From Everything to Nothing: How We Kill Creativity
When I was doing my MBA, the school offered a class on creativity. Students and faculty raved about the transformational insight to be gained from the class. Everyone spoke of the professor in revered tones, as one might speak of a guru or a celebrity.
Up to that point in my life, I had lived a life that straddled two rails. (Yes, there was a third rail—one I would end up touching much later.) I had balanced the quantitative and scientific demands of trading financial markets with the artistry of teaching and making music. I’d spent thousands of hours at the instrument or with pencil and paper in front of me, writing music. I had lived creativity and devoted much of my life to understanding it.
So, you might imagine I was very excited to take this class. Fortunately, someone shared the syllabus and their notes with me before I enrolled. Turns out, the class was about finding “creative solutions” to business problems. I could detect nothing, not a single shred, of what I understood as creativity there.
I was disappointed. Not because classes for finding good solutions to problems exist, but because people convinced themselves that this was creativity. Creative solutions to problems is the same as capital-C Creativity? To me, this was as stupid as getting a sunburn and thinking you’re the sun. No, you are dark; you make shadows. You do not shine.
When I looked at society with open eyes—from the business world, to education, even in fields that should be artistic endeavors—I saw something similar. People used the word creativity like they had no idea what it meant.
We’ve made the word so comfortably small. Creativity, to a business leader, means Post-It notes on a whiteboard. Creativity is about finding solutions. CEOs making and solving problems (not the least of which is advancing their own careers) are not engaging in the creative act.
A business leader wants creative solutions so they can increase profits.
The artist knows that Nietzsche was right: we have Art so that we do not perish from the Truth.
Do We Say What We Mean?
I understand the importance of signaling. If you have a business today, you better say you have “creative solutions”. If you’re an employee or an executive, you better say you’re a “creative thinker.” Messaging matters. But it can’t be all message and no substance. At least not if we want to live and be in the world authentically.
We often say “creative” when we really mean “new” or “attention-grabbing”. But we should be careful of what we say. We should not be like the Darkness. We should comprehend our words.
One reading of history might say that a major endeavor has been the taming and domestication of the raw power in words. We chip away at them, knocking off the parts we don’t understand. Stretching old words as far as they can stretch, sometimes adding new meanings, changing them in meaningful ways. Some of this is fine and good; words grow and change as we grow and change.
But there’s also a destructive force here. We are like children, smashing the parts of words that frighten us. Forgetting what we don’t understand. Grinding down the edges on words that can hurt us—until we have something safe to play with.
And then, in the case of this particular word, we’re left with a pretty, shiny word to fill that empty space on our resumes and to cover the empty space in ourselves. It’s a nice bandage on a wound that cannot heal.
We had to make it sterile so it would serve.
The Stories in Words
You probably remember a teacher or two talking about “root words.” For many of us, those weren’t our best days. We remember classroom drudgery, pointless memorization, and standardized tests. Me too, but that’s not what we’re doing here.
I do want to talk about old words, forgotten words, but with a different end: I want to go back to the source. Back when the first men and women grappled with power and wrestled it into words. Maybe there was some wisdom, the odd breath of inspiration here and there. I wonder if we can touch some of that magic.
If we were to go back about as far as learning and guessing can carry us, we would find a rough and sturdy people living in the area that is now Ukraine and Southern Russia. We’re in deep pre-history: The pyramids were not yet a dream in the dusty sands. Thousands of years would pass before anyone thought to pile rocks on top of one another at Stonehenge. Somewhere in the world, trembling hands still painted with ochre on cave walls. Almost everything about these people would seem alien to us today. Or would it?
When these horsemasters of the steppes moved on, their language did too. And it left traces. We can find them scattered in India, in North Africa and the East, and all throughout Europe, up into the British Isles. This has always been the way of it—language moves with people.
In this case, their language is long-lost, but something echoes on. They gave us the words I’m using right now. Scholars use the label Proto-Indo-European for their language. If you’ve never seen it before, it should stop you in your tracks. Yes, there’s a strong linguistic connection that ties much of the world together. From Sanskrit to Latin to unknown dead languages and many spoken today—the language of those people was the mother tongue. Theirs are the real roots.
The Proto-Indo-European root *ker-2 meant to grow or to increase. Not like your investment account, but like a tree—always in the sense of natural, organic growth. This gave birth Latin words such as creare (“to create”), and we still hear it in English words like increase, crescent, and concrete (“grown together”.)
The point is: creativity traces back to a very old word for an even older idea—to make something by growing it.
Who Creates?
Latin knew all these meanings. The word creare meant “to bring forth, produce, make, beget, elect.” (The same word that meant to grow something was used to describe how Senators were made. Maybe we should try that.) Eventually, it came to mean one precise thing: God (well, gods, at first before the Great Rebranding) “creare’d” the Universe.
By the time the word was given to English, the Christian Church had mostly narrowed the meaning to that single act. It was never connected to human action here, and earlier meanings had also largely avoided human involvement. The word got a major upgrade from theologians when they decided creation had to have been ex nihilo, and this removed “creating” even further from the human sphere.
There was conflict in the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Human artistic output was sometimes referred to as “creation”, but many thinkers pushed back against the obvious (to them at the time) overtones of hubris and blasphemy in such a label. To be fair, those meanings were probably intended; very rich patrons were spending an awful lot of money on artists and art!
In the 18th and 19th centuries, the idea of the creative artist flourished, and people were becoming comfortable with humans creating things. It was still not until 1950 that creativity, as a noun, really saw common use in the English language. This was a result of academic research done after the war which popularized creation and focused on the creative process as something that maybe anyone could do. That’s a surprising point—the word creativity, as a noun, really is a newcomer in the language.
Consider the arc: this torch has been passed from the hands of gods to the creative artist, and then to the democratized masses. One might reasonably argue that this is good, that it reflects forces of civilization that lift the stakes of every human a bit higher. Aren’t lives enriched by the intellectual aspects of creating something? Isn’t creating just making, after all? Isn’t this a solution to the drudgery of the Post-Industrial Era?
Maybe, but look again. This word originally meant the Creation of Everything, then works of art (not all of which were great, of course.) Then it meant something anyone could do any time, and now it means brainstorming sessions in boardrooms. From the sacred to the profane. From meaning to meaninglessness. This is how you kill a god.
From Everything to Nothing
Only a fool would say something was really lost here. We have so much—we are endlessly entertained, swimming in a sea of baubles for our amusement. Not in a thousand thousand lifetimes could we listen to all the music and watch all the videos available on the internet. Whatever your niche desire is, some “content creator” has probably fulfilled it.
Artificial intelligence will only make this easier. Already there are lifetimes of pop music created entirely by algorithms; we’re very close to having literary works and cinema custom-produced on command. What a fecund universe we have created! Let’s automate everything. Even better, bring on the Von Neumann machines and let’s make it all paperclips.
It’s ever easier to create material that holds our attention and grabs our minds, but much of this work is being done for that purpose only, and being done by content creators who are themselves, to put it charitably, shallow. It’s difficult to make that argument heard—the shallow is all most people know.
It is the job of creative artists to capture that which is most important to a society. It’s easy to dismiss TikTok content creators as making garbage. But I wonder if they are being faithful to their mandate and holding up a mirror. Maybe it’s our fault if we don’t like what we see. The artists of our time have stooped down to our level, and they are smearing peanut butter on something for their next TikTok short. We only want the easy, the safe. There’s no time for anything else, and nothing left in us. We are so busy keeping ourselves busy.
None of this is real. Real creativity is hard; it demands payment. What it gives in return is not always entertaining and comforting, but it is Real. True creativity is confrontation.
That’s what an artist really does—she sticks her hand through the veil. Sometimes she brings back a thing of beauty; sometimes something struggling to not be born; and sometimes her hand comes back bloody, if there’s a hand at all. Sometimes what’s on the other side tugs back.
This is dangerous work. Only for the bold. Or the foolish. Or for those who must.
In this essay, I’ve uncovered another of the major pillars of the First Fire project. I wanted to write about art and creation—all the beauty, ugliness, and terror. These ideas and associated questions (of which I have many more than answers, I’m sorry to report) have been central to my life since early adulthood.
I look forward to exploring them with you.