Creative - of course you are!

A pandemic is a lesson in living with reality. It will be a hard lesson, there will be grief and heartache.

For many across the world, the Covid-19 pandemic means financial and health insecurity. Fear of disease and death is compounded by loss of income or housing, and accompanied by unease about governments seeking only to seize more power.

For many of us in Australia right now, though, we are simply stuck at home. After the initial anxiety spike, the panic buying and the grief of ruined plans, we find ourselves facing a new reality of being in the one place, all the time, without our usual activities and distractions.

Those of us away from the 'front line' of Covid-19 have a sudden excess of time. It feels strange.

This strange feeling is largely the lack of opportunity to consume.

Snipped from the socials 

Despite being relatively safe, having free time and a lack of opportunity to shop can pose a profound personal threat. It hits hard at our personal identity as a consumer. Some are struggling to cope, and calling for other people to put themselves at risk to allow them to buy things and services. They call it 'liberty'; I call it 'fear of facing who I am without shopping'. 

But we could instead try to learn from this sense of threat to our personal identity based on what we buy. 

We have a rare opportunity to reclaim our personal identity as creators. Making things is a fundamental human activity, but something few of us now do, apart from perhaps an occasional craft activity. 

But I don't just want us to reclaim this inherent aspect of our humanity.

I want us to reclaim the concept of creativity itself.

For other than essential products, we're in a consumption detox courtesy of the government's economic shutdown. Online shopping has initially boomed in place of going out to shop - but then you can't wear your new purchase anywhere. Perhaps the consumers could also spare a thought for the health and safety of factory and delivery workers who support all this online retail therapy.

You can binge on TV of course, the ultimate couch consumption. But we are in for the long haul, and those who have experienced long term isolation due to illness will tell you that watching TV wears thin eventually when that's ALL you can do. And speaking of couch consuming: no end of social media challenges has sprung up to fill our time - your favourite albums, dance challenges, travel photos, yourself at 20. Keep busy everyone!! The detox will be over soon!

Yes, humans need something to do. 

But consumption alone does not meet our human needs.

Okay, shopping can be fun and satisfying in the short term. It can sometimes even make you feel better. 'Retail therapy', including panic buying, is a response to many types of personal crisis. Paul Marsden, consumer psychologist, says that 'shopping plays to our three fundamental psychological needs' - autonomy (the need to feel in control of your actions), competence (the need to feel like smart shoppers making the correct choice), and relatedness (the need to feel that we are doing something to benefit our families).

But shopping only provides short-term satisfaction of these psychological needs, so we do more, then more, and then we are into over-consumption. On a mass scale.

There is no question that we over-consume. In Australia in 2016-2017, we sent 67 million tonnes of waste to landfill. Of this, 3.1 million tonnes was wasted food, 2.54 million coming just from households! We buy far more than we need.

Mass over-consumption puts a huge strain on our ecosystem. Our excess stuff creates greenhouse gas at every stage of production, packaging, shipping, dumping and degrading in landfill. This wasteful over-consumption must stop if we want to limit global warming.

But we keep doing it. And there is one key personal reason for over-consumption: it never truly satisfies those basic human needs for autonomy, competence and connection/relatedness. (See the article on Gendered Adjectives for more detail on these needs.)

Our sense of autonomy in our work and our society can be so minimal, we displace this into 'control' over what we buy. We resort to demonstrating our competence through our purchases, our ability to buy and discard without care about money. We often supplant genuine connection with others by consuming shared products we arbitrarily decide are valuable, 'in' or high status in our social group, like the latest $18 beer or the newest binge-it-right-now show. But the short-term buzz of consuming fades, and then we need another hit.

What never wears thin is creating, making things.

Before you run screaming from the screen thinking that I'm going to advocate you take up macramé or mosaics or musical compositions, that's not what I am talking about.

I'm not interested in WHAT we create at all; I want to focus on the ACT of making, the experience of creating something new. WHAT you make is irrelevant to your inherent creativity. 

We just like making things! 

There is a genuine happiness in the process of making, in problem solving, and close attention to the task at hand. It satisfies those basic human needs for autonomy, competence, and for connection (in shared making or making for others or perhaps with the natural products we create with) in a genuine and lasting way.

There is real satisfaction in the process of creating things. 

As Liz Gilbert says, for most of history people just made things, and they didn't make such a big freaking deal out of it. 

Sure, we can't all create highbrow art or compelling music or a best-selling novel.

I want to challenge the idea that 'creativity' is the ability to produce 'professional standard' art. This puts the focus on the THING that is created: the product. It defines 'creative' in terms of some nebulous standard relating to the 'thing' that is made.

Instead, when we focus on the ACT of creating, the PROCESS of making something, the magic of pulling something new into being, without regard for its practicality, quality or any other assessment of the outcome, we are talking about something deeply human. Something we can all do.

But we've lost that idea somehow. 

We no longer use the word creativity to mean 'the ability to make'; we've shifted the definition.

Start with create, the verb:

♦️ to bring into existence; to produce or bring about by a course of action or behaviour; to produce through imaginative skill; to make or bring into existence something new.

And then creative, the adjective:

♦️ marked by the ability or power to create; given to creating; having the quality of something created rather than imitated;
♦️ one who is creative especially one involved in the creation of advertisements; creative activity or the material produced by it especially in advertising.

So, a 'standard' applied to the THING that is created has crept into the definition, as well as a concept of making a living through the act of creating. (And little surprise that marketing has corralled a word that rightly belongs to all of us.)

And finally to creativity, the noun:

♦️ the ability to create; the quality of being creative.

So, creativity should mean: 'having the ability to make or bring into existence something new'. I brought some seed crackers into existence just last night. Is that what we call creativity?

Well, we don't use the word that way. The real evidence for how the definition has shifted is found in the synonyms for creativity (at the same link):

♦️ cleverness, creativeness, imagination, imaginativeness, ingeniousness, ingenuity, innovativeness, invention, inventiveness, originality

We define create to mean 'to bring into existence', so the key feature is making something that didn't exist before. Not necessarily something great (or imaginative or original). And creative means 'marked by the ability or power to create', which is all of us. But when we use the word creativity, we add all sort of judgments of cleverness, ingenuity, inventiveness, artistry. We add standards.

Through this shift from verb to noun, we deny creativity to most of humanity. Only those who are deemed to have 'artistic' abilities are considered creative. Those lucky few - those with 'the creative impulse, creative genius, in the creative arts and creative writing' - only those people can create. We require that the THING that is created becomes the means by which a legitimately 'creative' person earns a living, no small pressure. 

Humans are inherently creative; we are all makers.

In fact, creativity is something we all have. We can all make. Making is an essential human drive. 

You can see it in very small children. Creativity is not defined by brilliance and cleverness, uniqueness or any aspect of the THING that is made at all. The fundamental definition of creativity is 'the ability to make something that didn't exist before'. 

But the enjoyment of making things is squashed out of most of us.

Our society places an artificial division between people: those who can make and those who cannot. 

If you're reading this, you're alive, and... 

By the end of school, we've divided young people into the 'creative'... and the rest of us. That small coterie of 'official' creators has to carry the burden of humanity's drive to create for everyone else. The rest of us are relegated to consume, and only consume. We accept this division as something true about humanity. That's the way the world is, we think. 'The rest of us' are unable to make things.

While there is nothing wrong in consuming what others make, it is a problem if we NEVER create.

It means that 'the rest of us' don't get to experience that deep engagement of full attention on a task of our choice, called 'flow', and the experience of being outside of oneself that all types of making, all types of creating, can engender.

If we never create, I think that makes us less than human.

It leaves a personal void, which we try to fill with consumption. And here we find ourselves: with overflowing landfill waste, environmental degradation for more and more production, and an endless appetite for more consumption.

Artwork or everyday object? 

We all used to make all the time. It was the only option.

Over time, we tipped the balance away from mainly creating to only consuming. Over the last few hundred years, we have accepted that only very few of us are capable of being creative (according to our society's distorted definition); the 'rest of us' can only consume.

If we really want to shift our society and an economy based on mass over-consumption, we need to change this idea. Obviously, we cannot make everything we need. I don't want to romanticise a subsistence lifestyle where you live off only what you can make yourself. That's unrelenting hard work; a real grind. We are fortunate to have many shortcuts and options to buy what others have made.

It's a matter of finding a healthier balance between creating and consuming. And change our ideas about what creativity is, and who is creative.

We need to reclaim the idea that every human being is inherently creative.

We need to reclaim the very definition of creativity: the ability to make something that wasn't there before. Not high art, not necessarily something that amazes other people, not something that pays the rent.

Being creative, making things, is primarily about EXPERIENCING our human nature, not about the THINGS we make.

When we rediscover the joy and deep satisfaction of making some of the things we need, we want to make more. And consume less.

We are creators BECAUSE we are human. 

We can create through our daily choices and our everyday activities.

You can cook and create with food, present the dish for visual appeal. Skip the zigzag pattern of jus, just look at the food you have created and think about how you could now create an appealing visual image for yourself and for others who will enjoy it.

You can clean and sort, getting to those tasks around your home. Boring, but done? Well, a more satisfying perspective is that by cleaning and sorting you have created a restful and pleasing living space. Made a more efficient process. Created a more organised and enjoyable tool shed.

Make a beautiful space to sit for a cup of coffee. Toss the decorating 'recipes' from the overpriced magazines; make something that is yours - using your ideas, what you have, and what appeals to you. It's for you after all.

You can garden and grow, and the food and the flowers are the final product of the long process of creating. If you get a bit more into gardening, you will quickly learn there is no final product; you are actually part of a long cycle of creation and re-creation.

You can learn to make clothes, preserves, sprouts, detergent, compost, toothpaste, seed crackers, bookmarks, hairbands, spreadsheets, costumes, a filing system, a family calendar, a backyard nook to be still and listen to the world, etc.

You can make things for others in need: face masks, meals for neighbours, games for children.

You can create images with a camera, pencil or paint, or your computer. You can write: poetry, prose, a diary, a letter, a set of instructions to help someone else.

You can sing, play an instrument, edit music to make a new melody. And you can dance, the ultimate 'creating for creations sake'.

It is not important how well you do these things. It's not for others to assess.

What you make is not for sharing on 'the socials'. It's not about WHAT you make at all. It's about fully experiencing the PROCESS of making, creating something that wasn't there before. For you to lose yourself in this process; for you to connect to something you make in a way that is impossible with something you buy.

What is essential is to reclaim the ACT of creating. 

To feel that full immersion in the fundamental human act of making. You can create practical items or foibles, just feel the process of making with your hands, test gravity, push your ideas, make a new thing for creating's sake.

But ultimately for your own sake.

It probably won't be easy to reclaim and enjoy your personal creativity. We've been told for so long that most of us are not creative. You may bring society's narrow concept of 'artistic' or 'good' into your creating, and judge what you make against what you consider the suitable standards. You may well find yourself critical of your creation, but I say slough off those standards. They are false. Those standards do not apply to your inherent capacity to make things. Remember: you are creative because you are human.

Those of us fortunate enough to be minimally impacted by the pandemic have an opportunity now to challenge the idea that only some people are creative. We can learn to push back against society's limiting messages. We can rediscover the slow and lasting satisfaction of making, and at the same time reduce our need for the compelling buzz of consuming.

That buzz quickly fades and leads only to more and more and more consumption. Leaving us endlessly unsatisfied. And ready for more consumption. I wonder, who does that benefit? 

Buy a fridge for the country! 

When the economic shutdown ends, it will be very tempting to jump back into excess consumption to feel good (temporarily) again, to feel 'back to normal'.

And get ready for it: when the immediate health threat is passed, we will all be urged to consume, as Americans were in the post war period of the 1940s and 50s. You will be told it's for the good of the economy, the good of the country. 

But maybe, it is not so good for you. 

Instead, start to think of yourself as 'a creative'. 

So, while we have this forced detox from excess consumption, we could experiment with our human capacity to make. Make a wonky table, make a garden, make a cake, make a picture.

Make a mess, make something that doesn't even taste that good. Learn from what you like and don't like about what you make, but without external standards, without judgement of creative 'merit'. It's just for you.

Reclaiming and nurturing your personal identity as a creator will provide you with a deeper satisfaction than you may anticipate, and help you resist the pressures to over-consume.

Create, everyone!

And make yourself more fully human in the process.


Images, used under Creative Commons licences where noted

• "I want a haircut" fixed from The Late Show Facebook page, snipped from the socials by author.
• Elizabeth Gilbert quote 1, by author.
• Elizabeth Gilbert quote 2, by author
• Painted earthenware, 2000-1500 BCE, by Maia C on Flickr [CC BY-NC-ND]
• Buy a fridge for the country! Sourced from Flickr, original file since deleted [CC BY-NC-ND]