There’s a stubborn idea that real creativity comes from struggle, isolation and pain. We’ve been sold the myth of the “suffering genius,” a romantic picture of Vincent van Gogh, Frida Kahlo or even Steve Jobs toiling in agony until something brilliant comes out. The story says great art or invention has to be painful, slow and laborious to count. The fear of plagiarism runs the same program from the other side: it enforces the lone-genius myth, which serves the companies that own creative work more than the people doing it.
What if creativity can come from joy, curiosity and collaboration instead? We’ve made suffering the only legitimate route to work of value, and that shuts out a lot of people, especially neurodivergent creators who use AI or other technology to streamline their work and are made to feel their creations are “less than” because they didn’t come from the “right” kind of hard work.
Time and Privilege: Who Gets to Be Creative
Toil fetishism attaches to time as well as to emotional suffering: the longer something takes to make, the more it’s assumed to be worth. That favors people with the time and money to spend months or years on a single project. Historically, creative fields belonged to the financially privileged, from the patrons of Renaissance Europe to the well-off members of 19th-century literary salons.
Working-class and marginalized creators are juggling jobs, caregiving and everything else, and have less time to give. Their work gets taken less seriously simply because they can’t put months or years into it, and people without time to spare get pushed to the edges of the creative world.
The Invisible Labor Myth: Why We Assume Suffering Equals Value
When we look at a painting or listen to a new song, we tend to assume its value lies partly in the labor we can’t see: the hours, the emotional struggle, the suffering behind it. That invisible labor gets treated as the essence of real creativity, and work that came quickly or without visible struggle gets written off.
Creators who use tools or methods that cut the time and effort involved, whether AI, digital platforms or collaboration, are seen as taking shortcuts, and their work is ranked lower even when it’s original and good. For neurodivergent creators and those from marginalized backgrounds, that bias is one more barrier to recognition. Why should a tool that makes creation easier or faster disqualify the work from being taken seriously?
Toil Fetishism Isn’t Just a Creative Problem—It’s a Business One, Too
Business has the same obsession. There, value is attached to future labor, work that hasn’t happened yet but is expected to produce profits later. Companies are valued on how much labor they can extract from their workers in the future, and that labor is counted on with little regard for what it costs the people doing it.
In both art and business, the worship of toil, whether past and invisible or future and not yet done, keeps exploitation and exclusion going. Marginalized creators are shut out of artistic spaces that glorify toil, and marginalized workers are pushed into exploitative conditions in the name of future productivity.
How Toil and Time Keep Creators and Workers Out
Toil and time work as gatekeeping. Critics, curators and institutions tend to favor work that shows traditional, labor-intensive processes, and dismiss work made quickly or by other means, such as digital art or AI-generated music, as inauthentic or inferior. The resulting hierarchy pushes out anyone who can’t or won’t meet those expectations, for lack of time, access or desire.
In business, workers are expected to keep producing at unsustainable rates to hold up a company’s projected value, with little concern for their well-being, and marginalized workers are the most likely to be exploited this way. In both spheres, toil fetishism excludes, exploits and entrenches the inequalities already there.
Internalizing Toil Fetishism: The Damage to Creators’ Self-Worth
The worst effect may be that creators and workers absorb these expectations. They start to doubt their own legitimacy if a piece didn’t take long enough or wasn’t hard enough to make, and they stick to traditional, labor-intensive processes even when faster or more inventive methods are available, which stifles the creativity the processes were supposed to prove.
For marginalized creators the damage is worse. Neurodivergent creators who rely on tools or time-saving methods to manage their creative flow often feel their work isn’t valid because it didn’t come out of suffering.
The same goes for working-class creators who don’t have years to spend perfecting a single piece. Once they take on these expectations, they limit their own work and feel shut out of the spaces where they should be thriving.
Breaking Free from the Fetishization of Toil
Getting rid of toil fetishism means changing how we value creativity and labor. In the arts, that means dropping the idea that creativity has to come from prolonged labor and suffering and judging the work itself: what’s new in it, what it means, what it does. If traditional, AI-assisted and fast methods all count, more people and more perspectives get in.
In business, it means no longer treating future labor as an infinite resource to exploit. A company should be valued by how well it supports its workforce, not by how much toil it can extract from them later. That would favor sustainable labor practices and workers’ well-being, and make the economy fairer.
Let’s Redefine Value: Innovation Over Toil
In creative and professional work alike, value should be measured by what the finished work means, what it does and what’s new in it. Creators and workers would then be valued for what they contribute, however much or little suffering, time or unseen effort it took.