The problem with the internet

Creative people get bored. White pages repel them. Silence is a vacuum. See a brick wall, get a spray can. Now technology has created an infinite amount of empty spaces. We could make films and books and music and drawings and photos (god all these photos!) forever and not even scratch the limitless amount of blankness out there waiting to be filled.

I'll hit the post button. And immediately be greeted by another white page. It's enough to drive a person crazy.

Experiences are your creative equity

Is creativity anything more than taking a given and matching it with something unexpected? Watch this:



It's another example of a Z that can't easily be traced back to a known A. Of thinking that inspires joy, not just because of the content, but because of its unpredictability. I love it. And I was thinking about it when I read Noah Brier's comments on some interesting findings:

"What do artists, poets, and novelists have in common?" Ramachandran asked me. "The propensity to link seemingly unrelated things."

Michael Gruen writes this:

This is also not to say humans are incapable of complex thought, quantum leaps, or extraordinary thinking - I’m only suggesting that those leaps and complexities are based on systems that we know or that we happened upon: our imaginations are limited to our experiences and the patterns we innately understand on circumstance of being human.

Which means that creativity depends - almost to the exclusion of all else - on finding a lot of cool, random, beautiful stuff to put in your brain, so that when someone hands you a problem, you have a deep well to draw from. You take their A and add a Z that no one but you could've possibly seen coming.