Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death

Is it important to be creative?
If creativity itself is important, then it is important to be creative. I'm going to employ a mathematically syllogistic argument to answer the question of whether creativity is important.

The assumption:
Happiness is good; frustration is inversely proportional to happiness, so decreasing frustration is important because it maintains happiness.

The facts:
School is frustrating.

School is a creativity-deficient environment (my references:  memorization of random facts and regurgitation of the professor's opinions).

The conclusion:
A possible correlation exists between the occurrence of frustration and the scarcity of creativity; frustration and creativity seem to be inversely proportional as well, because when creativity is absent, frustration abounds. There is also an assumed relationship between frustration and happiness, saying that the minimization of frustration is important to maintaining happiness.

One can maintain happiness by decreasing frustration; the decrease of frustration is accompanied by an increase in creativity. Therefore, the important function of happiness maintenance is served by an increase creativity.

Thus proved, creativity is important, due to its direct relationship to happiness.


Play? Please.
The last time I engaged in play (I think) was the disproportionate amount of time I just spent trying to use logic to avoid that trick question, "Is it important to be creative?" That in and of itself raises a red flag; the fact that I used logic to attempt to describe something inherently unrelated to logic. The phrase "exercise in futility" comes to mind.

Call it a myth, I call it fact:  I'm just not a creative person. I mean, the existence of a majestic creature like Nessie is a perfect example of the subjectivity of the word "myth"; it's pretty clear that she exists, and some people just refuse to get in touch with reality.

But seriously, on the play thing, I'm not sure I know how to play anymore. Everything feels like work. There's so many expectations to attempt to fulfill, so many standards to try and achieve. And they're all social constructs. It's baloney. I was just thinking last night, I miss the old days when I'd be pulling an all-nighter to play video games. Now I spend an all-nighter planning my next all-nighter.

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I'd hardly call any of my daily activities "play"; the closest I come is probably watching sports or a movie or something. I love reading, but don't do it much in my free time these days; I usually try to avoid continuing the assault that the English language unavoidably delivers to my eyeballs all day. Unfortunately, because of the amount of time I wasted with my logical pursuit of happiness, I won't be able to delve too deeply into my cerebral cortex. Any attempt to find answers just begets more questions. I may have just had a breakthrough though - maybe the absence of creativity in me is because I forgot how to play?

This reminds me of that episode of Scrubs where J.D. has "man cards", and Dr. Cox takes them in response to J.D.'s unmanly actions...I feel like I just lost a man card for my "breakthrough". It just sounds pathetic somehow. Helpless. LAME. I think it was more of a connection than a breakthrough anyway, and a pretty obvious one at that. Definitely not worth losing a man card. Do they reset the card count at the end of the day, or what? If the reset comes at the end of the week, I might be in trouble.

A question that keeps coming back to me:  Should creativity have objectives? I said something similar a couple paragraphs ago. I have a thought that going into a situation with a predisposition toward its conclusion is something that could stifle creativity. And a predisposition could be anything - an expectation, an objective, even a goal. I suppose there's a distinction between knowing the endgame and knowing the journey. And I just had another musing on the idea of thought conditioning that I mentioned a couple weeks ago.

So maybe there's two tracks for my train of thought to travel down. One is creative, and one has been created in me - whether it be through school or experience or logic; I could just be a jaded old man. This second track is the one I've been conditioned to take whenever I have to get something done. It is really analytic. The train is given a destination, and it embarks on the analytic journey - I analyze the way to get to the destination. In that way, I don't think I can really make that mental distinction between journey and destination, at least as far as creativity is concerned. I guess I'm an all or nothing guy - you give me creativity of the destination AND the journey, or I'm not going to take any creativity at all.
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I still need to read those articles that we got at the museum so I can get a better idea of what the people who study creativity think about it. The main takeaway I had was that "creativity" is now associated with "fun" in my mind; as far as applying fun to my daily life, or to the challenge, I'm drawing a blank. There's tons of songs about taking time for yourself. That's not something I have a problem with; I procrastinate with the best of them. [Like how I'm using this blog post to procrastinate studying for my multiple midterms.] But it's making use of that time in a way...I don't even know; in a way that helps me have fun, I guess? I'll try and get that fun back.

As for my autobiography...I would probably write the chapters, and then go back and title them, unless there was a specific story I wanted to tell. Generally speaking, I would expect it to be a more illusrated (literally illustrated, that would be awesome) version of the section of this post contained within the asterisks*. I would probably add some colorful language, and perhaps support my ramblings with some stories.

Like the section above, it would just be me - making statements, noting observations, asking questions, providing counterpoints (to my own points), despairing over my lack of knowledge, trying to be funny, cursing some person or organization or object, making references to my idea of pop culture, criticizingand contradicting and arguing with myself - really just rambling. I'm a ramblin' man.