Why Creativity is a Cure for Nihilistic Despair
By: Ben Thomas
Tags: Creativity, Philosophy, Art, Existentialism, Psychology

Recently I read a New Yorker interview with Donald Glover. I noticed and appreciated Glover’s existentialist sentiment regarding life itself. Unintentionally tapping into the philosophy of absurdism, Glover and his brother endured a tough childhood and, through this, came to share an understanding that “life was a bad dream and that laughter was a way to wake yourself up”. Glover also talks about the world as a computer program. “When people become depressed and kill themselves, it’s because all they see is the algorithm, the loop,”. Glover sees himself as a hacker, using hard work and self-confidence as his superpower, much like Camus’s Sisyphus, who embraces the process of existence with a lucid awareness and autotelic ambition.

Donald Glover is an authentic artist, bound only to his creations rather than his personal life or even career. In this sense, he provides us with a model of existential living at its most profound and compatible with a world growing increasingly bored, tired and hopeless.

Ernest Becker and Camus came to similar conclusions as Glover, as do many others, every day as they reflect on the absurdity of existence; from their dead-end jobs to the next round of world tragedies. It’s like we’re in a loop of meaningless trash that leads us nowhere. For Becker, the essence of humanity is paradoxical because of this. We have an instinct for survival and life and yet are, at any moment, cursed with an awareness of our eventual death; the Worm at the Core of our being as William James called it.

“The tragedy of evolution is that it created a limited animal with unlimited horizons…men have to artificially and arbitrarily restrict their intake of experience and focus their output on decisive action”

For Becker, humans have to come up with a transcendent meaning system to symbolically deny death. This he calls heroism. The first defence, character armour, is the lifestyle we choose. Whether we decide to act as a parent, a student, or a Tik-Toker, we strive for and assert ourselves in dominant cultural roles that provide us a certain security. By participating in the society, we can imagine our being attached to something that will survive us symbolically past our deaths.

Another form is the causa sui project: how a person achieves their self-esteem and purpose in life. Usually we’ll adopt some sort of custom or system that serves as a vehicle for earthly heroism. This is our immortality project, something that will last us far past our deaths and assert our lives as meaningful.

Photo by Devin Avery on Unsplash

Becker extends this arguing that society itself is a hero system, “a living myth of the significance of human life”. However secular culture isn’t the best at providing us with a lot of vehicles for meaning. No God or supreme being is really taking into account what we’re doing so, technically, we can do anything. Which sounds awesome but after a few hedonistic benders can end up kinda depressing. We seem to crave meaning, causing a second paradox: the need for meaning in a universe that is silent.

Sure, people might try to hack this with material gain, raising a family or defending certain ideologies even more extremely. However, Albert Camus rejects an avoidance from the paradox, arguing that the absurd; the tension between objective meaninglessness and the human desire for meaning, is actually what makes us unique as a species. If we were animals we would be one with the world, no division. And if the universe was obviously meaningful, we would also be one with the world and there would also be no division. To be human is to see the absurdity; to see life as a bad dream.

Camus argues, then, that rebellion is the appropriate response to the absurd. This, personally, means rejecting anything certain and, in a difficult balancing act, also resisting nihilism. The rebel says no but must say no in the name of something. This avoids needless and rage-filled destruction for the purpose of destruction.

The artist is, evidently, the rebel. They live a compelling and meaningful life all the while remaining lucid by transforming that lucidity into meaning. Becker and Camus each conclude that creativity is one of the best ways of remaining aware of the existential paradox without succumbing to nihilism. Becker writes: “the most anyone of us can seem to do is to fashion something — an object or ourselves — and drop it into the confusion, make an offering of it, so to speak, to the life force”. For the artist there is a demand for meaning with the constant recognition that such an order is impossible.

Photo by Eddy Klaus on Unsplash

“In comparing the neurotic and the artist “they both bite off more than they can chew” but the artist spews it back out again and chews it over in an objectified way as an external, active work project”

Hence Art is simultaneously the ultimate form of self-expression, an act that saves us from hopelessness all the while without any requirement of hope to begin with. For the artist “existence becomes a problem that needs an ideal answer but when you no longer accept the collective solution to the problem of existence, then you must fashion your own”. This is reminiscent of the latter part of Donald Glover’s interview in which he states”“Authenticity is the journey of figuring out who you are through what you make.” A product of the artist’s struggle with the existential paradox, the authentic personality develops through the art that one makes.

Donald Glover, an artist seemingly aware of such a paradox, has nonetheless developed such an authentic personality by, not just dabbling, but throwing himself into different genres and mediums just as soon as his fans became comfortable with calling him a stand-up comedian or actor or rapper. In such an age where Becker’s observations on lifestyle signalling become ever apparent, it’s refreshing to see someone consider themselves an artist first and foremost, presenting us with a fact that one can lead a life of self-exploration and that such an existence is perfectly fine if not preferred.

And now that we all have some time on our hand it’s probably not a bad idea to combat the creeping nihilistic despair and loneliness with some art; so we can strive for happiness without ignorance just like Sisyphus.