Coding kills creativity
Last week I had my first improvisation class. I did so, hoping that it will help beating my social anxiety. Because I know as a software developer most of my professional life is spent communicating with computers and if necessary in writing with people. Even then, usually with a small group of people from where I work, who I am relatively familiar with. If I was working a retail job, where you have to answer random strangers every other minute, probably I would have less trouble breaking the silence with a stranger in the elevator, but also would I have paid significantly less.
That’s why I started with Level 1 class, which is meant for absolute beginners. Yes there are a few people in the class, who had a short experience with improvisation or some kind of acting before, but most of them have no history of it like me. Yet, at the end of first class, it felt more like there was a Level 0 class and I missed it. After an hour of practicing, almost everyone else shook off their initial shyness and started coming up with very creative and funny ideas.
Last practice of the day was, two of us improvising a random scene in the middle and any of the others in the circle can shout “freeze!” at any moment and go and replace one of the two and start from exact same pose, but have to change the scene to something else. This requires quite some creativity. In less than 15 minutes, people were ramming castle gates with trees, hunting dragons, camping in the mountains, saving a puppy who just got run over by a car and many other stuff. There were moments where more than one would shout “freeze!” and they would change the both people in the middle at the same time.
Maybe also because shouting “freeze!” was a voluntary action, I stayed on the side watching and laughing but couldn’t come up with any idea to change the scene ever, unlike others. They are now carrying something together, how can you change that scene? I have to think around 10 minutes to come up with something, but only have 3 seconds. If I’m too late, the scene already changed, now have to think about something for two people sitting on the ground. Impossibru!
Later that day I was thinking, why must I lack creativity so big time. It’s a class of 12 people dropping ideas one after other and it’s only me constipated. As you can imagine, I have to blame the easiest option first. It must be an occupational hazard. It may be that I’m exaggerating this, instead of accepting that I’m really terrible with creativity or a real big time introvert, undercover, for whatever that may mean. But I have to say, my feeling is, it has a lot to do with coding.
If programming had to be only about one thing, it would be determinism. The most creative thing with programming is bugs and we are here to kill them! Only bugs would generate erratic, random results and the more unpredictable your code, the buggier it would be considered. It is easy to code creative programs in the beginning, with hard to predict outcome and by working for long years as a developer you learn how to code less creative ones. It is the least creative program, which will pass all the tests flying, deployed with no hassle and get used for a long time. It is simply the same experience and qualifications which makes you a better developer, also makes you very non-creative. Do I sound like I’m looking for the word “boring”? Perhaps I do, I have no idea, not that quickly at least.
