Creativity

If you have read the slightly edgy about page of this website, you may already have had a sense that my relationship with creativity is not the healthiest.
The internet seems to be swarming with brilliant people doing brilliant things, creatives of all walks of life, artists, hackers, DIY-ers all broadcasting their achievements endlessly, building in their own personal time, for their own personal enjoyments.
I, like most nerds, have found immense pleasure in reading and interacting with these creations of others, a pleasure proportional to the perceived absurdity/complexity ratio of whatever project it is. The more unnecessary and complex a project is, the more fascinated and captivated I am by reading about the process of making it, more so if it is of a technical nature. What draws me more to this particular niche is not the end product itself, but rather a fascination with the kind of mental framework that leads a very capable person to decide to spend a disproportionate amount of time, effort, and mental bandwidth on something that will have no immediate practical benefit. It is in these cost-benefit outliers that human creativity shines brightest, where the gumption in the pure act of creation is most apparent.

That being said, my admiration for creation in its purest form has rarely ever translated to a motive force. I have always found myself on the outside looking in, my mind swirling with ideas, software I can develop, hardware I can build, mostly useful stuff, at least to me, things I would love to use but that don't exist. That either no one has thought of building or that no one has shared, many more useless ideas of simple experiments, little bits and bobs, what-ifs, and what-would-it-look-likes. Over many years of frustration by my own lack of whatever it is that makes people do things, this swarm of ideas went from exciting prospects to shameful reminders of my own inadequacy, each idea becomes proof of my handicapped potential, a wound that is flares every time I read another project report about the exact kind of thing that I would love to (mis)spend my time doing. The build-up beyond the dam of procrastination has reached dangerous levels, and I often feel like I'm at risk of a literal bursting, pushed by an overwhelming force on one end, against the immovable barrier on the other. highly unpleasant.

I mentioned the word procrastination, as that is the catch-all word in vogue for referring to this kind of paralysis, but having spent most of my twenties debugging my own self, poking at it in all kinds of uncomfortable ways and inspecting it from all kinds of angles, even spending a few years disassembling it and putting it back together (I don't think I've done a particularly good job at the latter), I have come to the conclusion that the reasons run deeper than what can be captured by a single word, they run deeper than even my own ability to introspect, it is not a deficiency, but rather the opposite, some additive process, an acquisition of some defective mental models that rendered me completely incapable of accessing the kind of dissociative mental state required for creation, that have burdened my identity to the point of making it too heavy, incompatible with the required lightness of creative gumption. How these mental models came to be acquired, I can only guess, and they involve episodes too personal to share even in the cozy anonymity of this medium, though it has been summarized neatly by Balzac.
"L'âme ne compose-t-elle pas de terrible poisons par la rapide concentration de ses jouissances, de ses forces, ou de ses idées? Beaucoup d'hommes périssent-ils pas sous le foudroiement de quelques acides moraux soudainement épandus dans leur être intérieur?"

To alleviate any misunderstanding I must clarify that I have in fact engaged with creation, in fact I do so every day, my job even requires it, I am constantly building or helping people build all kinds of software, some even complex, some novel and creative, I have even built things in my own time, things that had I completed to my satisfaction and documented properly, I would have found my identity on the other side of this divide I have made here. The issue really has never been my ability to create; I am reasonably confident in my technical competence and in my ability to acquire it in the domains where I lack it. The issue has been the lack of what I call the "motive force", the presence of various obstacles that frustrate the vast majority of my attempts, that prevent me from engaging in creation in a way that feels pleasant and freeing, that is separate enough from my own sense of self-worth as to allow to endure the process of building, when things start to go wrong, when time starts to drag, and when the initial excitement has all but faded and no rational reason remains to justify the perceived suffering. At least at work, I am paid to endure past that point.

This may have had something to do with the fact that I never had anyone I may consider a mentor. Growing up in an environment hostile to any kind of intellectual pursuit in more ways than one, and having no one in my vicinity that I could take any kind of inspiration from, no one to ask for guidance, to show by example how one can go from ideas to execution, to teach me to reason well about my own ideas, about my own self. Looking back at the whole span of my childhood, there were two or three people that had the potential to become mentors by way of their interests and their position, but who were in my memory unapproachable if not slightly antagonizing, no doubt shaped by the same forces that were working on me even then, they probably found out as I did myself later on, than in such an environment your passion survives only so long as you shield it with all your might from the judging eyes of others, because if your shield is weak in any point, the unrelenting flood of mindless comments, quips and even looks can tear it and your lofty ideals to shreds. So I turned to literature, whatever little of it I could get my hands on, to try to find people I can mimic, characters I can embody, and guides in the wilderness.
Luckily, I was able to escape this environment, at least physically - for there are still remnants of it in me to this day, that I am only now getting around to cleaning up - and managed to hold on to that youthful wonder, already flickering, enough for it to carry me to university, where I was able to study computer science. Looking back at it, I often wondered why that wasn't the turning point in my intellectual development that it could have been, being immersed in the kind of academic environment that western universities offer had been a fantasy, why was that not the place where my mentor found me? Why did I not seek them there?

The truth is I can only answer this retrospectively and unconvincingly but here it goes, growing up in the kind of environment I did, isolated and alone in your interests, lead me to develop a feeling of absolute ownership over them that was unchallenged, all the concepts I acquired, the notion of even what it means to be an intellectual, a person of science, a curious entity, is built entirely in private beyond the reach of prying eyes, but there must come a time, as it did for me when I reached university, where that whole model is challenged by not just peers, but by entire institutions and cultures that have laid claim to all of it, that have their own conception of what it means to be a member the community of the learned, what someone with intellectual ambitions is supposed to look like and talk like, and they have saturated the universities with it, they were inescapable, all these badly dressed, awkward and identical hoard of nerds, with the same interests the same way of talking the same palpable and unjustifiable arrogance, people who were so assured of their belonging to the place because they embodied all of its memes, memes that I was not only unfamiliar with, but that I found absolutely repulsive and wanted nothing whatsoever to do with, all these professors, standing only at the extremes of the scrawny to obese spectrum, seemingly devoid of any sense of aesthetic appreciation that goes beyond the narrow range of their own technical specialization, utterly uncool almost out of principle, as showing any kind of flair or charisma would have no doubt caused a sudden drop in their nerd cred, and most of all reeking slightly of mediocrity ( I did not say this was a top tier university, but it was the one I could afford). Needless to say, these were not people I looked up to, even less people that I was tempted to be mentored by; they did not in any sense embody the vision of who I wanted to be, not as an academic, not as a nerd, not as a person. In all fairness to them, the literary characters that I was inspired by at that point were the likes of Sherlock Holmes, Hannibal Lecter, and Greg Hale (from Dan Brown's digital fortress), I mean sure, they broke the mold, but what the hell? Odysseus did serve as a counter-weight but I was definitely no prize mentee myself. I should have picked better books.

This is where I place the blame for the rupture in my identity, the sudden realization that I would never fully belong to the only place that up to that point had any place for me; that in retrospect would have fully embraced me had I only seized to be so paranoid about protecting something that was no longer under threat, my own sense of self. The pressure to conform was only in my head and might have made more of that time had I not had my own arrogance (that you've no doubt become acquainted with by now) to contend with.
Those years set the tone for the rest of my adult life, having reached by my own previous autodidacticism an advanced enough level to afford me the luxury of dissociating from the pedagogical aspects of university while still doing well academically, my interest soon turned to more hedonistic pursuits. Perhaps had I attended a different university or met some like-minded individuals that helped me keep the straight path, maybe things would have turned out differently, and I would not be at this point now, still clamoring to understand how to remain myself while transgressing into the domain of others.

This prose veered way off course. What was the point of this again ? ah yes, creativity. It has seemed to me for a long time that the difference between creativity and the act of creation was only semantic. I was content in thinking that to be creative is to have creative ideas. By this definition the ideas themselves are the creation, the creative act stops as soon as the idea is formed, then it can be admired, I could look at it with my inner eye at tell myself "oh yeah, this is some creative shit" and I may tell other people about it and they may confirm that it was indeed a creative idea, and I am indeed a creative person for having came up with it, isn't life grand? And aren't I the creative type? How many souls have had all of their potential drained out of them by directing their waterfall of ideas to pour straight into an abyss of self-indulgence?

Nowadays, the creative ideas by themselves feel unreal, insubstantial; they do not even stir the excitement they once did. I find myself more impressed by doers than by thinkers. I have come to believe that it is infinitely better to materialize a mediocre idea than to theorize endlessly about a brilliant one. The creative act is physical, it doesn't live in a world of potentialities, it is the act of carrying an idea beyond the moment of conception, it is the arduous labour of bringing it into life, forcibly pulling it and shaping it into a form where it can be seen and shared, so that it may find its way to other minds where it can copulate with other ideas and lead to other creations, continuing the cycle of human progress in all its forms. Without this labour, ideas are little more than engine noise.
Yes, creation is physical as well as psychological. Though its physicality demands not just the level of fitness demanded by the end-goal itself (building a house is an athletic as well as intellectual feat) but an even higher level of mental athleticism required to navigate the traps awaiting at every turn every unprepared person engaged in a creative pursuit, the traps of self-doubt, of psychological exhaustion, of the triggering of every insecurity and fear they have ever entertained, often lurking at the edges of your psyche, and which only leave you alone so long as you are not tempted to push the boundary of your own being. It is this kind of mental agility that needs to be taught, and for those, like myself, who didn't have the privilege of encountering a guide that could guard me against these psychological dangers of creativity, it must be self-taught the hard way, by trial and error, for there is a severe lack of literature on this specific aspect of the topic, beyond the cringe inducing genre of self-help books, often written by people who are themselves in want of some creative inspiration. The truly creative people seem reluctant to share their secrets. I suspect that this is not because of any malicious intent of gate-keeping but rather because either they have been too engaged in the creative act to ever feel the need to question its mechanisms or that they felt that whatever mechanisms were at play were too subjective, too personal to warrant sharing with others. In any case, I don't know how useful it would be if they had shared the detailed inner workings of their minds in identifying the dysfunctions in mine.
I myself do not really know why I feel compelled to suffer from my lack of creative output, why this need exists within me that I feel must be satisfied at any cost, no matter how long it takes or how many winding roads and cul-de-sacs I end up in on the way to it, I am convinced I will never know.

Here we are at the end of whatever this was, I am not really sure if there was any insight be drawn, or any conclusion to be made beyond my attempt at expressing my own frustrations and try to illuminate my own short-comings so that I may see if there is a way out of them or perhaps I am only engaging in a slightly different kind of labour, trying to mold thoughts and words into embodied realizations by engaging with them from outside my mind, perhaps by reading them after I have typed them out I can pretend they were written by someone else and by so doing give them more weight than they had, spoken in my own inner voice.

Algernon