How to Create Art When the World Feels Chaotic? (and Is It Selfish?)

With all the overwhelming things happening in the world right now, making art can seem out of place or even selfish. This post explores why creating still matters and how to keep painting during difficult times.

Sometimes it feels strange or even inappropriate to sit down and paint when the news is so scary and there’s such uncertainty and so much suffering in the world. If you’re an artist, chances are you’re quite sensitive and you may feel like you’re supposed to be doing something more important or that you don’t deserve some quiet time with the things you love when there is war, hunger, and injustice in the world.

But here’s the truth: Creating art is not withdrawing from the world. It is strengthening the inner resources you need to live in it. Here’s how:

1. Regulating yourself helps the world around you

When people are overwhelmed, or anxious they become reactive and exhausted.

Creative practice helps regulate the nervous system. When you paint, your breathing slows, your focus narrows, and your mind settles.

This doesn’t remove the problems of the world, but it helps you show up with clarity instead of panic.

A calmer person:
- thinks more clearly
- treats others better
- makes wiser decisions

That alone already benefits the people around you. When you have the emotional and mental bandwidth, you are more likely to help others.

2. Art preserves attention and humanity

When everything around us is chaotic, people tend to move toward numbing, like endless scrolling or your addiction of choice (food, alcohol, drugs, shopping, gambling, etc). Creating art interrupts that pattern. It asks you to look carefully at color, light, shapes.

That act of attention is meaningful. It reminds us that beauty still exists, even during difficult times.

3. Creating something tangible restores agency

When the world is overwhelming, many things are outside our control.

Painting is one small space where you can still:
- make decisions
- create something with your hands

This sense of agency matters psychologically. It reminds you that you are not powerless.

And people who feel less powerless are more likely to engage with the world constructively.

4. Art can steady others too

Even when you create for yourself, your work can affect others.

A painting or a shared process can:
- calm someone
- inspire someone to start creating
- give someone a moment of peace

Art has always done this.

5. Daily practice becomes a form of resilience

In difficult times, daily painting becomes:
- structure in the day
- a grounding ritual
- a reminder that life continues

If you want to read more about how daily practice benefits us, read this post.

Many artists created some of their most meaningful work during difficult times. Claude Monet painted many of his famous works while grieving his wife and son and while Europe was in the middle of World War I. Painting the pond in his garden later became the monumental Water Lilies panels, now considered some of the most important works of Impressionism.

Creating art doesn’t ignore the world’s problems. It helps us remain steady. And a steady person is much more capable of contributing something meaningful to the world than an overwhelmed one.