3 Reasons Why a Creative Lifestyle Leads to Greater Personal Fulfillment
By: Colton Tanner Casados-Medve
Tags: Life Lessons, Growth, Self Improvement, Creativity, Lifestyle

The modern world is one in which people are increasingly beginning to feel confused when it comes to what to do with their lives.

Traditional career paths are dying out, age-old religious beliefs are losing their cultural binding power, and despite the increasing prosperity of developed nations, depression and other forms of mental illness are on the rise.

At the root of much of today’s anxiety is the question of whether or not personal fulfillment will ever be found in life.

If you, dear reader, are anything like me, then you have worried about this exact same thing.

There are a lot of different perspectives on how we should go about finding fulfillment.

Some will say to turn to religion. Others to work. And still, others might say to focus all of one’s attention on friends and family.

There is value in that advice, but what’s resonated with me the most is the idea that to meet the challenge of a seemingly meaningless world, it’s best to cultivate our own creativity, which allows us to create our meaning — and life satisfaction — as we go along.

The excitement of the artist at the easel or the scientist in the lab comes close to the ideal fulfillment we all hope to get from life, and so rarely do. Perhaps only sex, sports, music, and religious ecstasy — even when these experiences remain fleeting and leave no trace — provide as profound a sense of being a part of an entity greater than ourselves. But creativity also leaves an outcome that adds to the richness and complexity of the future. — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Whether it is through the discipline of writing every day or taking up a hobby like painting or dance, I believe that getting in touch with our creativity is the best remedy to some of the more existentially-flavored anxieties besetting modern humans.

There are many good reasons to believe that this is so. For the purposes of this piece, I’ve decided to focus on just three.

Creativity is an active, rather than passive, process. Cultivating creativity requires that we adopt better habits. Participating in the creation of culture is more fun than only ever consuming it.

Hopefully, by the end of this piece, it’s easier to see why the act of creating things is one of the best antidotes for a modern world in which meaning and satisfaction are increasingly harder to come by.

Creativity Is an Active Process, Consumption Is a Passive One

One of the main reasons more people don’t make an effort to create their own work is that any creative discipline requires the cultivation of challenging skills.

It’s far easier to passively consume the results of other people’s creative work than it is to strike out and try to produce our own.

Skills demand a time investment in which one feels awkward, clunky, and totally inept before they start to return joy and satisfaction, whereas quick indulgences offer us immediate pleasure with little to no time investment.

But rather than seeing the challenge associated with growing one’s creativity as a downside, it should be looked at as an upside and embraced.

Why so?

Because anyone who has ever worked on a skill for a substantial period of time will tell you that the joy that comes from mastering challenges and discovering new ones to strive towards far surpasses life’s quick and easy pleasures.

Even the attainment of something seemingly simple — such as a single push up — is felt, from the perspective of the person whom it’s challenging for, as a deeply satisfying experience.

Pleasures such as eating, sex, or binge-watching TV may be extremely satisfying in the short-term (and largely due to biological reasons), but they are ephemeral, which is to say the pleasure wears off almost as soon as we have felt it, and so, of course, we will eventually crave more.

Skills, on the other hand, require our active, continued commitment in order to keep on growing in complexity, which leads us to reason number two.

Increasing Creative Skills Requires Forming Better Habits

To write a good blog post, paint a decent picture, or be able to perform even a simple song on a musical instrument requires that we question our current habits and adopt better ones if necessary.

Out of all our habits, how we choose to wield our focus is perhaps the most important one.

Another way to think of focus is in terms of priorities.

The decision to use one’s free time to passively consume content on social media — rather than producing it ourselves — is firmly habitual in nature.

There’s no reason we can’t replace — via slow, gradual effort — habits of passive-consumption (such as spending all our free time watching Netflix) with ones of active-creation, which contribute to the development of what Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi refers to as a more “complex self.”

Put another way, we aren’t destined to only ever gaze at the better work of others. We can learn to both enjoy other people’s creativity as well as nurture our own.

We may not be able to produce works of such quality as the various historical and contemporary notables, but we can certainly break past our current limits and discover just how far our potential can carry us in any given direction.

And isn’t discovering that much better than never knowing at all?

To relate back to reason number one, however, part of the difficulty in doing this pertains to our habitual tendency to put off challenging tasks in favor of easier ones, even though we know that the greater the challenge, the greater the reward.

Once we adopt creative habits, however — such as sitting down to write every day, even if the finished product isn’t “perfect”— it becomes very difficult to feel content with the old routines that used to run our lives.

To give you a concrete example, once I finally started writing every day and got back into drawing and painting with my girlfriend, we’ve found it increasingly difficult to find something enjoyable to watch on Netflix.

After being slightly frustrated that nothing seemed to catch our interest (as one of our primary activities was to simply watch things together), we came to the conclusion that this is because we’re now more interested in pursuing our own creativity rather than passively sifting through the works of others.

This doesn’t mean that we have ditched consumption entirely. For instance, we really love The Mandalorian on Disney+.

What’s really changed is that we’ve become more discriminatory regarding what consumes our attention.

We’ve balanced out the joy we get from creating our own work with that we get from consuming the work of others, and this has been hugely beneficial in terms of feeling more satisfied in life.

And so, we eventually stopped feeling frustrated that less and less content seems to interest us.

We now realize that it’s okay to not let our attention be spent so easily, to have better standards for what we do consume on social media/television, and to prioritize the development of skills that create our own lives as we go along.

Now that we’ve been at it for a while, it’s become more obvious that there’s no going back to the way things were.

It’s much more enjoyable to grow one’s creative skills than it is to forever miss out on the opportunity, which leads us to reason number three.

Creativity Allows Us to Participate in Culture, Passive Consumption Relegates Us to the Sidelines

Most of us will never become the next Einstein, create a popular film franchise like Star Wars, or write a bestselling book series that becomes a hit TV show like Game of Thrones.

But this doesn’t mean that our creative potential is worthless or that we can’t participate in the evolution of culture.

The truth is quite the opposite: by nurturing our own creativity and bringing happiness to ourselves, we do the same for others.

After all, every individual is a constituent part of their culture. They are related to it via friends, family, coworkers, etc. And the internet has made it so that each of us can be “related” to virtually anyone else who is using social media at any given instant.

So how we choose to evolve ourselves determines how effectively we find our own groove in the changes currently taking place.

Put another way, we are each a role model to those around us. The habits and activities we adopt and put into practice reveal to ourselves — and the rest of the world — who we are.

This is why it behooves each of us to try and get in touch with our more creative side. It can help us steer the direction of our own lives and thus help steer the direction of humanity at large as well.

And fostering creativity is a step in the right direction for everyone.

One way to characterize much of the modern world’s predicament is that humanity currently consumes more from nature than it gives back.

Creativity — when adopted with the right mindset — can get us thinking about how to find satisfaction without the need to “take it” from something else.

The act of creation can reinforce our sense of responsibility to ourselves and others, as well as to the planet that we live on.

Furthermore, as the culture changes and more and more people wake up to the fact that fame, status, and fortune don’t necessarily bring lasting happiness, they will increasingly turn to methods of self-expression to find personal fulfillment.

If we don’t work on any creative skills of self-expression, then we remain unchanging and passive. This is a lot like opting to sit on the sidelines of our unfolding story as observers, rather than participants.

We have to do some observation, to be sure. But our lives miss out on an essential ingredient of happiness if we don’t participate as well.

As difficult as the question may be, we should all ask ourselves, “If I spend my whole life passively consuming the results of other people’s creative work instead of producing my own, will I approach death happily and without regrets?”

I reflect on that question often.

I think it’s safe to say that it’s the primary question that motivates me to keep writing, regardless of how large of an impact my blog has in the grand scheme of things.

Every time I ponder that question, I’m reminded of how essential it is that I continue to express myself via writing and I feel rejuvenated enough to keep at it another day.

Without the creative ability to express oneself, life becomes a more miserable affair.

And I don’t know about you, but I think that life should be an exhilarating choose-your-own-adventure experience, in which each individual feels empowered to go on a journey of self-discovery, sharing with others what they learn along the way.

Becoming more creative is — to my mind — the most effective way to come closer to feeling personally fulfilled in a somewhat crazy, constantly shifting modern world.