I love getting attention. The only thing that beats getting run-of-the-mill attention is getting attention for my creative work. Thankfully, I’m not alone. Craving attention for your work is a painfully relatable experience for most artists, especially those of us trying to make a living within the attention economy. It can take a lifetime to cultivate a marketing mindset, and the process often raises profound, unanswerable questions about the nature and boundaries of artmaking and attention.

It’s rejection season, baby. For creative beings who bravely put themselves out there this fall and winter, I tip my hat to you—regardless of the outcome. The first months of the year are a notoriously brutal season for artists because, while a small percentage of us just received happy news (you finally got that grant!), the vast majority of working artists are questioning why they poured hours of their precious free time into applications that go nowhere.

When it comes to repetitive tasks, no one does it better than Wall-E. Besides being undeniably cute, the dude really knows how to roll up his…sleeves? and get to work. When I’m knees deep in emails, laundry, accounting or [insert your least favorite, most mind numbing task] I try to channel Wall-E. But his space odyssey is more than an allegory for the power of perseverance. It also foreshadows a world in which humans are increasingly detached from their planet—and themselves. A world not unlike our own.