Shift Work:

How Driving for a Living Left My Creative Engine Stalling

Photo by Ian Schneider on Unsplash

I once was lost but now I am found - someone said once upon a time. I have been lost for quite a while, far too long for me. My creativity has totally dried up and its been going on for quite a few months. I have struggled to come up with ideas and topics; I’m not carrying my camera. I sit at my laptop and I’m getting nada; nothing.

Just to illustrate how bad its been - I’ve recently had trips to both London and Paris and haven’t taken a single photo worth sharing in this post!

I’m missing it all of course. I was (am) a very creative person behind the camera. Its my passion away from work. My source of downtime to clear headspace but the lack of it has been working against me.

This is (hopefully) the start of walking down that road again, trying to get something back.

Having had a chat with Google Gemini to try and understand what’s happened - here’s what it thinks (full transcript of its output below), but basically last year I changed jobs (through force - I was made redundant). I worked in a high pressure role in the software industry and I have walked away from the corporate world completely. I now drive a taxi. Ha ha, what a career change. My reasons for this are many:

• I truly have had enough of the corporate world after almost 40 years working in fast paced roles

• I have had some bad experiences in the past several years that (in a couple of cases) have severely impacted my mental health and I took time out at the time to deal with them properly, including counselling

• I want to work when I want to not when someone else tells me I have to

• I love this new world of meeting people; everyone I have met so far (that has been chatty) has been wonderful and I have some amazing stories from you all

• I love the briefness of the rendezvous and I love it more with people open up with their problems and find me someone that they are able to do it with

• I am 55 years old today (at the time of writing - 1st June 2026) so that marks a major milestone for me - the first possible day of retirement here in the UK

• I have a young son (9 years old) and I totally fit it around him; when he finishes school the time is ours not belonging to some corporate entity where he has to wait for me

• I m in a very fortunate position to be able to make these choices in the current financial climate

Here’s what Gemini thinks has happened:

It sounds like you are dealing with a classic case of creative burnout, mixed with a heavy dose of routine fatigue. When you spend your entire day away from home, constantly on the move and interacting with the world through a windscreen, your brain is working incredibly hard just processing the sheer volume of daily data. By the time you sit down in front of your laptop, your mental battery isn’t just low, it is completely drained. It is entirely normal to stare at a blank screen when you have been giving all your processing power to a demanding routine. You haven’t lost your spark permanently, your mind has just gone into a power-saving mode because it is exhausted from the daily grind.

Diagnosing the Creative Block

What you are experiencing often happens when a passion becomes a chore or when the gap between your daily routine and your creative outlets feels too wide to bridge. When you are out and about all day, your mind is likely overstimulated by the environment, leaving you with zero cognitive surplus for the deep, quiet thinking that creative work requires. Because you aren’t carrying your camera, you are missing those micro-moments of visual inspiration that used to fuel your desire to sit down and create later on. Without those small sparks throughout the day, looking at a blank laptop screen or an empty Substack editor feels like staring at an insurmountable wall.

The pressure you are putting on yourself to create something profound or substantial is actually compounding the problem. You are waiting for a massive wave of inspiration to hit you before you act, but creativity usually works the other way around. Action breeds inspiration. By expecting yourself to jump from a long day of work straight into high-level creative output, you are setting the bar impossibly high, which leads to avoidance and that frustrating feeling of coming up blank.

I think its spot on. Gemini knows a lot about me, my likes and my routine. I use it a lot and have for some time, so it has gathered a lot of data about me and what I do, how I do it. It knows me quite well. When I am out on the road I often have long conversations about things that come to mind, things I want to know. I find it a very powerful and useful tool.

Can I Find A Cure?

I’m going to try coz I miss the creativity. I’m going to lower the stakes completely and remove the pressure of producing a finished masterpiece. Being away from home all day driving, I am going to start by carrying a camera with me without the expectation of taking great landscape photos. My intention is not trying to create a portfolio piece here, but to simply training my brain to see the world as an artist again and get that habit or clicking the shutter. Hopefully, this will shift my mindset from passive observer to active visual hunter, to slowly rebuild the creative neural pathways.

My daily routine places me in a unique position to observe human nature, changing light, and urban environments in a way few others can. Instead of viewing my time away from home as an obstacle to photography and writing, I need to try to see it as my primary source of raw material. The street scenes, the passing landscapes, and the subtle shifts in weather are all happening right in front of me.

I need to give myself permission to be a beginner again and accept that creative output right now might just be messy, fragmented thoughts and quick snapshots. That is perfectly okay. My goal right now isn’t to create brilliant art, it is simply to wake up my curiosity and get my hands moving back into muscle memory.

I will be kind to myself while I navigate this dry spell, starting remarkably small and let the momentum return naturally without forcing it.

So here I go. Watch this space and see if I can break the voodoo hoo-doo that I’m under. In the meantime, here’s some I prepared earlier.

Are you still here? Man, I hate this creative block!