When asked about the meaning of life, my answer has been that of Albert Camus: Life has no meaning, and it is absurd to think otherwise.

What if I were to tell you, there is a deeper meaning. A force driven into our DNA that gives our life meaning, that the anti-life threats are actively trying to suppress.

That meaning is creativity.

Last year I wrote an essay about “Metamodernism” as a synthesis of modernism and post-modernism. Modernism was about building the institutions of society. Post-modernism was about destroying institutions by attacking their flaws.

Metamodernism is about what is left over. Since the decline of post-modernism, I have seen two competing visions: 1.) Cynicism and Nihilism which has dominated culture for about a decade and we are all tired of it, and 2. Curiosity and Creativity, which is what this essay is about.

The world seems to pay more attention to the dark first one, but we need to focus on the second one if we are going to survive as a species: Specifically with the two indestructible grand narratives of science and art.

Humans are naturally curious, and naturally creative. We feel most alive and happy when we are engaging in activities tied to either curiosity or creativity. It gives our lives meaning. These traits are evident in the earliest records of human activity we find, even other species on this planet show signs of both.

This and the next two essays will be about creativity.

But first a few words about Curiosity and Science.

Virtually our entire modern world has been built on science and the technologies invented as a result of science. This is indisputable.

And yet, I think it is important to recognize how pervasive anti-science is in today’s world. Enemies of science can be found across the political spectrum. On the left you have those that claim Science is a “social construct”, and therefore dismissable, and on the right you have those that devalue science as some kind of “leftist conspiracy”. Scientific truth has a left leaning bias, and it is not up for debate unless you deny science.

To deny science, and the scientific method is to deny life. Here is the latest Neil DeGrass Tyson video on the anti-science going on right now. At present it is mostly found in anti-vaccine, climate change denialism, and many other fields that are negatively affecting life on this planet for dumb and ignorant reasons.

I don’t want to go on about these debates any further here, it is very big topic that would take books to explain, and terribly frustrating due to the sheer ignorance the anti-science groups have become. Instead lets move on to a topic that gets less attention:

Creativity and the creation of Art

I’m hoping I can look at the other side of this second vision, namely “creativity” and have it be a little easier to explain. Like curiosity, creativity can be found in all humans and is vitally important to our survival as a species.

I believe that humans are naturally creative. We often don’t think we are because we have a narrow view of what creative art is. No, not all of us can draw and paint, but cooking is a creative art, creating a playlist is a creative art, just simple “think outside the box” problem solving is creative.

Art skills require instruction and practice, just like science fields do. It takes patience and practice to be great at art, but to engage in art even as a beginner can bring us some joy as we learn, and more joy as we get better.

Our relationship with art is primarily as consumers. We enjoy movies, music, books, and games and find our favorite artists and genres as we go.

But those of us that have tried creating art experience it a different way, a much more powerful way. Being creative involves doing both. Enjoying the creativity of others, gives us new creative ideas and inspirations to use in our own creative works.

There is always this desire to be able to sell your art to prove your work is appreciated, but often the making of the art is itself rewarding as a hobby. The problem with focusing on selling your art is that you end up following trends, or tried and true formulas for success. These end up interfering with the creative process. As I will point out later, making money from your art is mostly a matter of luck and patience that we don’t control. Best not to go that route.

Chuck Jones, the creator of numerous famous Bugs Bunny cartoons, says that the thing that made Loony Tunes cartoons so successful is that the creative teams focused on what they themselves would like, instead of what the audience would like. Almost every artist I have talked to agreed with that idea. Making art that you yourself would enjoy is the road to making great art that others will enjoy.

The important point is that creating our own creative works, is a source of happiness much bigger and longer lasting than just consuming other people’s creative works. Find a medium you enjoy: writing, drawing, pizza making, it doesn’t matter. Try and create something you’ve never done before. Doesn’t matter if it’s original, or just original to you. Enjoy the process of being creative. Share it with others, enjoy the praise and get constructive criticism, and make the next one better. This is how you learn to enjoy the process of creating.

Signs of the importance of Creativity

If I am going to assert that Creativity is a major part of the meaning of life, the best place to start would be philosophy. So I looked up what philosophy thought about creativity.

There is little that shapes the human experience as profoundly and pervasively as creativity. Creativity drives progress in every human endeavor, from the arts to the sciences, business, and technology. We celebrate and honor people for their creativity, identifying eminent individuals, as well as entire cultures and societies, in terms of their creative achievements. Creativity is the vehicle of self-expression and part of what makes us who we are. One might therefore expect creativity to be a major topic in philosophy, especially since it raises such a wealth of interesting philosophical questions, as we will soon see. Curiously, it isn’t.

To be sure, some of the greatest philosophers in history have been taken with the wonder of creativity. To name just few examples: Plato has Socrates say, in certain dialogues, that when poets produce truly great poetry, they do it not through knowledge or mastery, but rather by being divinely “inspired”—literally, breathed into— by the Muses, in a state of possession that exhibits a kind of madness. Aristotle, in contrast, characterized the work of the poet as a rational, goal-directed activity of making (poeisis), in which the poet employs various means (such as sympathetic characters and plots involving twists of fate) to achieve an end (of eliciting various emotions in the audience). Kant conceived of artistic genius as an innate capacity to produce works of “exemplary originality” through the free play of the imagination, a process which does not consist in following rules, can neither be learned nor taught, and is mysterious even to geniuses themselves. Schopenhauer stressed that the greatest artists are distinguished not only by the technical skill they employ in the production of art, but also by the capacity to “lose themselves” in the experience of what is beautiful and sublime. Nietzsche saw the greatest feats of creativity, exemplified in the tragic poetry of ancient Greece, as being born out of a rare cooperation between the “Dionysian” spirit of ecstatic intoxication, which imbues the work with vitality and passion, and the “Apollonian” spirit of sober restraint, which tempers chaos with order and form. This is just the barest glimpse of what each of these philosophers had to say about creativity, and many other figures could be added to their number.

Nevertheless, while some of the topics explored by earlier thinkers have come to occupy a central place in philosophy today—such as freedom, justice, consciousness, and knowledge—creativity is not among them. Philosophy has seen some very important work on creativity in the last few decades, but not nearly at the rate that we see for subjects of comparable range and importance. Indeed, “the philosophy of creativity” is still a neologism in most quarters—just as, for example, “the philosophy of action” and “the philosophy of music” were not too long ago.

“The Philosophy of Creativity” by Scott Barry Kaufman Scientific American May 12, 2014

That’s a little disappointing. In summary, philosophers recognize the importance of creativity in our lives, but it is not a major field of study among philosophers. It’s a little ironic considering how much of philosophy writing, from Plato’s Socratic dialogues, Thomas More’s “Utopia”, and Nietzsche’s “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” were works of fiction with philosophical ideas included in the dialog.

When western philosophers turn me down, I look at the east, and the prominent Eastern thinkers also said more or less the same thing: Creativity is important but not a major concern. And yet I look at eastern artists like animator Hayao Miyazaki, or game creator Hideo Kojima and they won’t stop talking about the importance of creativity in everything they do. On the subject of creativity, artists understand more than philosophers it seems.

Which leads to my second point: outside of philosophy there is plenty of evidence of creativity being important in life.

Why do so many “Trust fund” kids and “Nepo-babies” spend all their free time creating?

Here’s a truth: Much of today’s art comes from rich kids with trust funds or children of famous artists. Before Taylor Swift recorded anything, she was a rich kid, who never needed to work at all if she didn’t want to. She was driven to write music, and today she is the most famous artist on the planet. Almost all the Disney Channel and Nickelodeon child actors now practically dominating pop music and Hollywood productions had rich and/or famous parents to get them that first big break.

Why? Because they have the time and money to be free, and being creative is the most fulfilling way to fill that freedom. The majority of us have to work for a living and can only be creative in our spare time.

I’m not saying that they are bad for having starts like this, and not all child stars become famous adults, but the drive to be creative is inherent in everybody, and when not blocked by other concerns, it often dominates who we are and who we become.

For every rich kid that makes a living as a famous artist, there may be hundreds of equally talented creatives who can’t get anyone’s attention. I’ll talk more about this injustice in part 2, but just to be clear, I also recognize that there are some great and famous artists that started without any privilege or advantage at all, so it is not a universal rule.

The seriously deep well of creativity that is “fan-fic”

Lets move on to the art found among the “commoners” (like me) who do creative arts in our spare time purely for the joy of doing it. If you dig into the archives of this site, you will see I got into this kind of creative content by making stuff for 3D virtual worlds like there.com and Second Life, both of which still exist and both filled with artists creating stuff for these games that are well past their prime popularity.

Today the main popular virtual worlds are games like Minecraft, Roblox or Fortnite, which allow some limited player designs, and have millions of such designs to choose from online. Less limited is VR Chat, the chat room game for VR headset users that invites users to create their own 3D character to use in chat rooms.

Even more popular than virtual worlds: Ever been to FanFiction.net? Archive of Our Own (aka Ao3)? Quotev? Wattpad? These are some of the biggest trafficked websites on the internet and most you have probably never heard of them. Facebook and Twitter may have more members, but they can only dream of having the engagement numbers of these sites. People spend hours on these sites, and engage in so much activity the servers are often going down.

These are sites devoted to “fan fiction”. People being creative and writing often unpublishable stories and making unpublishable art about their favorite characters from other fiction sources they don’t own the rights to, because they love it. Profit is so rare it cannot be seen as a motivation. These are creative people just doing creative things, because they enjoy the act of creating. That’s it!

Sure, most of it is crap. A lot of it is adult oriented versions of family friendly original material. But some of it is surprisingly good, and the best stuff comes from people that practiced a lot by making crap first for years. Creative people get better with practice. Who knew?

And to bring this discussion of “fan-fic” full circle, there are thriving “modding” communities for games that are not designed to be virtual worlds with user generated content. Sites like Nexus Mods host hundreds of thousands of user made add-ons to popular games made by creative players who, like fan-fic writers, can’t get paid for their creative work. Game makers encourage this as modding communities are often what keeps older games alive, often offering tools to help modders customize their games.

Why do people do this? Why engage in fan-fic and modding with no financial reward? Because it is where skills develop. Many creative writers and artists got their start in fan-fic. Many game developers got their start in the modding community.

Humans are creative people, we like creating stuff and showing it to others. Fan-fiction also makes you worry less about copyright or plagiarism. While anything you publish and earn money on should be copyright and plagiarism free, engaging in copyright infringement and plagiarism to learn your craft is practically a time honored tradition. The 2000 Sean Connery movie Finding Forrester was precisely about that.

Other creative treasure troves.

On top of that are amateur art sites. I used to belong to DeviantArt, but it has changed, especially since it embraced AI art, so I left. According to Self Employed Artist.com The best alternative to DeviantArt, for fantasy and science-fiction artists, is ArtStation.com. For graphic designers, artists in advertising and editorial illustrators try Behance.net, and for artists with an Asian aesthetic I would recommend Pixiv.net. Again, all of these have huge communities in the millions of creative people creating art mostly out of the joy of creating it.

My own creative field is renpy based visual novels which has sites like ren’ai archive, for general amateur visual novels, or itch.io for all game types made mostly by hobbyists.

Probably shouldn’t skip over the obvious while I am at it. Video sharing sites like YouTube and Tik-Tok are filled to the brim with creative people doing creative things. I subscribe to several streaming services, and yet YouTube Premium is the one I use the most with Nebula coming in second. The value of small time creators over big studio content will be discussed more in the next essay.

Other ways to be creative

As I pointed out a few sections ago, creativity does not always mean art forms. Almost all of us have hobbies that we spend large chunks of our free time doing. Parents may say, “I have no free time, I either work, or raise my kids” but raising children is itself a creative endeavor. I also mentioned cooking as a creative act, the results often get eaten before they are appreciated. Some of us can be creative problem solvers in the workplace and get our creative joy from work.

I often watch a YouTube channel called Cracking the Cryptic on solving hard variant Soduku puzzles, and it amazes me how often they declare puzzles “beautiful” and “works of art” while solving them. Philosopher C. Thi Nguyen in his book Agency as Art would agree that designing games and playing well designed games are both forms of creative art in themselves. “Gamers” are creative artists too.

Conclusion

Art is all around us. Everyone is creative, everyone is capable of greatness in their creative hobbies, though actual financial success in art is mostly luck at this point. Creative actions are still happiness inducing and therefore worthwhile pursuits in life.

Since the end of post-modernism, there are two competing visions: 1. Cynicism and Nihilism, and 2. Curiosity and Creativity. Cynicism and nihilism is about fear, hate, destructive instincts, making others miserable. As post-modernism has destroyed any meaningful grand narratives, a nihilistic world view seems to be taking over in some peoples minds. Others want to return back to modernism and just ignore all of it’s flaws.

But we have two narratives left in art and science, based on two natural biological traits: curiosity and creativity. Engaging in learning new things and creating new things makes us happy enough that nihilism becomes meaningless. So why do we need nihilism at all, and all of it’s associated mental distresses? I believe it is possible to build a society primarily focused on curiosity and creativity and make the maximum number of people happy in the process.

My goal in this essay was to point out all the ways that creativity is more important to society than we realize. I’m sure I missed quite a lot, but that just makes my point better.

In part 2, I want to focus on what is stopping a “creative society” from even forming, and hopefully some ways to work around those obstacles.

The answer will surprise you: Just as there is an organized anti-science movement, there is also an anti-art movement, too. That is my next focus.

Read Part 2 here!