The Anti-Creative Establishment

I never thought I’d care so much about the word, “creativity”. For most of my life, creativity was a character trait embodied by artists and “those people” of which I did not count myself. These were the people who growing up, could draw, sing, or write. The most creative thing I had done up through high school was turn an apple into a bong. Creativity to me was something that got squeezed into a 45-minute block twice a week at school that we called “art class”, a class that I struggled to be average in.

Fortunately (for my grades at least), most of my educational experience required very little creativity. If creativity is defined as using imagination and originality to create something unique, then high school was for the anti-creative. In high school, I was taught to follow a system to find an answer. The teacher, at the front of the classroom, laid down the path and we as students were graded and evaluated based on our ability to follow.

Our traditional education system comes from an age focused on grooming automatons. Schools as we know them came about during the Industrial Revolution when society needed to train children how to be productive factory workers and it’s not hard to see the similarities between the American high school and the American factory if one looks hard enough. Strict class schedules, regular testing, and the reduction of the individual to a series of KPIs come straight from the factory floor. The mottos of both environments could be “routine and standardization”.

During the late 19th and early 20th century, this made sense. Most of the jobs for the middle class involved very algorithmic work. Whether this was on the factory floor, or crunching numbers in a cubicle, people needed to be able to show up on time and follow instructions. The problem is that in the early 21st century and beyond, this type of work has become less and less valuable. We are shaping a world that needs fewer and fewer automatons, whether on the factory floor or in the office.

The challenge for most people then, is how do we re-learn to employ creativity at work after decades of having it lie dormant in us?

Where does creativity come from?

Creativity comes from the brain. All of our thoughts, ideas, and emotions are the result of neurons and synapses firing in various patterns forming what we might call “the mind”. Our brain has regions dedicated to regulating emotions, instinct, logic, spatial data, hunger, memory and more. Our entire experience of reality is controlled and dictated by what happens within this organ.

Creativity is no different.

The ancient Greeks believed that creatvity came from a set of goddesses called “the muses”. One can forgive them for not having a fully developed understanding of neuroscience at this point. And while many have attested to being “struck” by a great idea as if through an extra-dimensional being, it all boils down to what is happening inside our skulls.

This is a crucial point. This means that the most critical thing we can do to improve the quality of our thinking and our ideas is to treat our brains like we would our heart.

Brain Health

Our society spends a great deal of time discussing heart health. Many of our foods come with labels that read “promotes a healthy heart” or “low in cholesterol”. Grocery stores organize their foods into different tiers of what is considered “healthy” or “good for you” and one of the most important topics of discussion when visiting your doctor or cardiologist focuses on the types of foods you are eating. When you eat poorly, such as downing a couple of Big Macs and a large soda, you might joke that you are on the edge of a heart attack and if you look through the documentary section on Netflix, you can find hundreds of high-quality works that focus on different types of diets and their impacts.

Clearly, our society is very conscious of things like heart health. And that makes sense. Once the heart decides it has had enough, life stops.

But how much awareness and attention is paid to the health of our brains? Personally, I don’t remember being exposed to much (if any) education on what type of information and behavior is considered “healthy” for the brain. The brain is a neuroplastic organ, meaning it literally undergoes physical changes to adapt to the stimulus it is most frequently subjected to. Our brains are incredible in this way.

A great example of neuroplasticity in action comes from London, where cab drivers must navigate a tangled mess of streets that is nowhere near logical. These cab drivers have a much larger Hippocampus than the average Joe and the hippocampus is the region of the brain that deals with memory and spatial navigation, which makes sense. It’s critical that these drivers know every street in London in order to efficiently navigate between two points, and as a result, their brains have literally morphed to meet this demand.

Neuroplasticity is a double-edged sword, however, given that if you subject the mind (and therefore your brain) to trash, your brain literally changes to be more receptive and more dependent on it.

How often do you consider the health of your brain, or how some of your actions might be impacting it? Imagine if more of the stimuli in our world were labeled based on their impact on brain health. On one end, we might have TikTok, which fragments our attention into tiny, attention-draining hits of dopamine. On the other hand, we might have meditation, which has proven to be incredibly healthy for our brains.

In between, we have a sea of potential distractions. Everything from Netflix to Buzzfeed, from Reddit to the news.

It would be strange to live in a world where we publicly judge these things based on brain health, but if we want to improve our creativity, this is something we must understand.

The creativity diet

If we continue this overly drawn-out heart analogy, we would say that if one is concerned regarding the health of their heart, the first thing one must do is change its diet. One must commit to altering the inputs to the system in order to try and heal and improve the health of the organ. Otherwise known as a diet.

A diet both restricts the consumption of certain foods and promotes the consumption of others. Our hope is that by pursuing a given diet, we will experience not only physical transformation in the form of lost fat and greater musculature but also psychological changes in the form of greater confidence and mental energy.

If we want to improve our brains, we need to get them on a diet.

Do Nothing

One of the simplest ways to inject creativity back into modern life also proves to be perhaps the most difficult to execute.

Do nothing.

Far from being some trite passage from an Eastern Religious text, the prescription of inaction is the foundation for re-discovering your creativity.

In our Western world, we fetishize action. We should always be doing something, productive or not. Reading, writing, conversing, shopping, eating, scrolling, watching, exercising, etc… We always want to be in a state of verb.

When was the last time you did nothing? I mean like, really nothing. When was the last time you sat down on your couch, put your phone in the other room, and just sipped on some coffee? If recently, have you made a habit of it?

It can be helpful to think of creativity as an innate energy that exists in all of us, but that is either freed or blocked by outside stimulus. All of that scrolling, emailing, and reading is pushing energy into the mind, whereas creativity is something that flows out of it. Given that your mind has a single door of attention, you can only perform one of these things at a time.

Write

Many of us have creative thoughts all of the time, however, they slip through our attention like mist. If you can force yourself to sit down and actually write down the ideas that are traveling through your sphere of attention, you’d be surprised by all of the value lurking beneath the surface.

Beyond simply providing you with a cut-out into the workings of your mind, writing allows you to further develop your ideas, and build upon what you’ve conjured up. Without writing, your ideas cannot develop any momentum. Without a previous point of reference, you cannot further grow or iterate on the concepts or proposals set forth by the machinations of your inner voice.

Let’s say you arise one morning with some ideas on how to tackle a problem at work. If you spend 30 minutes writing those down in the morning before spending the rest of your day in a state of production, when you rise tomorrow, you can revisit the ideas from the previous day and enhance them with a fresh perspective and further development.

If you continue to work on this idea day after day, the sophistication of your proposal and the level of depth to your idea may surprise you.

Find nature

Nature has a way of inspiring us. Studies show that when spending time in the woods, an individual’s markers of stress are immediately reduced. What this means for creativity is that by helping to calm the mind, you open it up for this creative energy to flow from it.

This quest for nature doesn’t have to be dramatic. This doesn’t require a pilgrimage to the Himalayas or a 3-week backpacking trip through the desert. By making a daily practice of returning to the natural world and combining this with a daily habit of nothingness and writing, one will find that a simple walk in the woods becomes indispensable for handling the noisiness and busyness of everyday life.

Old practices, new pressures

Everything that I have suggested above has long ago been understood as vital to human flourishing. From the ancient Greek philosophers to more contemporary American naturalists such as Thoreau and Walden, bringing a slower lifestyle together with nature and the practice of writing and self-observation has been proven over millennia as being fruitful.

What is new is how valuable these practices are today. As it becomes harder and harder for our brains to create this vital space, and as our environments become ever greater sources of distraction, one’s ability to create space and bring creativity into their life is becoming ever more rare and challenging.

This increased difficulty and scarcity creates opportunity, however. For the few who apply the necessary discipline and commitment to practicing in these old-school habits, rewards will follow. These rewards will come in the form of economic and social benefits via professional success, but any practitioner of these habits will soon find that the act of pursuit is all the reward that is needed.

When one replaces mindless scrolling and binge-watching with quiet meditation, nature, and the honing of one’s internal voice, one will not be convinced to return to their previous, shallower state.