professional in the moments I felt most absent from myself.
The Service Logic of Art
The assumption underneath all this — what I’m calling the service logic — is simple: if I am the recipient of your labor, I am also the keeper of your behavior. In retail, this is the “customer is always right” spell. In the creator economy, it arrives disguised as “accountability,” “transparency,” “engagement,” or “community standards.” It says a maker is only as good as the degree to which they convert themselves into a customer-facing interface.
Fluorescent Words, Digital Counters
There are days where it feels like we’ve been retrained to accept this as truth. Consider the language that has quietly domesticated our work: deliverables, pipelines, content calendars, customer journeys, dashboards. You can feel the fluorescent light in the words. I used to scan UPCs; now I scan metrics. The beeps changed keys, that’s all.
And I will tell you a secret learned on late shifts: the more “professional” the behavior demanded of you, the more likely what you offer is being treated as interchangeable. Real goods require attention, patience, care; interchangeable goods require protocols. And protocols don’t like personality. Protocols want you to be polite because polite is predictable.
You can hear the echo in creative spaces. “Can you make the ending more upbeat?” — as if I’m boxing pastries and you want the chocolate one, not the custard. “Could you add a content warning for grief, betrayal, disappointment, rain, sharp corners, and the moon?” — as if caution tape can make a wilderness safe to walk. “I don’t like the tone,” says someone who believes the correct tone is whatever would ensure their appetite proceeds undisturbed. “I would support you if you were nicer about it.” And there it is: a tip jar tied to a muzzle.
I’m not pretending audience relationships don’t matter. They do. But there is a difference between care and compliance, and the service logic cannot tell them apart. Service logic believes the most trustworthy creator is the one most fluent in apology. It trains us to parade our wounds to prove we’re humane, and then scolds us for bleeding on the carpet. It asks for vulnerability like a receipt: show me you have suffered, in the correct cadence, with the correct disclaimers, and then I’ll deem you safe to read.
Surveillance with Manners
Let me say this as clearly as I can: the demand for endless transparency is not intimacy. It is surveillance with manners.
What happens to the work under surveillance? It starts learning to perform gratitude instead of truth. It learns to manage expectations instead of learning how to exceed them. It stops growing teeth. It becomes a very good listener even in places it should be loud. It conducts its own risk assessments before it reaches for a risk. It builds a polite fence around its wildness and calls it “brand.”
The Clerk Inside the Creator
I recognize this because I did it for a living. I learned exactly how to walk a store floor so no one would feel unattended. I learned the tone that defuses complaint. I learned how to accept blame for structural problems I couldn’t fix, because the point was to make the moment disappear quickly. In the old days, it was a returned item; in the new days, it’s an uncomfortable paragraph. The ritual is the same: the clerk eats the conflict so the store keeps humming. We’ve just taught creators to be their own clerks.
The Global Mall
And the store? It’s bigger now. Social platforms are global malls, and every creator is both kiosk and greeter. The signage reads COMMUNITY in letters tall enough to see from orbit. But the mall doesn’t love you. It only loves the behaviors that keep it full. Watch how it rewards the performance of process over the messy dignity of craft. Watch how it gamifies “building in public” into hourly proof you’re not falling behind, how it turns mutual learning into a stage show where you must demonstrate stamina or be forgotten. Watch how it insists on constant presence while visiting you with the forgetfulness of a god.
Mystery Isn’t a Customer Service Failure
One of the strangest side effects of this environment is the way it teaches both creators and audiences to mistrust silence. If you’re not posting, you must be hiding. If you don’t respond, you must be guilty. If you set a boundary, you must be ungrateful. Politeness can’t abide opacity. It thinks a closed door is an insult. But opacity is one of art’s oldest rights. Every good piece refuses to explain itself at least a little. Mystery isn’t a customer service failure.
Accountability and the Customer Is Always Right
There is also the matter of accountability, that word large enough to hide inside of. True accountability is reciprocal and specific: we agree to terms, we honor them, and if one of us breaks faith, we repair it or part ways. The service version of accountability is unidirectional and ambient: you owe me a manner, indefinitely, regardless of whether I owe you anything at all. In my old jobs, the service version wore a name tag and a schedule; in the creative economy, it arrives as a DM with a tone. The expectation is identical: perform deference first, then we can talk.
We need to say a forbidden thing: audiences can be wrong about what serves the work. A customer can be wrong about what solves their problem. Sometimes being of true service means refusing the request. In stores, this looked like not performing a fraudulent return. In art, it looks like refusing to declaw a story so it can be carried into polite drawing rooms without incident.
You Don’t Get a Refund if the Story Grows Teeth
“You don’t get a refund if the story grows teeth.” That line is truer than it is polite. It’s the kind of sentence someone will screenshot to prove I lack bedside manner. But art isn’t a hospital gown with an open back; it’s a garment you cut on the bias, stitch unevenly, align by hand against a body that moves. There must be room for unexpected seams, for fabric that fights you, for the dress to teach you how it wants to fall.
If this sounds like a manifesto, good. I’m tired of the hush around the real costs of politeness. I’m tired of the way creators inherit a tone from businesses that would replace them tomorrow without blinking. I’m tired of being told that the only trustworthy artist is the one who never asks anything of their audience but permission to continue apologizing for existing.
Reclaiming the Workshop
Let me try to describe what a different arrangement might look like.
First, we stop calling everyone a customer. The word is useful in stores because it describes a narrow interaction: you exchange money for a defined good or service, with protections in place for both sides. Art breaks those borders on purpose. Once you let a piece into your home, it behaves the way weather behaves: it arrives, changes things, leaves remnants. You don’t ask for a refund if the storm was too blue.
Real Hospitality vs. The Hospitality Industry
Second, we practice the kind of hospitality that isn’t hospitality industry. It’s worth saying outright: even “authentic” warmth can be faked at scale. I’ve worked in places where the performance of real connection was so carefully choreographed you could time it with the espresso shot — where sitting down at a customer’s table wasn’t generosity, it was a KPI. That kind of engineered intimacy teaches workers to counterfeit genuine welcome while pretending it’s a gift.
True hospitality is quieter. It’s not a smile timed to the transaction; it’s the structuring of a space that grants dignity to whoever enters — maker and visitor both. If you’ve ever been in a kitchen where the host actually sits down with you, not because it’s policy but because they’re part of the meal, you know the difference. You are not entertained; you are welcomed. The room doesn’t pretend to be perfect. The door closes when it needs to, and that’s part of why it’s beautiful.
Boundaries, Pauses, and Mutual Gratitude
Third, we say yes to boundaries so we can say yes to bolder work. When I was a clerk, my boundaries were a laminated policy sheet. In art, my boundary is a commitment to the work’s integrity. That means there will be days I don’t soften language. There will be topics I simply won’t discuss in public. There will be messes I keep private because private is where they can turn into something worth bringing you later. If your trust in me depends on constant disclosure, you are not trusting me — you are outsourcing your anxiety to my calendar.
Fourth, we reintroduce the sacred pause. Not every discomfort in the presence of a piece requires the maker to intervene. There is a dependable wisdom in waiting: the mismatch between you and the work sometimes resolves into understanding, or it clarifies into a clean “this isn’t for me.” Both outcomes are honorable. Neither requires customer service.
Finally, we remember that gratitude is a relationship, not an act. I’m grateful to be read. I’m grateful that people spend unrepeatable hours on things I’ve made. But gratitude expressed as groveling is just another way to keep a maker on their knees. The healthier form is mutual: I make attentively; you read attentively; we meet with our spines intact. If money changes hands, it does so without anyone pretending they bought the other’s soul.
Who’s Serving Whom, What, and Why?
There’s a cliché that art should “serve” the audience. I understand the spirit of it — art is not a sealed vault — but the verb makes me itch. Serve how? By telling people what they already know? By confirming tastes they’ve trained into reflex? By filing the serial numbers off of anything controversial so it can pass inspection? That’s not service; that’s sedation.
Art serves best when it treats the audience not as customers to keep satisfied but as witnesses who can be surprised, provoked, moved, or even productively estranged. If you’ve ever left a room slightly altered by what you saw or read, you know the difference. No one smiling at a counter made that happen. It happened because someone refused to behave like a clerk while making the thing you just carried home in your chest.
I don’t think we can fix the entire infrastructure that trained us to conflate niceness with worth. I don’t think creators can opt out of every algorithm or every expectation. But we can refuse to carry the worst of it into our workshops. We can stop offering apologies as the packaging for our work. We can design our studios, our websites, our notes-to-readers, our shop pages, our shipping emails even, to sound like we are speaking from a table we own — not from a service desk at the end of a mall corridor where the clock flickers and a manager counts our smiles on a clipboard.
I’ve been that person, and I’m not ashamed of them. They got good at surviving because the room required it. But they are not allowed to choose my sentences anymore. They are not allowed to approach a poem with a returns policy or to point at a story’s shadow and ask me to “brighten it up for the customer.” They can rest. I will keep the parts of them that know how to be kind without begging and discard the parts that equate kindness with disappearing.
Other Lights to Steer By
There is a quieter closing scene I like better than the opening. It looks like this: the workshop is dim, but not the way a store is dim at closing — no fluorescent buzz, no apology hum. Tools are in their places. Something unfinished breathes on the table because it isn’t worried about disappointing a stranger; it’s worried about becoming more itself. On the door, a sign that doesn’t say OPEN or CLOSED, just a simple request: knock, and wait. When you come in, I will welcome you as a guest, not as an audit. If you don’t like what is here, the path back outside is clear and unblocked. If you do, you are free to stay and witness the making as long as you remember I’m not here to sell you my voice in the register’s tone.
Art isn’t customer service. It doesn’t promise the right size in every color. It doesn’t ask you if you found everything you were looking for because it knows the best visits end when you carry away something you couldn’t name before. It also doesn’t owe you a smile to prove it deserves to exist. It will be courteous when courtesy is true, and it will be silent when silence protects the work. And when it reaches toward you, it will do so from the full height of its spine, asking nothing but the one thing the malls could never sell: your unpurchased attention.
If that costs us a few stars on someone’s satisfaction survey, so be it. There are other lights to steer by.
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