This article illustrates the challenges of being creative in a boring dystopia, but it doesn’t justify despondent defeat. No, if anything, creativity is more important in a bad situation, not less. Our human need to express ourselves through art has been a survival skill all the way back to hunter-gatherer days. “Art is more than just a form of expression – it’s a way of understanding the world and our place in it,” according to this article, “[o]ne of the main ways that art benefits mental health is through its ability to help us process and make sense of our emotions.”
But what’s it all mean? Where is this going? To be honest, I’m not really sure. What I do know is that the creativity industry is an industry, like any other, and it has its own problems. If I wasn’t living and learning about *these* problems, I’d be living and learning about the working stiffs dat AWS laboring at 80-hour gigs to dodge that dreaded ‘PIP.’It’s all about finding the torture you can live with, or so I’m told.
Is it worth being creative in a boring dystopia? Some argue that it’s the only way you can be creative. I’m not so sure about that, but I do know that my torture is something I understand. Here’s what torture looks like for me:
- I live in a small apartment with two cats in a sketchy neighborhood with occasional hints of hysterical violence. My landlady thinks I’m crazy for trying to be a writer, but we have achieved a way of existing. She ignores my ‘delusions of grandeur’ and I ignore the shotgun she keeps behind the door for when the homeless guy starts rummaging our recycling for cans and bottles.
- Keeping your world small sounds right to the right people. I scrape by every month on benefits and other sources of support. Some define this as ‘crofting‘ but others call me a bum so I’m careful about who I share my life story with. I’m not chasing the dream of ‘uber-wealthy author rockstar,’ I’m just chasing a small self-sufficient life that lets me take care of me and be kind to other people. This blog is about figuring out how it all works and the fun I have along the way.
- There’s no going back – once you start the path of being ‘someone else,’ you can’t return. I always thought Neil Gaiman’s ‘Neverwhere‘ was the perfect metaphor for life as a creative. Different rules, different culture, different ways to exist. It’s beautiful, if you can stand it – a nightmare if you can’t – an agony to live without it. One of the lowest, most self-destructive periods of my life happened when I tried to live without being creative. The world is a better place when I’m a lowly, constructive artisan versus an avaricious, predatory villain.
So yeah, being creative comes with challenges when you live in a dystopia. I’m not sure if that ever wasn’t the case – ask Michelangelo if he was happy as he painted the Sistine Chapel. Everybody’s got a mountain to climb, and this is mine. I didn’t choose to be creative, I was called to it, and I suffered when I refused that calling. Now that I’m back to this point, eight years into my journey, I’m still convinced of one truth. I don’t do this because I want to – I do this because I must.
