Creativity vs Consumption
In a week when I haven’t felt creative, the all-knowing algorithm decided to show me a piece about how we should create more than we consume. I didn’t click on it; I wasn’t interested. However, when I was listening to an interview with Cory Doctorow, who is the polymath extraordinaire who coined the term “enshittification” when the idea came back to me.
I did a little search and found that the idea, while definitely popular, is, unsurprisingly, not a new one. At first , creating more than we consume felt like a reasonable idea; however, the more I thought about it, the less reasonable it became because of Cory. Cory is prolific, no hyperbole whatsoever. Part of the interview asked him about his process and how long he spends writing. It was this answer that brought me to question the idea that we can create more than we consume, and whether that would be a good thing if we did.
Cory types at 70 words per minute, told you he was prolific, a visiting professor to more than one university, and part of more than one digital rights organisation, to name only 3 hats. He is professionally super busy. Of all the people able to create more than they consume, I would have him as one. Yet, he stated clearly that if you exclude the time he spends reading, then he spends hardly any time creatively. This was a huge moment for me; he regards his reading as essential to the creative process.
Cory, who is, in my mind, outrageously creative, feels that they write (their primary creative act) only a small part of their time (Cory also creates collages, for example). A lot of his time is spent reading, and research is the foundational structure of his creative process. I have constantly berated myself for the fact that I don’t spend time actually writing, and here is a writer telling me they spend very little time writing.
I am not sure I have fully grasped the revolutionary potential of this, while I write this, however, I am sharing it because it feels life changing and liberating. I can quite literally stop beating myself with the productivity stick.
This is also a cautionary tale. Thinking about the idea of creating more we consume I realised that it was already somewhere in my head. That the current anti-consumption narrative was already deeply embedded. I am not about to say doomscrolling is great or that we need to brain rot. The work is starting to pile up that disengaged passive consumption is very bad for our brains. I am wary that we so easily fall into binary thinking and that this can be our undoing.
We can say screen bad, not screen good. Is a book on a Kindle bad, or is it just devices with distractions? Is it just the “phone” which is a multi-use computer more than it is a phone for a great many people, that is the problem? A computing device in our pocket wasn’t that the dream before it was the nightmare.
On a personal level, I have been using computers and online technology since the 80s and the dawn of the internet. I have fallen down many rabbit holes, but I have also been lucky enough to learn that curation is everything. In fact, digital or not, curation is everything. The advice that we are the sum of the five people we spend the most time with is, in fact, an act of curation. Me, and I guess all of us, have to be intentional about what we choose to consume, be that food or media, be it books, television or online. As Tommy Robinson recently discovered, our online feeds are tailored to our habits and demonstrated interests. Perhaps what we don’t like is seeing our real personalities and choices reflected back at us. That is another topic.
I have struggled creatively this year; I have felt like my output has been lagging and is somehow falling behind. Although I set nothing for my creativity to actually fall behind, it is how I have been feeling. Creating more than I consume isn’t just impossible; it is not even how creativity works.
Exploring how “everything is a remix” and how creativity is a soup we make of all the ingredients that life gives us as we go through the daily task of being alive humans is a big topic indeed (too big for today). What we choose to consume goes into our creative soup, and the combination is what makes us original. It is the way we interpret, interact, as well as choose and get struck by the culture around us that creates the products of our expression.
That said, I am hoping that I can find some more creativity in me this week with my diary sporting the first of this year’s workshops for me to learn more about the craft of writing. Until next week, keep on keeping on and feel free to share your thoughts and experiences.
