Creative Crunch?

Tapping the creative energy >>

When one door closes...you're unemployed for a bit.

If things work out, I will have only 3 days of credit crunch hell. And that is indeed a special kind of hell. Working for nothing at least fends off the bad spirits.

Doing nothing, for nothing, with no certainty of 'nothing' ever becoming 'something' removes the desire to even twiddle one's thumbs.

But I don't want to talk about unemployment, or the credit crunch. I want to talk about creativity, and the way it manifests itself.

Is it a question of confidence? Certainly. Productivity? Yes.

Both are qualities of being employed. Even making tea or surfing the internet mindlessly increases creative output. Why? Because your ego is thrilled to confirm that someone needs you for something. And, more importantly, because they are focused on someone else. You're helping to feed someone else's caffeine addiction, or you're stealing someone else's time, and get that cheeky pride in managing to get away with it.

Creating, however, is the most selfish activity in the world. And for most of us, selfishness takes energy. Hence unemployment is bad for output! It is good for influence and ideas, but not actual production. When left all day thinking only of yourself, it becomes impossible to look inward without feeling a crushing self-hatred for your indolence, your slothfulness, and your inability to contribute anything.

Unless you're a complete narcissist. Which, to be fair, does actually seem true for most 'canon' writers: Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Byron, Shakespeare, Plath, Rand, Dickens, on and on and on This narcissism is then forgiven by re-branding it as 'drawing influence from life.' Lives that end at approximately half the length of the average person...