Cultivating Creativity in an Era of Scarcity
Three easy methods to cultivate creative inspiration in a go-go-go Society
Throughout my childhood and early teens, living in a near-constant state of fantasy was effortless. It was effortless to the extent that I never questioned whether my overly active imagination was typical: I assumed that everyone else lived in these parallel worlds of fantasy, just as I did. It was natural — integrated into my personality. I existed in a sort of symbiosis with creative processes. I woke up before the sun rose with a mind full of thrilling dreams, I read books of fiction and natural sciences alike, and then I’d look up at my clock, shocked to realize that the morning had passed!
As an adult, I no longer experience these incredible sessions of hyper-focused creativity. I first realized that my creative capacity was dying in my first year of university three years ago. From the first moments of consciousness, when I opened my eyes in the morning, my mind was full of worries. I had homework to finish, abstract concepts to understand, family obligations, a full-time job…
Yikes.
Responsiblity…
Adulting…
Overwhelm…
During this period of emerging adulthood, time had transformed from something abstract and intangible to a concrete measure of task allocation. The privilege of adolescence was behind me, and I no longer had any spare time to create.
On my morning runs, I would observe the care-freeness of children. They had such a talent — a gift for seeing things as they were and then make them better: to see things as they were and innovate. I watched 8-year-olds possess the wild creativity characteristic to entrepreneurs. But a key difference was that these children created for the sake of creating rather for the promise of monetary gain, accolades, or survival.
Over a two-week break from school, I hauled myself off to the backcountry to forget about the city for a while… to just be human in the natural world, as humans are meant to be. After my first few hours in the solitude of the untouched land, I noticed a silence in my mind. In the city, a seemingly infinite stream of babble runs through my brain. It occupies every minute of my waking existence, sometimes so disruptive that I can’t even sleep. I realized how significantly our environments influence our mental state.
Since my break from society, I’ve fallen down a rabbit hole to determine how I can actively cultivate my creativity. After some trial and error, I’ve discovered some science-based methods that are remarkably effective. The hilarious part is how common-sensical these methods are. So simple that I think most of us disregard such methods entirely.
Why Does Creativity Die?
“What exactly is creativity?” is a question that has long been debated by philosophers and neurologists alike. Some take a sociological stance, suggesting that one’s social environment can nurture or terminate the creative process. Others believe that the ability to produce innovative works is the result of innate personality characteristics: some people are born to be creative geniuses, and then there’s the rest of us.
When I first attempted to find pleasure in my creative pursuits again, I found it very hard to believe that creativity is a personality trait, possessed by only a few. I’m around children a lot, and although every one of them is unique, a unifying factor seems to be their tireless creativity. On the contrary, when I look at myself and my peers, our unifying factor appears to be terror:
- Terror of the current state of the economy.
- Terror that we will disappoint our families.
- Terror that we’ll end up sacrificing our passions for career- and finaincial-stability.
- Terror that we will never achieve financial stability.
The list goes on…
After reading journals from across decades on creativity and testing different methods on myself, I don’t believe that creativity is as simple as is often made out to be. Sure, some people are more creative than others, but that doesn’t mean that creativity is a strictly heritable trait. Humans are naturally curious animals, and our ability to be imaginative, expressive, and innovative is characteristic of our species.
If we are naturally creative as a species, why do so many of us feel that our creativity is dying? Why do so many of us feel we’re going through life on autopilot, with a complete lack of passion — a drive that was so natural in our childhoods’?
The answer lies in our environment.
In the past few years, our environment has bred an increasing amount of scarcity. The cost of living is increasing, job competition is increasing, and now, with the rise of AI, many people fear losing their niche importance within their field. This means that we collectively have to compete more, spend less time with loved ones, and sacrifice many hobbies and aspirations that make us feel like the best version of ourselves. People are being driven by their environment to live in a constant state of scarcity, and as a result, their creativity is being inhibited.
Although our environment can lead to stress and scarcity, we still have autonomy over our mindset in a powerful way: we can manipulate our environments to suit our desires. When I began to be mindful of the things I wanted to create, I started actively implementing several science-based methods to resurrect my creativity:
1) Preparing for my creative endeavours ahead of time:
Pasteur’s Dictum gives insight into strategies we can implement to nurture our creative abilities. According to the Dictum, chance is a big part of creative inspiration: a person who is considered highly creative may be in a slump for years, and a person who has never been creative before may experience a revelation. Yet paradoxically, you still have a better chance of being creative if you prepare for it beforehand. Specifically, Pasteur suggests that although nothing can guarantee creativity, one can maximize the probability of being creative if they equip for it.
A person who has absolutely no understanding of basic mathematics may experience a creative breakthrough in the fine arts during an acid trip. Still, it’s nearly impossible for such a layperson to invent an entirely new branch of mathematics (e.g., as Isaac Newton did with his invention of Calculus) without a robust foundational understanding of the subject.
In my personal life, I’ve always been aware that I wanted to write fictional novels. As I previously mentioned, when I was a kid I use to read and write compulsively. But this changed when I started university. I switched pretty dramatically from reading classics and popular fiction to concentrating exclusively on the sciences and then later on law and public policy. Fiction became an interest of the past, and as a result, the fantasies that inspired me to be creative in my writing died. When I think about it, this aligns with the suggestion of Pasteur’s Dictum: I wasn’t making any preparations for my creative pursuits, so how exactly could I expect myself to reach my creative goals?
To solve this goal, I realized that creativity needed to be a structured activity that I invested energy in — precisely like I invested in my schooling and work. I needed to set aside time for “studying” fiction, planning the projects I wanted to immerse myself in, and engaging in my creative pursuits. I began by setting roughly 30 minutes each night for brainstorming the chapters of a book I’m currently working on, so that when I woke up in the morning, the story I was going to engage with was fresh in my mind.
2) Limiting competition and scarcity in my personal life:
Despite what the sentiments of many politicians suggest, studies on creativity from the 1980s to the present day consistently find that competition significantly diminishes creative production. An interesting study found that when children entered a collaging contest for which their final artistic works would be evaluated, the creative quality of the collages could have been more impressive than those created by children who were not competing. A similar pattern can be seen throughout history: groundbreaking and innovative works of art, scientific progress, and economic shifts tend to occur during periods of national security, where the basic needs of the individual are met. This pattern can be related to Maslow’s Hierarchy Of Needs, which indicates that “Self Actualization” — one’s desire to actively invest in becoming the best version of oneself — can not occur until other, more fundamental survival needs are met. Creativity is not necessary for survival. Instead, it’s an innately human characteristic that arises only when we, as people, have our basic survival needs met and are in a state of mental wellness.
The separation of my creative pursuits and competition dramatically improved my output as a fiction artist. As a perfectionist, this was a difficult mindset for me to achieve. I actively had to commit myself to mindfulness training, such as meditating before beginning to write, in order to a) stop comparing my work to my past work or the work of others, b) stop seeing my writing as a means to attain monetary gain, and c) stop seeing my writing as linked to my career goals. I needed to fall in love with writing as an art form and pursue it strictly for enjoyment and passion.
In all honesty, I still struggle with leaving my perfectionism in the past. But over the past month, my creative output has improved astronomically. For the past three years of university, I rarely wrote (probably less than 30 pages) that was unrelated to academics. Now I write more than 2000 words every morning before going to the gym.
3) Be in natural settings as often as possible:
Here’s where the physical environment comes into play — this article’s real inspiration.
I think a massive contributor to my creative death over the past few years was heavily related to the virtual transition during the pandemic. Before Covid, I went to an actual school, worked in actual buildings, studied in an actual library, and socialized with real people in person. But in my final year of high school, my classes switched to zoom, my work was completely online, and the most interaction I got with friends and family was over the phone. Although this is a dramatic example of how our environment can change our mindset, I think it’s also an example that most people can relate to. Our world practically changed overnight, and even now that the pandemic is over, most of our daily habits have remained impacted by the increased popularity of virtual platforms.
While there’s nothing wrong with spending time in online spaces, the long-term effects lead to sensory overload, decreasing the aesthetic calmness of creative inspiration.
Many people falsely equate the state of creativity to conscious cognitive processes. The reality, however, is that innovation occurs unconsciously — you can’t force yourself to be creative the way you can force yourself to be productive. Because creativity occurs below our consciousness, innovative breakthroughs won’t occur when the subconscious mind is occupied with ongoing chatter — aka, overload.
As a result of the time we devote to work, education, chores, parenting, and so forth, we experience fatigue — something that I’m sure everyone can relate to. This is problematic because when we remain in an environment that is associated with mental exhaustion or a setting that continues to present us with excessive sensory stimulation, our brains don’t have the opportunity to relax. Natural settings help with this.
Natural environments such as forests, beaches, and deserts are what humans became human within, and the environments that nurtured us into what we are today still have profound benefits for enhancing one of humanity’s most unique characteristics: creativity.
Relaxation is key for the birth of creative inspiration because only when the babble in our brains comes to a halt can we allow ourselves to mindwander. Exposure to natural environments promotes fatigue recovery by encouraging feelings of fascination, relaxation, and wonder.
According to opportunistic assimilation theory, natural environments’ visual aesthetic stimulates inspiration and advances a creative state. Many nature psychologists have suggested that creativity is nurtured so well in natural settings due to the balance of stimuli offered by each undisturbed environment: the soothing green of old-growth forests combined with the gentle sounds of birds and the wind flowing through the tree leaves, for example, occupies the mind enough to distract us from dwelling on stressful events, but not enough to overwhelm us. This effect is vital to the creative “revelations” or “Ah-ha!” moments that occur when people suddenly have an ingenious idea, or suddenly find a creative solution to a long-standing problem.
For the past few weeks, I’ve drastically changed my schedule to revolve around my time spent outside in the elements, soaking up the natural environment that provides me with everything I need for my sustenance. I find the shift in my overall state of existence somewhat inexplicable. Not too long ago, I addressed the creative process as a sort of assembly of logical ideas: I would think up, plan, and then execute fictional stories. My stories were manufactured products that lacked true creativity, because they were an assembly of logically unravelling events rather than an unwinding of passion that happened to be tied together by logic. The meditative trance nature allows me to enter promotes the mind wandering required for me to write effectively, poetically, and passionately. And additionally, the natural world nourishes my mind, body, and soul.
