Let’s Normalize Creativity

It’s nothing special. That’s what’s special about it!

Hi,

This is going to be the first of a series exploring the Everyone’s Creative Manifesto. Since developing this set of guiding values, I’ve noticed a shift in the way I think about creativity and how it maps onto my beliefs. Hopefully it can lend some clarity to you, too.

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Everyone is Creative

There is a misconception that some people are creative and some people aren’t. It runs deep - it’s a lie that has propagated itself throughout time and space to become an accepted fact by many. It’s also incredibly, hilariously and worryingly wrong.

It’s not just wrong, though. It’s dangerous. Creativity, like empathy, morality, love and logic, is core to how we experience the world. We conceptualise our own minds and manifest an identity for ourselves before we’re even able to speak. We build houses, write stories, have babies and make horrible, life altering mistakes. We invent medicines, write music and form arguments that can change the way other people think. Everything we do as people is creative - it’s the essence of life and consciousness. The thoughts you’re having right now about this idea - maybe you disagree and are formulating a rebuttal - are spontaneously arising in your mind and you’re using the ideas that fit together to create a belief that you can think and feel. That’s creative. That’s making something.

There’s no opting out of this. Everyone’s Creative starts by acknowledging that reality - maybe it’s profound or maybe it’s semantics but it’s what we need to accept before we can do anything else. There’s no point in continuing if you can’t accept this for yourself: you are creative, I am creative, and everyone else is creative. No one can take that away from you, you can’t take it away from anyone else, and nobody needs to do anything to deserve it.

This is where we start.

A Broad Definition

It’s fair to say that this position is, in a way, unhelpfully broad. It covers, essentially, everything. If repairing a roof is creative, making an omelette is creative, designing a bomb is creative, nurturing a relationship is creative, evading taxes is creative… then what isn’t creative? What’s the point?

Well… that’s the point. I feel that we’ve pushed “creativity” into a niche that it doesn’t belong in. I feel as confused by someone saying that they “aren’t very creative” as I do by someone saying they “aren’t very emotional.” They aren’t unemotional, they’re just out of touch with their emotions. Culture, patriarchy, capitalism – our unhelpful social structures have put many of us in a place where we don’t realise we actually do feel emotions all the time. I think creativity has been treated the same way.

At the same time as many of us repress our creative identity, others gate-keep creativity. They try to define and categorize what “counts” as creative work. They set rules about how to be creative, excluding the work and the people they don’t value. There’s a dehumanizing nature to this exclusivity. If creativity is fundamental to who we are as humans, then saying someone isn’t creative is like saying they lack a beating heart or that they’re unfeeling – a robot or a monster. The judgement may not be explicit, but the implication is clear and the gatekeepers man the gates with pride.

My goal is to take creativity off of its pedestal. I want to normalize creativity. I want it to be more mundane and reliably present. If we can appeal to people’s “common sense” or “logic” then why not their creativity? I love creativity, but not so much that I want to seal it behind glass and tell people they aren’t allowed to have it.

Sex advice columnist and podcaster Dan Savage has a great philosophy to help people who feel like they don’t have enough sex: if you define sex more broadlythen suddenly you’ll be having more sex! The problem stems from when people instead define sex narrowly. They set themselves up for disappointment. I think we need to take the exact same approach with creativity. Define it broadly and suddenly you have more of it!

We’re coming up alongside the arguments people make about what is and isn’t “art.” While I have my feelings about these debates (typically, anyone saying something isn’t art seems to have a motive beyond objective taxonomy of creative work) I don’t want to muddy the waters with that here. Art is a thing we make. Creativity is a capacity we all have. We’ll leave that there for now.

When I say Everyone is creative I’m deliberately broadening the definition. If you ask “well what about X? Is X creativity?” I think we should say yes. Because creativity isn’t supposed to be a monolith. It isn’t meant to have rules that compel or contain it. Just like our emotions, our logic and yes, even sex, creativity is a way of examining and expressing something about our circumstance of being alive. We’re here in this place experiencing our experience, observing our observations, feeling our feelings and creativity is one of the ways we try to make sense of it. How can you attempt to deny someone that?

The Ripple Effects of a Broad Definition

I’d like to leave this with a cliff-hanger that acknowledges the implications of this broad definition. Because if Everyone is creative, then a lot of bad people are creative. If positive acts like art making, community building and problem solving are “creative” then I think we need to consider that a lot of evil acts are creative, too. If we widen the definition, we can’t arbitrarily decide not to let some ideas through because we don’t like them. Instead, we need to recon with what it means to let the bad things in.

This is where we start.

I’m going to leave it there for now. I’m looking forward to digging into the rest of the manifesto in the coming weeks. I’d love to hear your thoughts about these ideas! You can leave a comment on this post at everyonescreative.net or reply to this newsletter from your inbox.

If you know anyone who says they aren’t creative, please share this with them. My hope is that we can at least start to chip away at that misconception one person at a time.

Have a wonderful week!

Love,

Simon 🐒