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Creativity Creep

newyorker.com

11 points by niravshah 11 years ago · 1 comment

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programmarchy 11 years ago

> If you’re really creative, really imaginative, you don’t have to make things. You just have to live, observe, think, and feel.

I call bullshit. Observe-think-feel is a navel-gazing dead-end compared to observe-think-act (akin to the liberal arts of grammar-logic-rhetoric as described by the trivium method). I whole-heartedly agree that "the unobserved life is not worth living" but thought without action is meaningless, and I think Socrates would agree with me.

The author also contradicts himself, saying:

> This watchful, inner kind of creativity is not about making things but about experiencing life in a creative way; it’s a way of asserting your own presence amidst the much larger world of nature, and of finding significance in that wider world.

How does one "assert their presence" by simply observing, thinking, and feeling? Slavmoral. Granted, one does not have to profit from or "pay off" from one's product to be creative, but one does have to produce, to act, to communicate -- to "make things" -- to be creative.

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