The necessary curse of our Creative Unrest
The pursuit of creativity, not self-interest, by individuals and organizations is what most benefits society — it has, in fact, been key to our survival as a species
Creativity is hot. As Laura M. Holson wrote recently in the New York Times, “Where once painterly pursuits were the province of starving artists or simply child’s play, unlocking one’s creativity has become the latest mantra of personal growth and career success.”
Laura Pappano also wrote in the Times last year, “Nearly 20 years ago ‘creating’ replaced ‘evaluation’ at the top of Bloom’s Taxonomy of learning objectives. In 2010 ‘creativity’ was the factor most crucial for success found in an I.B.M. survey of 1,500 chief executives in 33 industries. These days ‘creative’ is the most used buzzword in LinkedIn profiles two years running.”
And currently high on the Times’ bestseller lists is Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic, in which the author of Eat, Pray, Love joins a growing number of pundits extolling the creative life for everyone: “There’s that sense that if you didn’t go to the right school and you don’t have the right degree and you don’t live in the right city, then the arts are not for you, that the arts belong to the special, the tormented, and the professional,” Gilbert said in a recent interview. “I want to push back against that in a big way.”
Inside us is this hectoring inner self that wonders why our outer life is so crushingly disappointing.
– Stephen Metcalf, Culture Gabfest, Slate
Why the strong cultural interest in creativity? There are two general categories of discussion. As with Gilbert’s efforts, some of these conversations center on creativity’s power to release our potential as individuals. Many of us spend our lives mired in a deep, personal dissatisfaction with our condition. We perceive a gap between who we believe we are and who we believe we could be. Between what we’ve achieved, and what we believe we could achieve. The pursuit of creativity is put forward as a salve to soothe our burning desire for something more.
Conversation also falls upon creative thinking as critical to bettering society:
- Culling insight, even wisdom, from the overwhelming mass of information available to us;
- Driving industry’s unending need for continual innovation;
- Surmounting the daunting problems we face as a global society.
This isn’t going to be an argument for one position or the other; in fact, I think it’s far more interesting to think of both as correct. To venture, however recklessly, into Connect-the-Dots Land and, in creative fashion, combine them. We can put a different spin on the longstanding proposition of our economics, on what’s become the foundation of modern Western culture — that the pursuit of individual interest ultimately benefits society.
What if it is the pursuit of individual creativity that ultimately benefits society?
There actually is not a lot that’s sexy or froufrou about creativity.
– Kimberly Weisul, Editor-at-large, Inc.com, “Four things business leaders get wrong about creativity”
Let’s be clear what we’re talking about here: The pursuit of Creativity isn’t about the pursuit of Happiness. Even the most creative among us have always seemed to be driven by an even more intense degree of dissatisfaction — a frustration with our achievements, an ongoing certainty (or hope) that better work must lie yet ahead. For the most creative, most artistic, of us, that work pushes us into uncomfortable, if not terrifying, new emotional and physical terrain. Even in business, the most successful individuals and organizations are driven by missions they’ll never accomplish; that have them continually, obsessively, acting as champions of the people, of ideals, engaged in quests for Grails that could never be grasped in a corporate lifetime, if ever.
Here be dragons, not unicorns.
One never notices what has been done; one can only see what remains to be done …
– Marie Curie, 1894
With the second of this series of articles, I’ll explore the possibility that our need to lead more creative lives has a biological basis. That engaging in meaningful expression has been key to our survival as a species as well as a keystone of human culture. For now, let’s agree that we are curious creatures, and that our curiosity is never satisfied for long. And for that matter, we are never long content with our present state of being, our accomplishments, and/or our immediate environment.
We are always haunted by the myth of our potential, of what we might have it in ourselves to be or do … We share our lives with the people we have failed to be […]Our lives become an elegy to needs unmet and desires sacrificed, to possibilities refused, to roads not taken. The myth of our potential can make of our lives a perpetual falling-short, a continual and continuing loss, a sustained and sometimes sustaining rage.
– Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life
Couple this restlessness with our deep desire to meaningfully express ourselves — whether that “self” is a traditionally Western, independent self or a traditionally East Asian, interdependent self, or something in between — and you have a cumulative set of conditions I refer to as:
Creative Unrest.
Our Creative Unrest is quelled only through meaningful expression. In its ideal form, meaningful expression is the sharing of new meaning derived from mental, emotional, and/or physical explorations, its form potentially unlimited, reflecting the personal aesthetics and point of view of the creator, offered in the hope it improves the community’s condition (more to come on this next time).
The reality of the dynamics of growth is that an all-reigning satisfaction is its mortal enemy; the demand for supreme contentment and unending fulfillment is the death of growth. If we are completely satisfied with our lives as they currently are then we have no motivation to change or make them different, to further actualize unrealized potentialities and possibilities for what and how our lives can be. Therefore, we discover in the end that a truly authentic human existence depends entirely on the presence of a vital dissatisfaction with one’s life.
– Scott Riser, The New Existentialists
Once we’ve considered the biological basis for our Creative Unrest, I’d like to push on in further installments to explore its ramifications. How maybe, just maybe, it might help us re-frame big problems we face in interesting ways, offering the possibility of solutions by those who just need a nudge in a new direction. And I do mean “us.” As I mentioned, I am playing connect the dots, clambering onto the shoulders of giants the way a toddler climbs statues in the park. I need help. Guidance. The steadying hand offered at just the right moment. I hope we can do this. And not just for the above problems creativity has already been tasked with solving. There’s a deeper issue to be dealt with.
We’re told we are by nature creative, expressive beings, but only a casual survey of the glut of content swamping us would indicate that many, if not most of us, would appear to have little of value to express, particularly in the corporate world. This lack of creativity is not surprising when considered in the greater cultural context, beginning with our schools. Sir Ken Robinson (TED star and, most recently, author of The Element) is only one of the more visible advocates for a reformed educational system that doesn’t drum so-called “right-brain thinking” out of us: “Creativity is as important now in education as literacy,” he writes, “and we should treat it with the same status.” We’re living in a culture characterized by creative surrender, intellectual distraction, and the loss of ideals. Of idealism. Our collective dissatisfaction, this yearning for more, for something “real,” has been diagnosed as a spiritual illness. Our cultural authorities’ loss of persuasive power has left us hungering for meaning, to understand who we are and how we should live. It is the existential crisis of our time.
To make matters worse, we’re told that, coming robots and A.I. or no, we citizens of the developed nations will enjoy what has been a rare luxury: The challenge of what we are to do with our days. We need to construct a new ideology that forms a vision, a mission, that recognizes our inherent creativity, that redefines work and leisure, that triggers intrinsic motivations that we’re told are necessary to our well being: pursuit of the mastery of skills and knowledge, autonomy, and a greater purpose that builds a deeper connection between us, our society, and the world. Beyond the motivational platitudes of tech startups and Jane McGonigal’s optimism for games, the source for these motivations remains elusive for most.
Unlike an animal, man is no longer told by drives and instincts what he must do. And in contrast to man in former times, he is no longer told by traditions and values what he should do. Now, knowing neither what he must do nor what he should do, he sometimes does not even know what he basically wishes to do. Instead, he wishes to do what other people do… or he does what other people wish him to do. […]
For too long we have been dreaming a dream from which we are now waking up: the dream that if we just improve the socioeconomic situation of people, everything will be okay, people will become happy. The truth is that as the struggle for survival has subsided, the question has emerged: survival for what? Ever more people today have the means to live, but no meaning to live for.
– Viktor E. Frankl, The Unheard Cry for Meaning: Psychotherapy and Humanism
What if enabling and empowering every individual to pursue meaningful expression became our most fundamental right, our highest societal priority? The foundation from which we rebuild? Affording it then the recognition and respect it deserves could satiate our hunger for meaning; ease this deep, personal dissatisfaction we often feel about ourselves and our lives; make creative expression more meaningful more often; reinvigorate cultural institutions; perhaps even enable business to construct brand strategies that not only ensure ongoing cultural relevance but inspire continual product innovation, empowering more companies to play beneficial roles in our Age of Culture.
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The Creative Unrest series:
- Introduction | 10/28/15
- Creative Unrest and the Survival of the Species | 11/2/15
- Creative Unrest and Brands | 11/9/15
- Creative Unrest and Education | 11/16/15
- Creative Unrest and Government | 11/23/15
- Creative Unrest and Religion | 11/30/15
