I think I wrote about this before: It's hard to write when you're not a creative person, surrounded by creative people. But it's not because you're running into 'writer's block' over and over again; it's because you know the words you're putting into ink (or digital text) are a regurgitation of someone else's own thoughts and views.

I set myself up for failure with this kind of thinking. You haven't written a paragraph and you're trying to compare yourself to all of your mentors and idols. So you just think "well, if they already figured it out, why am I wasting people's time by re-writing it in my own words?"

I'm going to think out loud here so I can refute this thought for myself.

  • People start their intellectual and spiritual journeys from the oddest of places. It might not even be a book. It might have been a second-rate movie that you saw at midnight. It might have been from the time you smoked too much weed with a couple friends. It might have been when you were walking along a dirt bike path, and even as engines rattled in your head, you saw something beyond accessorized bikers and their new tires.
  • Each book out there is wasting the time of at least 80% of those that read it, and for those 20% of people that appreciated it, only 1% of those at best might take something from that book and apply it to the rest of their life. If you play this numbers game, you have to accept that, especially in our Information Age, you're going to disappoint some folks and very rarely find appreciation for your work.
  • The go-to method of refutation is that you should "just write for yourself". It's a value call. But there are limitations and a certain insincerity to it. Sure I get the should, but then why are we maintaining publicly-available blogs? You know why people usually don't just write for themselves? It's because they want to have a dialogue about what they wrote.
    • A dialogue doesn't always mean an email exchange is required for what you wrote to be meaningful, but that you responded to something interesting from your corner of the internet. The standard blog is different from Twitter/micro-blog in this sense, because the work is both a dialogue and an isolation. The blog doesn't require checking on links and direct responses/comments to understand the stance of the writing and writer. Yet it is part of a larger conversation.

Working off these three bullet points, here's my conclusion: Contributing your voice to the world is the opportunity to express your side of the conversation, and to spark the unlikely event of an inspired reader. The unfortunate side-effect is wasting a few people's time, and maybe provoking them beyond what you intended.

Back to the original point, which requires explanation. In coaching, there's a fun twist that you can put on creativity. You ask the client times when they've been creative, and many people will say "Well, I'm not creative." Then you kindly tell them that being creative is engaging in any creation whatsoever, whether it be grocery lists, notes to friends and family, or organizing a party. This opens the client up to the possibility that they can indeed associate themselves with the concept of "creativity".

This is very much appreciated in a coaching context, but I batten down the hatches when I think about my own creative works. I've made music, written many essays, and play the flute. Yet I can very rarely count the times that I have made something without response. This is what I consider the difference of being an archetypal Creative, which you may recognize as a concept in Human Design.

The Creative can pull a work from thin air. It is a pure expression of themselves, without response to a stimulus. I think this exists, but it's very, very rare to see. It's rare to see because in the Information Age that we live in, the creative types that we run into on the internet and in media, while very innovative in their own right, have rose like cream to the top because it's more likely that they created a responsive work. That is, a work that is very much in a product of the culture that we live in. Even some avant-garde short film that won awards at TIFF is likely an innovation in response to something else.

This is the bread and butter of creativity. The weirdest shit you've seen in art is likely in response to the culture.

I'd like to provide an interesting example. David Lynch, the avant-garde director of Hollywood, was an ardent follower of Transcendental Meditation (TM). The underlying concept of TM is the existence of a collective consciousness that you meditate to gain access to. Lynch would say his ideas came from "fishing", sinking a line into this collective consciousness and pulling something out that he'd want to work on.

Of course, these are just words being said and perhaps he is a true Creative. Maybe he just thought he was responding to the collective culture. But we can see from his work that he has a legibility in creation that puts it beyond what Hollywood could achieve but still able to tug at something or another in the modern person. A lot of people like to point at his work in contrast to Hollywood movies: "This is real auteur filmmaking!" But this contrast only exists because he worked so closely to Hollywood.

The Creative is incomparable, and more likely illegible. It's those arty friends that shows you their work and all you see is a blob. There is not symbolic connection of it. You're not going to contrast them with Hollywood or Warhol, because there's nothing to see.

We see in symbologies produced by ideologies. You can refer to Slavoj Zizek or Human Design's founder Ra Uru Hu for better context on this idea. We are a practical species, even with art: What does it do for me? And for the most provocative of art: What does it do against me? You can refer to Ayn Rand and her conceptions of art to see what happens when someone is mad about creation.

But the Creative is very likely to create out of nothingness, which is the areas where symbologies don't exist. We can place anything into the work; it looks only like noise to us. So the Creative is most likely truly ignored, and only the .00001% of people out there, if they ever get the chance to see it, will find inspiration in the truly Creative. And during those rare events, an earthquake occurs, perhaps Nietzsche's concept-quake. Because that inspired person will create their own symbology to place onto this Creation and the culture may sooner or later come around to finding it finally useful to them.

"They were ahead of their time." The thing about this phrase is that it's usually about a work that was at first panned and then accepted as a great work afterwards, maybe decades down the line. I don't think decades is enough for a Creation to be accepted, and I don't usually think the Creation itself is ever going to be widely accepted. It's usually the symbologist-discoverer and their following innovators that will be accepted by the culture.

There is no better time than now to seek the unexplainable works of others as this symbologist-discoverer. There is no worse time than now, because you'll run so many millions of folks who want to push back on your efforts, telling you that it's all been discovered. These are people who are dragged along with the times, unable to understand why the world is changing around them. While the work to be done is not for everyone, it's certainly for those who are interested in life itself.