Minithought on how to create correctly
I have a point. Let me try to get it down.
Why do we feel the need to optimise every little thing in our life with an almost consciously suppressed goal to monetise on it? I donât think that was always the case, I think the environment that bred this âneedâ, did it by becoming way more aggressive than it used to be.
What âenvironmentâ?
Think of a combination of two things: an abundance of choices, and an ever growing pressure to do something, to do anything, to do it quickly in the rapidly changing conditions, or otherwise others will get ahead of you. And you wonât be able to catch up. You will be left behind, a sad loser that just missed out.
Naturally, this kind of setup forces you into some anxious state. Alone having too much choice isnât a desirable thing, not really. If youâre interested in a bit of behavioural economics, you can check out this (pretty old) paper on choice overload.
Long story short, you might spend way too much effort in order to actually choose what to go for in any given context. In a situation where some external forces make it seem that the cost of making the wrong choice is pretty high, where youâre made to believe you donât have time, that you have to âpickâ fast, it all results in us aimlessly being swayed from one meaningless point of choice to the next one. And somehow, all we end up doing is losing motivation, faith, energy, and money.
Have you recently felt any need to do something, and fast? To buy a course, to dedicate your time to studying some new technology, to download something into your perhaps recently bought (out of necessity, yes) computer?
In some sense this pressure is real, of course. There is a very real possibility of âmissing outâ, we know this by observing the examples of people who made great money by riding the wave whenever market conjuncture provided such opportunity. Though perhaps we fail to consider the realistic statistics of how probable these successes are, and what their decomposition is, as well as the actual consequences of âmissing outâ (chances are itâs not death). By failing to consider these things we also fail to properly weigh the price of being overly invested in all of this.
Itâs also interesting to think about if people who âmade itâ knew something others didnât or if it was just pure luck? I guess in the fist case itâd make it more deterministic. In the latter, my point of needing to be aware of probabilities stands.
My point
Iâm wondering about the following: If ârealâ creative process should not be viewed from the lens of result, then people should never actually have any incentive to reach a result or to care if a result (or the result=any particular result, e.g. a good/a great result) is reached. Furthermore, if ârealâ creative process exists during creation only, and not anymore when the creative process has ended, it also leads to the fact (within this logic) that thereâd be no incentive to share it with others. Then it would mean that as soon as something is shared, we can know it was created for all the wrong reasons? That something else is at play apart from âneeding to createâ? That itâs not ârealâ somehow? And if thatâs the case, then any given shared item should immediately lose its value, right?
My point #2
I know, Iâm missing something in my point above. Right now it seems both true and false at the same time. False, because it implies some weird loop of meaning. If nobody ever shared anything, I wouldnât have been able to write this text, because concepts Iâm thinking about here would not exist. There are so many blissfully amazing things, itâs hard to think they were somehow even better, or different prior to them being shared. And quite simply, people share stuff. Ideas, feelings, physical things. Itâs how we do it. To claim that this essential way of how we function is wrong would be too pretentious.
At the same timeâŚthink about ârealisationsâ, those beautiful moments in life when you understand something so profoundly, it almost feels ecstatic. It might be something that can be put in simple words and perhaps you even heard that phrase many times before, but it never really âclickedâ like that.
There is some sense in saying that some things you just have to experience for yourself in order to truly understand. Buddhism is based on that. An enlightened being cannot tell you how to get enlightened because any explanation would be pointless. More than that, it might feel wrong to say something out loud that would just sound trivial as soon as itâs put in words. Not after it has given you this cathartic feeling of deep understanding. Not after you actually know what it means, not after you have become what it means (understanding is becoming. Think of Martin Heideggerâs âDaseinâ).
My point #3
I guess the solution would be to marry these concepts. I can see it being possible by adding some new variable. Something like admitting that words are just not enough for us. That in order to connectâand we want to connectâwe needed to come up with some other form of communication. And that form became sharing art. So maybe the result or the outcome we should desire is not to be good or exceptional at something. But it is to just share whatever youâre âcreatingâ. Again, not in order to validate your ego. But in order to get rid of its grip by connecting to something we should have aimed for all along.