Creativity Died

Nietzsche said that God is dead. God said Nietzsche is dead. Here I am, saying that creativity is dead in 2016. A hard pill to swallow but the truth none the less - technology has swallowed the kids we once were. What is really too bad about this lack of creativity is the loss of innocence. Ideas only form today because someone is waving a course credit or a dollar sign in front of you. Soon we will fall to the ideology of George Orwell’s 1984. We can’t think for ourselves because we are told how to. How simple it is to re-tweet something on Twitter that coincides with what you are feeling at the time. What you are really doing when you re-tweet or share that Facebook post is metaphorically bashing your head against the wall. Why couldn’t you just put it in your own words instead of stealing someone else’s? I say stealing because most of the garbage on social media goes uncited, unchecked, and uncredited. Soon all of our famous quotes of today’s world will be by the great philosopher Anonymous who lived a modest life on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Go scroll through your tweets and posts and try and lie to me that you couldn’t have done that. 

My word, did some minuscule megabyte just assist you in unplugging your emotions from the creative world? Did all of a sudden John and Jane Doe feel emotionally relieved that they relayed to their hundreds of followers how happy they are by tweeting some meme about a dog? Fantastic. I can’t wait for historians to look back and see the colossal impact on society we had creatively. Let me tell you this with the gravest of importance: Tweeting someone you care about or love a couple of hearts and a Nicholas Sparks quote does not indicate you love them. This is a creative cop out. If you truly cared about that person, you would try to relay to them that love is so much more than four letters glued together by phonetic insistence. Hemmingway and Fitzgerald didn’t write because they sat on their bums all day drinking scotch. They had their creative juices spiked with the vigour of being excited about something. They lived lives of adventure. They were creative because they decided to feel something. Frida Kahlo overcame the Mexican Revolution, polio, a learning disability, and a horrific bus accident and yet she did not let any of those obstacles stop her from being creative. They opened her eyes to a world in which she changed with her art. I’m certainly not saying that you need to go through the trials and tribulations of Ms. Kahlo but can we at least make an effort to feel something? 

Laziness didn’t kill the cat. Curiosity killed it, but at least that cat had the courage to try something.  So stop being so lazy go be creative; stop hiding behind the emotions that someone told you to feel. Go solve the hunger problem, go paint a flower, go write a song - just go. Soon enough the Doctor Seuss book your parents gave you when you graduated whatever will mean something. Oh the places you will go - go and get creative. Sorry Jay Gatsby, but you can’t repeat the past. There will never be another Freddie Mercury, Malcolm X, or Harvey Milk. So you go out and be the difference. The world has a lot of useless stuff piling up. There will always be room for creativity.