Creativity by Shrey

Imagine your favorite dish your mom makes. Mine is mutton curry and rice.

Now, take the most important part of the dish out.  So mutton is gone. Now we have curry and rice. Now remove each of the small ingredients from the dish: no more onions, chillies, curry leaves . . .no spices at all, no ginger garlic paste, no oil. What do we have?

Just plain, ever-white rice. 

That, my friends, is life without creativity. No imagination, and you might as well just get grains.

Creativity is a trait I see dying out (along with common sense), as the stuff I’m watching and reading these days are dry as heck. 

Movies recently are boring to watch, defeating the purpose for why they were even made. Articles are reruns of previous events, making us question whether investigative journalism is still a common practice. Even social media feels fake, as all the apps are full of AI-generated garbage.

Creativity isn’t actually a trait (even though I mentioned it before) rather it’s a mindset. To create, you just need to change your train of thought in a manner where you don’t need to create the next hot topic; instead, you need to sort through the words your inner voice speaks.

To begin, let me do so with a story.

When I was 13 years old, I created a YouTube channel. What was it about? Book reviews. I would spend five minutes talking about a book I liked and what the different facets that made me praise it were. The channel became an instant success, and quickly grew a community that blossomed with a 1000+ subscribers.

In another universe, all of this happened. 

In honesty, it was a big flop: friends panned it, saying no one in our generation read books. Only a few people actually liked it: my alt account, my dad, and my mom. I felt sad, as I spent so much time recording, editing, and publishing a review about my personal thoughts. So, against my preference, I created a gaming channel where I played Minecraft.

That too, was not necessarily smooth.

My first gaming vid was a recording of my TV, one I was playing Minecraft on. I spent 26 minutes jumping around in creative mode, trying to figure out how to create fire using a flint and lock–it’s pretty self-explanatory how it bombed. 

Again, parents helped, friends panned, and I woed.

At this point, I was about to just delete it all. But a ray of light, in the form of a movie, shone on me. There was this scene where a man comes in to meet a famous director, and he pitches a bunch of wild and over-the-top film stories in a humorous fashion. Ultimately, he reveals he just plagiarized famous Hollywood films, but not before the latter gave him a six figure salary to write it. 

And like a Mike Tyson blow to the face, an idea struck me.

Why not do the same, but this time change the ending?

I set up my camera and recorded myself talking in different clothes for an hour, naming random film plots in a way where it’s so bad you can’t even recognize them. And after a couple days, I uploaded the video.

“When The Director Needs A Story” blew up with my friends and family, not because of the funny writing or simple concept, but rather its unique ending when the director realizes he can write his own story to make into a film.

This just goes to show how much creativity can change your life positively. 

But how exactly does it do that? Well, here are three methods you can use to see for yourself.

Ever since childhood, we’ve been taught how to live—all by society’s standards. We’re taught how to speak, how to eat, how to dress, and especially how to solve problems. 

Problem solving is a skill everyone must have, as you’re pretty much cooked if you can’t find solutions to things you don’t know about. Be it through math questions, comprehension passages, or figuring out what color pencil to use for drawing, our time in grade school basically prepped us to handle every day with monotony; do the same thing, find the same answer, keep solving the same questions . . . and life won’t be harder than that. 

That’s true, life won’t be complicated if you do the same stuff repeatedly, but you might as well consider it as having no life at all.

The reason human civilization reached this point is because some person went out of their way to try something different, and what happened (for better or worse) was a new lesson. 

If the guy who created the wheel didn’t bother to do so, travel would be obsolete. If Nikola Tesla hadn’t experimented with electric coils, electricity would have been a myth. Creativity is a main driving force behind these innovations, as a different approach was necessary for creation. 

In fact it can even help you focus more, as one research states that “Creativity is also linked to flow states, which have positive effects on subsequent flourishing and happiness.” If the normal train of thought was utilized, then nothing would have advanced past square zero.

We’re taught to think the way the world works, but creativity is the inspiration that makes you think the way in which you can switch gears. 

Another reason why creativity is so important is because of its uniquity. 

Being creative is a choice to embark on a different route made for you. No two people can have the same creative ideal; they can think about two related things, but each person’s experiences and beliefs influence their thoughts. Since no one can have the exact same experience, it’s impossible to imagine the same thing. But what’s so interesting about creativity is how it allows us to remember those very encounters.

Think about creativity as if it’s a Polaroid. 

Imagine you come up with the idea to create a painting. You utilize an imaginative approach to come up with what you want to paint, what materials you want to use, and how you will finally paint it. As you go through this process, the Polaroid snaps mental images of each step; when you see the finished piece, your brain goes through those prints, studying them and rejoicing how those led to where you are now. 

Now, what if you failed and your painting is terrible? The Polaroid still has the snapshots, so you can mentally check through to find what went wrong then note how to correct it for the next artwork. This process doesn’t have to apply to just illustration—it’s a universal concept. It’s a tool.

A Polaroid gives us photos that make our experiences appear as the present moment. 

Likewise, creativity captures the comprehensive events we’ve encountered and stores them for soon.  Steve Jobs once said “Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while.” 

Once you observe something, your creativity keeps a record of it, and when you need it in the future, it searches through the archives and brings it forth. 

Furthermore, a group of researchers got together to see how much creativity affects memory, and they astonishingly found that “…upsurge of interest in the relation between remembering the past and imagining the future… revealed activation of a common brain network during these two forms of mental activity.” 

That said, I believe that it’s wise to have a vivid memory of a time you failed and learned, rather than to forget a task you easily passed off. Why? ‘Cause it feels better to rise from the ground than to fall from the top.

The final reason behind the necessity of creativity is because it built civilization. If you go back to humanity in the primeval era, we didn’t have much to communicate. Language was in its baby stages then, and intelligence wasn’t that high to come up with a way for many different people to connect. What did we have? 

Paintings.

I’m sure you’ve heard of the cave paintings, which depicted humans doing various things, both normal and legendary. The only reason we got to that point was because those homosapiens harnessed enough brainpower to take some liquid color and smear it on the walls to create something meaningful— something that millennia later their descendants would stare at in awe and appreciation of—something called the “human mind.” 

Thing is, the mind is a factory with many departments to keep the body going, one of those being the creative department. Had it not been for the intrinsic ideal that gestated in one cave-dweller’s mind, those paintings wouldn’t have been created. If those hadn’t been made, then the rest of the Neanderthals wouldn’t have been able to talk to each other. If that happened, then forget society, ‘cause it wouldn’t even exist.

There are two facets into how civilization has become this developed: logic and creativity. Logic is the bricks that built the house, as it was basically the tools which allowed us to advance. In that same way, creativity is the cement to put the bricks together, for those same tools need to be cleaned now and then to work best. 

There is a percentage of people that enjoy doing the tedious tasks for hours on end, but even the smartest of minds need a break. A movie to watch, piano to play, canvas to paint, book to write—creativity is the glass of icy lemonade needed on a hot summer day for our brains. Of course, you need to balance both logic and imagination, but it doesn’t mean one is critical and the other is useless. 

Life is best when lived in moderation. If you find the balance, you’ve struck the gold.

Since the creation of society, the pantheon of rulers, philosophers, and educators have worked to ensure that creativity still lives in the places where we live. It can be as complicated as the influence of Aristotle’s meditation upon politics and how it works still living through governments today, or as simple as the graffiti art of a cat holding a cup of coffee on the back of an apartment building. 

Creativity lives through all of us, and it’s our job to make it continue living forever.

I’ve spent this entire post talking about how necessary it is to be creative, but I want to actually tell the opposite: don’t be creative. Don’t start imagining things the moment you wake up. Don’t listen to music when you drive to work. Don’t try a new recipe to cook for lunch. Don’t watch an interesting movie in the evening. Don’t journal about your day when it becomes night. 

If you live like this… well to restate, you might as well have no life. 

We’re only put here for a certain time, so it’s in our priorities to go day-by-day in a way where tomorrow is never the same as yesterday. Everything must feel unique, must have a sense of variety; it’s only when that change is there that we start to appreciate the world we live in. 

Creativity is the fix that makes one moment a memory . . .and memories last a lifetime. So with that, I say that it’s time to put the small ingredients back on the mutton and the cooked meat back on the rice because you know…

What’s there to life if not for some mutton curry for the soul?