Tuesday, August 27, 2019

The Satisfaction Of Creation

There is a certain form of unhappiness and discontent that I see with people past a certain age (tail end of college) who are mainly consumers. They live in a strange sort of perpetual childhood where they are defined by what they are purchasing and or using, whether it be food or drink or entertainment or clothes or electronics. They seem fundamentally unsatisfied with life and kind of aimless in how they spend their time, not realizing just how important it is to be doing active and creative things while young, since good and bad are both exponential when spread over time and compounded.

Ever since I can remember, I have been creating things. Whether it be little drawings, writing, music, or programming, I have almost always been in the mental state of somebody who is trying to make stuff rather than create stuff. Most of the stuff I make is not all that complicated or even of amazing quality, but it has had a very profound effect on how I perceive and process things. Every week and every month, I can look back at what I have created or worked on and see tangible progress. I can also see the things I wish I did better at or didn't make progress on that I thought I would make progress on. This sort of iterative and constant feedback makes me more aware of how I'm spending my time and energy as well as being a form of positive reinforcement that helps be stay motivated and learning how to do things in a better and more skillful manner.

There is a certain satisfaction that comes from creation that can't be found by watching a movie or playing a video game or eating nice food or buying a new car. There is a sort of healthy and sustainable aspect to it that is kind of hard to describe that can only be felt from the act of creation. I imagine that this is the same sort of feeling that people have when they or their wife gives birth, where previously there was something inside of you that didn't exist in its current form, then you made it exist in its current form. This also carries with it a sort of responsibility, because the more you create, the more you realize that whatever it is you are creating is reflective of who you are on the inside, which means that you end up wanting to portray increasingly specific aspects of your self in your creations, which means you end up being a much more careful thinker and creator, which transfers overs to non-directly creative aspects of your life, such as your interpersonal relationships as well as how you structure your day to day habits.

While I don't think that being creative is something everybody can be good at, being that there are natural upper limits to intelligence as well other factors like focus and lateral thinking, it is a shame that more people don't spend a larger amount of their time creating rather than consuming. No matter where I end up in life and how successful or unsuccessful I am in the future, I will always have an increasing amount of self-made reference points that I can look back on and know I spent my time as best as I could. This results in me being more grounded in certain ways than I was prior, something that seems to be the opposite of what I see happening to individuals who are primarily consumers.