Creative Emaciation

When listening to the radio and hearing several nostalgia-inducing songs from an artist over a relative short period, it is almost guaranteed that they are going to tour and the tickets will soon go on sale. Not that I listen to the radio anymore, but this pattern used to be common so that when the hard marketing release was announced, people carry in those recent memories and feelings and are primed to buy tickets. It is pretty easy to influence behaviour through priming.

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For instance, when I write on Hive there are often spin-off posts written about similar topics, or parts of topics I have written about that build on the conversation, or add different perspectives and experiences. I wish this happened more, because I think it is a great way to build up content and alternate views and opinions, as well as build interest in a particular topic. And it isn't just me who people are influenced by of course, there are many sources of inspiration on Hive, it is just that I am primed to notice the content that is speaking about whatever is on my mind also.

Personally, I write about many varied topics, but I don't actually consume too much myself. This doesn't mean I am not inspired by things like the news which I scan most days to see if there is anything that stands out to me, but most of my topics are born from my own thoughts on what I am seeing through my daily life, interactions with others, and experiences with my family - which is why my daughter features heavily in my content.

And while I do speak about current events regularly too, I find it useless to parrot what is already out on the internet, so I bring in my own thoughts about the topic. Opinions too, but often just thoughts, whether I agree or disagree with what those thoughts might be. In my head, there are very few answers, just a lot of questions and hypotheses as to why things might be the way they are. So, putting these topics out there gives me a chance to clear the clutter as well as get feedback from different perspectives and experiences. I think this is a pretty amazing place to share thoughts.

Yet, one of the common topics that you will hear me harp on about often, is consumer behaviour. This is because I think that over the last however many decades, we as a society have made a major shift from being content creators, to being content consumers. And now, just to clear things up, a "content creator" is not someone who is creating digital content for a platform, it is someone who creates something.

We all used to be creative, because of we weren't, we wouldn't earn, we wouldn't eat, we wouldn't have shelter, we wouldn't survive. To survive we had to create houses, we had to hunt food, we had to create something useful to be able to trade and sell to others. But over time, we have become further and further removed from being personally creative, into a position of being mostly consumptive.

Consumption
"wasting of the body by disease; wasting disease, progressive emaciation"

The term was originally used for tuberculosis, because the disease would consume the body. But essentially, consumption means to waste and to take away from something. And that "take" is interesting in the modern use of the term, because what we are now doing is a lot of taking without doing much giving back to the community. Even when we consume to use the information, we generally don't use it to give, we use it to take more of something.

The most valuable companies in the world are the ones that provide consumers a chance to consume more, and give less. They disconnect us from interpersonal interaction where we have to give of ourselves in some way, and hide us behind a screen where we can just take unabatedly. Most people on all these various platforms, do not create anything, they just watch voyeuristically. This is out of a lack of creativity, a lack of ability, a lack of experience, or perhaps a lack of being judged in the same way they judge others. Yet, many people celebrate this approach to society as some kind of advancement of humanity.

We are less human than ever.

Humans are a creative species that can imagine unreal futures and make them a reality. We aren't bound just to learn from the past and through repetition and habit, because we are also able to predict the future needs we might have and formulate ways to get there, even though the ways might not be possible right now. We can theorise and make hypotheses about what might happen and then model, test and apply solutions. Some might work, some might not, but each attempt helps us narrow in on a solution, or inspires us to try an alternative way.

But humanity is just filled with creators, it is also filled with collectors. And it doesn't matter what is collected anymore. Many will argue that collecting knowledge is the goal of life, but I think that knowledge unapplied is pretty useless. Knowing a lot doesn't make you more capable to give value to society, if it isn't coupled with the potential to use it. The internet is filled with knowledge, everything at our fingertips - yet people are less creative than ever.

You can cherry-pick creative people from the global pool to refute my arguments, but when the average person is less creative, the normal distribution shifts. And when the centre shifts, it means that standard deviation shifts and even the most creative people on the tails, are likely less creative than earlier. The content is becoming increasingly homogenised and the more we consume from the same sources, the more we think alike, and the less creative we become.

Our environment primes us for the way we live our life, increasing or reducing the odds of our behaviours. What I have found personally is that the more content I consume, the less I can create. The more life I experience, the more I can create. Consumption is not inherently bad, but just like if we want our bodies to function well we have to feed it the right fuel, we also have to fill our "feed" with content that makes us more able to improve, to create - to give.

As far as a society of creates goes, I believe we are becoming emaciated.

With little left to give.

Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]

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