The Dark Side of Creativity
By: Colton Tanner Casados-Medve
Tags: Growth, Creativity, Technology, Self-awareness, Future

When our species first arose on this planet, it was in the midst of a rather cold and indifferent natural environment.

Mother Nature didn’t necessarily care about whether our particular primate offshoot would survive long enough to develop civilization.

The dinosaurs that had dominated the planet for millions of years were wiped out in one fell swoop by a large rock that just happened to collide with Earth, and there are innumerable other chance events that could have led to our ancestors being eradicated before Homosapiens ever came to be.

It’s within this harsh context that all human striving and creativity should be understood — we had to innovate, and innovate rapidly, in order to free ourselves from being at the mercy of nature’s whims.

For all the problems modern society confronts us with, from the perspective of our ancestors of even just a few generations ago, we live like kings and queens.

We worry not about being eaten by a hungry lion, and we enjoy the comforts of plumbing, air conditioning, heating, and clean water (at least in the developed world) readily available on tap.

These things — and everything else we take for granted — are the results of human creativity and ingenuity.

Therefore, we tend to think of creativity as a force for good, a way to “improve” the quality of human life, and something that we should all work to develop.

Yet at the same time, it is this very same creative urge to separate ourselves from our environment — in effect creating our own — that has bred a whole host of new problems, ones that threaten us on a planetary scale.

Climate change is the result of having invented electricity, automobiles, aircraft, and other technologies that demand the burning of fossil fuels and oil.

Modern agricultural techniques have allowed the human population to explode way past historic levels, necessitating the need to take more and more habitat away from wildlife to make space for our farms and cities.

And perhaps most strangely, the mass production of “comfortable” lifestyles has left modern human beings feeling estranged from themselves and confused.

We carry genetic programming that helped us survive when we were still learning how to walk upright and speak our first words, yet which we find ourselves plagued by as modern culture continues to emerge.

Much of the technology we have produced (such as smartphones and social media) have unintended, negative consequences as the result of how little we still seem to understand about the genetic and psychological forces that drive us — forces that were forged in the treetops and plains of Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago.

This is the dark side of creativity — for every problem we have managed to solve, we have unknowingly created scores of new ones.

Even apparently beneficial inventions have unintended negative consequences. Television is a fantastic tool for increasing the range of what we can experience, but it can make us addicted to redundant information that appeals to the lowest common denominator of human interests. Every new meme — the car, the computer, the contraceptive pill, patriotism or multiculturalism — changes the way we think and act, and has a potentially dark side that often reveals itself only when it is too late, after we have resigned ourselves that the innovation is here to stay. — Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi

One could be forgiven, then, for taking a cynical point-of-view, of saying, “Well, I guess that’s it then. We can’t improve the world, so why even try?”

And yet continuing our efforts to improve both ourselves as individuals and the world we live in is really all we can do — the alternative is to stagnate where we are and consume the last bounties of Mother Earth until she has nothing left to offer, at which point we secure our own extinction.

This is why it is essential — now more than ever — to understand how our best efforts to liberate ourselves from the natural environment that birthed us have gone a bit overboard, so that we may think of tomorrow’s solutions in terms of how to live in harmony with nature — including our own.

It is an awareness of any problem that is the first and most necessary ingredient to solving the problem — and thankfully, human beings are now experiencing an exploding epiphany regarding our interconnectivity with the natural world and our dependency on it, even if our initial desire to break free from it was justified.

We are learning that our desire to control nature — when taken too far — leads to a rebound that eventually harms more than helps us.

This is the basic law of human ingenuity that we try very hard to ignore: the greater the power to change the environment, the greater the chances of producing undesirable as well as desirable results. — Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi

The temptation, then, becomes to reject progress entirely, to condemn the past few thousand years of human cultural development, and to yearn for some sort of return to an “archaic” period in which human beings lived in harmony with the environment.

But it is as unwise to condemn humanity’s striving for progress as it is to embrace it with reckless abandon.

We may have lived in harmony with the environment thousands of years ago, but it was a harmony that cared not about human fears and desires.

Though we have created seemingly unconquerable problems today, we have to find it in ourselves to forgive our ancestors for doing all they could to gain some degree of control over human destiny — and then we have to go further in pushing our creative ingenuity to devise solutions that take the planet into account as much as they do human needs and aspirations.

And why should it be that we cannot both look out for our own species even as we come to see ourselves as the gentle caretakers of our lonely Garden of Eden?

Luckily, in contrast to the horrors of the twentieth century, modern science has helped to elucidate the patterns of nature’s operation — and how human beings fit into them.

It has done so in a way that has gone far beyond the mythopoetic accounts of our ancestors — stunning in their own way, yet nonetheless much more esoteric and hard to practically apply.

It is now possible for us to create technologies, design homes and cities, and adopt modern lifestyles that have, at their foundation, lessons learned from nature’s processes — which are always effortless in their operation.

As we go about solving the problems of our current age, we can always carry — in the back of our minds — the awareness that a solution is valuable insofar as it helps guide our civilization back toward some form of equilibrium with the planet.

If it doesn’t, we can safely disregard the idea, and move along.

You may be thinking that this doesn’t apply to your life because these are problems that our society faces on a larger scale.

What can any individual hope to do in the face of such sweeping issues?

The answer is to learn how to be happy, and to be happy in such a way as to become the living example of the type of human being that the world needs more of in order for the human experiment to continue.

On the plains of Africa, material comfort was hard to come by.

For this reason, it is easy to understand why — as civilizations eventually flowered in Egypt, the Near East, and beyond — material luxury, wealth, and societal status were seen as the keys to happiness.

When capitalism came along, the keys to upward social mobility were granted to ever-increasing portions of the population, and we followed the examples of the kings, emperors, and aristocrats who had come before, thinking that if we could live their life, we’d finally discover joy.

But today, we know better.

More wealth doesn’t necessarily correlate to more happiness, and no amount of property ownership can compensate for an unfulfilling life.

And so discovering happiness today is a creative act — it is up to each individual to define the meaning of their own lives, to choose the activities that bring them the most joy, and to share the knowledge they learn along the way with others.

Such an approach toward life can begin taking the dark side of human creativity and begin transforming it into its opposite — the light.

We can deprioritize external markers of success in favor of internal ones — which nonetheless can be outwardly shared with others anyway.

After all, is not a well-written blog post a sign of one’s joy, or a beautiful painting the same?

We may not be able to get rid of our desire for progress, to constantly strive for self-improvement and the betterment of society.

But we can ensure that these desires are channeled in such a way as to ensure that they constantly carry that awareness of our tendency to create new problems as we solve old ones.

If we can do that then we may discover, as time goes on, that we create fewer and fewer problems with each new solution, until we finally reach a point at which humanity is, to paraphrase the psychonaut Terence McKenna, released into the potential of its very own imagination.