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The future is not about technology
As I follow my deep curiosity for different forms of social organization – the creative ecosystems – looking into the past for clues about the future has always proved to be an interesting path. As Antonio Gramsci once said, “History teaches, but it has no pupils.” That’s why it is good to look back now and then.
The Industrial Revolution was a huge influence on how we work and learn today. Modern school systems were born in the 19th century to fuel factories, and not long afterward, the office work model followed suit, at the hands of Peter Drucker, considered the father of modern management.
But it wasn’t only work and school that borrowed their structure. “The regularity and efficiency of the factory was the model for the penitentiaries, insane asylums, orphanages, and reformatories,” explains John Zerzan, “embodying uniformity and regularity, the factory had become the model for the whole society.” Zerzan explored the development of the Industrial era in his book, A People’s History of Civilization, giving us a glimpse of our social organization back then.
It looked like this:
With Gutenberg’s printing press, technology made its first promise of modern progress, making change the new norm of social life. Metal types pressed against the paper in an orderly way made mass production possible, and consequently, the assembly line. In other words, the printing press transformed words and ideas into commodities.
However, independent creativity obviously posed an obstacle to manufacturing efficiency. For industrialism to work and be more efficient, it needed more control and predictability. No one wanted “creative” factory workers. It was the presence of work skills that challenged the new technology, not their absence.
In the task-oriented labors of artisans and farmers, for example, work and play were freely mixed. A constant pace of unceasing labor was the ideal not of the mechanic but of the machine – more specifically, of the clock. The independent creativity of workshops gave way, along with working at one’s own pace, to the unremitting technological time of the factory whistle, centralized power, and unvarying routine.
The trend toward mechanization came more from cultural and managerial bias than from carefully calculated marginal costs. And in this new, harsh, and inflexible world, people looked for an escape from reality, mainly through the abuse of alcohol and opium. One of the consequences of the modern dedication to productivity was sure to be the exhaustion of the natural human gift for the enjoyment of life.
Until finally, the machine life was the only one that could be imagined on all sides. Back then, the only idea for making labor tolerable was to decrease the amount of it by means of ever-fresh developments in machinery. However, it was easy to see that work not only increased, but was also steadily more alienated.
You probably weren’t alive during the 19th century, but I bet that it sounded familiar. Let’s put it in today’s context:
With Artificial Intelligence, technology made a renewed promise of modern progress, making disruption the new norm of social life. Algorithms trained on vast datasets generated outputs in an orderly way made mass personalization possible, and consequently full automation of cognitive tasks. In other words, AI transformed thought and expression into data commodities.
However, human judgment obviously posed an obstacle to algorithmic efficiency. For AI to work and be more efficient, it needs more control and predictability. No one wants “creative” human input. It is the presence of human nuance that challenged the new technology, not its absence.
In the meaning-oriented work of educators and designers, for example, reflection and improvisation were freely mixed. A constant stream of optimized output was the ideal not of the human but of the Artificial Intelligence – more specifically, of the algorithm. The independent thinking of creative professionals gave way, along with working at one’s own pace, to the unremitting technological optimization of the algorithm, centralized platforms, and automated consistency.
The trend toward cognitive automation came more from technocratic and big techs bias than from deliberative ethical reasoning or necessity. And in this new disembodied and artificial world, people looked for an escape from reality, mainly through the abuse of social media and numbing digital entertainment. One of the consequences of the modern obsession with efficiency was sure to be the exhaustion of the natural human gift for the enjoyment of life.
Until finally, the algorithmic life was the only one that could be imagined on all sides. Today, the only idea for making mental labor bearable is to decrease the amount of it by means of ever-fresh developments in AI. However, it is easy to see that work not only increases, but is steadily more artificial.
You got the idea.
“Are we not more ‘over-civilized’ than ever, in greater denial?” John Zerzan questioned, “There is more of the artificial than before, and an even greater indifference to history.”
He is right to worry. So, in my work and research, I’ve been trying to propose a different path ahead: understanding the ecosystems we are part of and how they interact presents a more meaningful plan of action than simply delegating everything to technology, as I wrote before.
I won’t go as far as to say that technology is the greatest evil of our times. I don’t think that AI will destroy us, but it won’t save us either. What will eventually destroy/save us is how people use it – technology in general, not just AI. If you think that technology will solve all your problems, you don’t understand technology, and you don’t understand your problems.
So, why is thinking systemically important? Why will this matter more than investing in technology?
The short answer is that people will always be a good bet. Everything we do is made by and for people, or at least has a human input somewhere in the process. However, “there are now fewer places that provide communities and individuals with opportunities to engage in low-stakes hangs and chance encounters with people of different ages, backgrounds, and life experiences,” explained Adam Chandler in his TIME article. Therefore, what we should really aim for is to understand how strong communities work, and how they build upon, interact with, and share knowledge among them. Ideas and actions deeply influence each other.
But understanding these ecosystems isn’t only about how people connect, but how ideas flow through them via distributed cognition. In Ursula Franklin book, The Real World of Technology, she wrote, back in 1989, that “the assault of noise and unsolicited messages on people’s souls seems to me to create an environment of violence quite akin to how aggression and war hurt innocent bystanders, those poor non-combatants caught in fights not of their own making.” For her, “silence is a space for something to happen.”
Personally, what troubles me the most is that this silence Franklin talked about is what we need for deep thinking. And because of the “noise” of technology, we barely have a quiet time to think. Without thinking, it made it harder for ideas to pollinate. But once we must (eventually) do some thinking for work, education, or whatever, and we don’t have the time for it, we start to delegate it to AI. As Audrey Watters wrote:
I’d argue the interest in using “AI” for brainstorming is surely connected to the decline in reading – reading long-form materials, that is, not text messages and status updates (…) As we spend less time undertaking the challenging cognitive labor of reading, we become less adept at both deciphering complex language and thought and constructing complex language and thought in turn. We have nothing that interesting to say (to write) because we have nothing interesting to think about, because we have read nothing substantive.
Audrey’s piece focused on writing, but I think it easily applies to thinking in general. As history tells us, the promise of technology is control, as always was, but its inability to offer efficiency so perfectly only uncovered the real “flaw”: human innovation systems. Because human cognition is distributed (socially, materially, and temporally), our complex systems of thought can’t accommodate such technologies, unless we adapt them for new metrics of “success.” Put it simply, innovation and efficiency can’t go together; to have one, you have to give up the other, what Blair Enns called the “Innoficiency Problem”.
Basically, these old structures for social organization that may have been powerful in the past do not address today’s needs anymore. We should expand our options to include various formats, giving people more flexibility over how they engage with their ecosystems (e.g., work, education, personal life, etc.), and especially what it means to be “successful” in those systems. We can’t claim the future while still living by the past standards. So, I hope we have already learned by now that one size does not fit all.
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When creativity meets power
For the second edition of this book interview series, I sat down with Prof. Michael Hanchett Hanson to talk about his latest book, Creative Work and Distributions of Power. This conversation felt especially meaningful to me not only because of the book’s relevance, but because Michael has deeply shaped the way I think about creativity. He’s been a brilliant mentor, an intellectual guide, and a good friend over the years.
But let me introduce him to you first. Prof. Hanchett Hanson is a developmental psychologist who looks at the lifelong development of creativity and the very concept that this is something we develop. He studied with Howard Gruber many years ago and over the decades have elaborated on his ideas. Gruber was a protégé of the famous developmental psychologist Jean Piaget and applied Piaget’s systemic view of normative child development to non-normative – that is, creative – development across life span. When Howard became too sick to teach, Michael took over his course and during the last 2 ½ decades have combined his systemic view of development with sociocultural systems views of creativity and distributed cognition theory. That process has led him to an ever-greater appreciation of the challenges, importance, and dangers of creative work while challenging common ideas about individual creativity.
Working alongside a group of outstanding scholars, Michael has played a key role in shaping the participatory creativity framework, an approach that’s been central to my own work and research. As he described it, this framework is part of a larger shift in creativity studies, one that embraces more dynamic, systemic views of how creativity unfolds. What I find especially compelling is how the participatory approach centers on the challenges and experiences of individuals engaged in creative work within interconnected historical, social, technological, and material systems.
To start, a meta question for you: why did you decide to write Creative Work and Distributions of Power? Was there a particular gap you felt needed to be addressed, or did the book grow out of a personal or professional turning point?
This is the second in a three-book series that I am writing for Routledge about Creativity in Practice. The series uses this case-study method to examine different topics. Most methodologies in psychology are inherently reductive, isolating specific variables and examining each variable independently. In contrast, Gruber wanted to study complex dynamics – interactions of variables in specific contexts – and so designed a rigorous approach to case-study research (the evolving systems approach to case-study research), which I have expanded over the years to include more concerns about social and material dynamics and feedback loops.
The first book in the Creativity in Practice series looked at different ways in which people who do creative work get their educations, and in writing that book it became apparent that the roles of power in creative research was undertheorized in the participatory framework. Worse, it has been largely ignored by creativity research in general. That’s shocking: a field of research on how unexpected change (“creativity”) happens and is evaluated in personal lives, in societies, and across history ignores the concept of power?
But I and the students who assisted me in writing Creative Work and Distributions of Power did not want to just make that point. We needed real, nuanced theory that could bridge the equally big concepts of power and creativity. I knew that Gregory Bateson’s work on systems theory was relevant to the participatory framework. He applied systems theories to a wide range of fields and phenomena, and he was particularly interested in creative work, as well as how people thought and learned.
I’d had Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind on my bookshelf since graduate school but had only reads bits of it. This was an opportunity to really dive into his work. As I would learn, that is no small task. The major focus of my own work was studying his ideas for almost two years. It was like getting another doctorate. His views of levels of learning and communication and double binds alone were almost overwhelmingly rich in implications for creative work. In addition, Bateson was quite critical of common uses of the idea of power, which set up a richly generative dialogue for the book.
That’s true, Bateson’s ideas are undeniable rich and nuanced. His case study and ideas do ground the book, but you cover a lot of other ideas.
Yes, again, the goal was to bridge systems views of creativity and power. We link Bateson’s work to the work of Michel Foucault, Pierre Boudieu, Phillip Guddemi, and Tara J. Yosso.
We also needed other cases. Analysis of the development of Bateson’s own views served as a way of thinking about those same views in relation to creative development, but we also needed different cases as a beginning of a proof of concept. The previous book in the series had six cases from very different domains so that was a starting place. Then we added within Creative Work and Distributions of Power an extended case on the early work of the musician, fashion designer and videographer, Tyler, The Creator. It’s hard to imagine two cases that would be more different in domains, in social and material contexts, and in course of development than Gregory Bateson and Tyler, The Creator. The comparison of the two cases in relation to the theories was a fascinating process, and I think it worked. The comparisons brought out nuances that are not immediately obvious from the theories alone.
The book has an extraordinary structure. You weave together the Bateson and Tyler, The Creator cases and the theories you mentioned, as well as personal reflections in a very distinctive way that’s easy to follow and, well, fun. I particularly enjoyed that even the book itself participates in the discussion via metalogues. How did you decide on that structure? What was it like to bring all those threads together?
Challenging and exciting. Bateson used metalogues in the form of imagined dialogues with his daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson, perpetually 9 years old in the metalogues. He used these metalogues to explore difficult ideas in a way that was relational and without jargon. In the proposal for this book, I said that we wanted to include metalogues, but neither I nor my team were sure how that would work. After some experimentation, we came up with tracing the development of the book itself through metalogues between the “AUTHORS” (me and the writing support team) and the “BOOK” as it was emerging. This allowed us to illustrate the idea of material actors in the creative process, to give a peek into the thinking underlying the book, to break up the rhythm of the text, and to go more deeply into specific concerns. The BOOK, which takes on a rather feisty persona, also stands in for readers’ concerns and objections. Like I said, it was quite a challenge to put together, but from the responses of editors and readers, it seems to work.
It surely does. I have to say that some of the BOOK’s “thoughts” were the same as what I was thinking at that moment, so it was a helpful way to clarify the theories and ideas as you read through it. And that process comes together in a particular vision of how power and creative work interact. Can you summarize the message of the book in a few sentences?
Probably not. Maybe multiple short answers? You see, the answer to your question depends on the reader’s interests. At the most basic level, part of the book is an extended case about Bateson and his theories. If you’re interested in some of his key ideas, this is a good starting place. Another substantial part is about the work of Tyler, The Creator, and his fans may be interested in that. In case-study research we call those the intrinsic findings, what we learn about specific people and their creative work.
We also talk about instrumental findings, more general ideas that people can use, adapt, elaborate, or revise. For people doing creative work as well as those pursuing creative research, the book offers a model of how to understand our own local creative eco-systems – the people, technologies, materials, and environments with which we interact every day. These local, distributed systems are key to recognizing resources, maintaining generative social and material dynamics, and defining the sense of purpose that both drives and emerges from the work itself. Then we lay out how to think about our local eco-systems amid the mind-boggling complexity of larger social, technological, political, and economic dynamics. I believe that this model is particularly important at today as conventional ways of living are being destabilized in so many ways and so many people feel powerless.
Which brings me to a more general idea from the book. We propose a way to think about power in relation to creative work, based on the expression of individual capacities in relationships to other people and society as a whole.
This is definitely a great way to introduce complexity to a “linear object” such as a book: you don’t necessarily need to read it cover to cover, but can go back and forth depending on what you are looking for. However, Power is in the title of the book so that’s important. Having read it, I think the concept of power lays the foundation for all of the topics you cover.
As I mentioned before, the approach adapts and elaborates multiple theories of power, particularly Phillip Guddemi’s application of Bateson’s work. We all have sustainable ranges of various capacities and available time that we invest in our relationships. Long-term suppression of those capacities, ranging from a stultifying job to political suppression of ideas to economic oppression, harms individuals and the systems in which they participate. At the other end of the spectrum, pressure to work beyond our capacities for extended periods – from burnout to exploitation to enslavement – again harms people and systems. The whole social system loses flexibility and is less able to adapt to changes.
Note that this vision of power dynamics neither vilifies nor glorifies power but recognizes the exchanges of capacities in all relations, dynamics which amount to what we generally think of as power. People are constantly looking for sustainable power relations in their teachers, their communities, and their leaders. Those same kinds of relationships can veer into skewed dynamics that are quite oppressive to people and milk the social system of its resources and flexibility. Bateson based his views largely on biological and ecological systems, and there we can see the continual give-and-take of resources usually functioning within sustainable ranges. There are extreme weather conditions, but over time they also modulate into sustainable rhythms. These systems can even adapt to human activities that harm them for a long time, but along the way, individual species and ecosystems are lost. And, as we increasingly see today, ultimately the flexibility breaks down, which can lead to more extensive system collapse.
In the book, you use the case studies to explore how this view of power applies to creative work. From looking at those cases, how do you think this approach to power can help people doing creative work?
It helps identify resources and possibilities. In line with Bateson’s critique of the common ideas about “power,” we move away from thinking of it as a simple quantity that people have or do not have and move toward thinking about flexibility that emerges within our relations, where the exercise of power and recognition of possibilities to act that others do not see – creative work – are closely linked. Is that the concise answer you wanted two questions ago?
Maybe, but it’s now clear to me that it is hard to summarize the book in just a few sentences. Now, I have another question. You’ve brought up the writing team a few times, and behind every book is a group of people who help shape it, even if they don’t appear in the text. Here, they are part of the book. Can you tell me about that?
Both of the books in this Routledge series have been group efforts. I’ve done the writing, but a group of extraordinary, former graduate students have helped in the conception, research, and editing. Creative Work and Distributions of Power could not have happened without this support team – Dr. Ana Inés Jorge-Artigau, Associate Professor, Universidad Austral in Buenos Aires, Argentina; Dr. Benjamin Dickman, Department of Mathematics, The Hewitt School, New York City, USA; Dr. Joseph I. Eisman, Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Pennsylvania, Graduate School of Education, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA; Sam Piede, doctoral candidate, philosophy of education, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York City, USA; and Stella Wasenitz, doctoral candidate and Lecturer, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany. I also had a terrific artist work with me on the cover and illustrations.
This team helped choose the cases, conduct the research, think about perspectives to take, what to cut and what to add. They were a great team.
This was surely a great team to work with – and I had a lot of fun working on the cover and illustrations of the book. Was there a chapter that was particularly difficult or challenging to write? And is there one chapter that you feel most personally connected to?
The metalogues were both the most personal and the most challenging. By giving the BOOK its own voice as it was emerging, the nuances, misgivings, and limitations of the cases analyses could be thought out-loud and explored in writing. For me at least, it really is wonderful way to write, and my favorite lines are the BOOK at its feistiest. But then the editing is a different challenge than editing the academic prose. Everything explored in drafting the metalogues is not useful for the reader so there’s a lot of cutting and crafting to do. The rhythms, tone, and relationship established in these dialogues are more like editing a script that has to be very tight and always anchored to the ideas in the other chapters.
Writing a book is its own kind of creative journey. Were there any moments during the process when your own ideas about creativity or power changed or became clearer just from the act of writing?
From looking at hundreds of case studies over the years, I do not believe you can separate the actions from ideas in creative work, including the kind of theory construction we did in this book. Writing is thinking and so there were insights every day, some dead-ends, many small elaborations, and some big Ah-ha moments. Probably the most important breakthrough was seeing the value of Phillip Guddemi’s concept of power, which he had based on Bateson’s work. Phillip is one of the leading authorities on Bateson’s work. I was already in contact with him and knew that he had specifically written about power, a concept that I planned to cite and discuss as I focused more on the ideas of Foucault and Bourdieu. In the writing process, though, I saw how incredibly useful and subtle this view of power was. As we acknowledge in the book we are using Guddemi’s concept of power with some elaborations that come from the application to the cases of creative work. So, yes as you noted earlier, there are lots of people involved in a project like this, a participatory process as we say.
If you want to read Creative Work and Distributions of Power, you can order it on Amazon here. Michael Hanchett Hanson can be found on his lab website, LinkedIn, Google Scholar, and ResearchGate.
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We live for the next trend
In my sophomore year, I had an incredible art history professor who, when explaining modern art, once said: “Today, we don’t know which rules to break because there are no rules. We don’t know what to do because we can do anything.” She was referring to how, in the past, groundbreaking artists understood the rules well enough to subvert them meaningfully. Now, with no clear boundaries, true innovation has become harder to define.
Her point applies far beyond the arts. When creation in any field can be anything, it becomes incredibly difficult not only to do something genuinely innovative but also to judge what’s not innovative enough —without slipping into the ridiculous or the bizarre, or both.
Looking at previous generations or decades, we can often define an era by its trends. As Jason Parham, a senior writer at WIRED, puts it: “A generation’s currency is measured in trends. Only these fads are no longer dictated by a handful of tastemakers. Instead, what gets crowned as cool is often determined by how well a trend appeals to the rhythms of a specific platform.”
Before the internet, radio, TV, and magazines were the main gatekeepers of culture trends. For example, music videos on channels like MTV were a must-watch if you wanted to stay attuned to the latest fashion, style, vibe, and slang. Today, digital platforms dictate trends, based on sketchy algorithmic metrics and on how easy it is to replicate them. “Mediated through platforms, all trends, to a degree, become memes, our primary language of the internet, the digital tongue we all speak”, Jason commented. And maybe sharing the same feeling as my art history professor, Jason called it the Age of Everything Culture: a cultural soup where anything can be thrown in—yet no matter what, it lacks flavor.
“Every day virtually there’s a new kind of micro culture, micro niche, aesthetic or vibe,” explains Tony Thorne, director of the Slang and New Language Archive at King’s College London. “And what is happening, in a way, is not new at all. It happened many times in popular culture in the past. (…) What, of course, is new, though, is that the technology and the access to media has changed, and the media itself.” He continues: “First [there were] the internet and messaging, then mainly verbal platforms like Twitter and Reddit. But this has moved to much more visual-based platforms. That’s what helps to shape these micro trends. Because of the way TikTok and Instagram work, that’s helping to generate this kind of new media.”
As I’ve written elsewhere, material actors —our tools and technologies— shape how we think. And as the saying goes, if you have a hammer, everything else is a nail. In this case, if you have Instagram and TikTok, everything else is a potential new short video.
But does that mean trends are essentially dead?
In this brave new online world, anything vaguely popular must be named and packaged to be sold as the next big thing. “No one is sure exactly what a trend is anymore or if it’s just an unfounded observation gone viral,” writes VOX reporter Terry Nguyen. “The distinction doesn’t seem to matter, since the consumer market demands novelty. It creates ripe conditions for a garbage-filled hellscape where everything and anything has the potential to be a trend.”
For example, Terry points out that “TikTok plucks niche digital aesthetics out of obscurity and serves them up to an audience that might not have known or cared in the first place.” Whereas aesthetics once played a meaningful role in shaping subcultures, they’re now flattened into vague, viral visuals stripped of context and meaning.
However, the problem isn’t trends themselves—it’s how they’ve spiraled into a meaningless cycle of consumption and reproduction. And this trend-induced brain rot has spilled into how we communicate.
This kind of binary, oversimplified communication reduces rich, complex culture into a doom-scrolling feed composed only of meaningless stuff. In other words, what symbolized a certain group breaking away from some social norms by creating their own, now resembles an army of Rick and Morty’s Mrs. Meeseeks, all screaming, “Look at me!”
In this chaotic media landscape, calling something a “trend” often serves as hollow propaganda—a desperate plea for attention (“Look at me!”). And the truth is, no one really knows what’s going on. Unfortunately, most people don’t see a way out of it, leading to what writer Alexei Yurchak describes in his book Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More, as hypernormalization. He explained that when the USSR began to collapse, politicians and citizens kept acting as if nothing had changed, because they couldn’t imagine an alternative status quo. History, it seems, repeats itself.
Taylor Lorenz, writing in The Washington Post, observed that “virality has changed dramatically over the last decade,” due to fragmented platforms, inflated metrics, and ever-shorter media lifespans. In this environment, even the idea of going viral has become devalued.
However, an even deeper issue has emerged: when anything can be something, and no one really knows what’s happening, we create room for grab-and-go specialists, ready to make big statements that might go “viral.” The louder your opinion, the more attention it gets —because this is the new metric of “success”. And just like a virus spreads sickness, culture begins to rot.
When having an opinion becomes mandatory for “succeeding” in the digital world, everyone is expected to chime in —even when they know nothing. But unsolicited opinions have consequences. “They can catapult people into public positions they aren’t ready for, resulting in frequent and intense internet backlash,” says Kate Lindsay, an internet culture specialist. I’ve seen people completely change their careers or audiences after being cancelled in their previous space. And not surprisingly, there are always people who are consistently determined to willfully misinterpret what you said —which only makes things worse. “After 10 years of algorithmically driven feeds that give users extra incentive to comment on trending topics and reward increasingly ‘hot takes,’ users are making the choice to opt out or otherwise radically alter how they post their thoughts online,” Lindsay notes.
This issue extends to creativity as well. If everyone is “creative”—in everything, everywhere, all the time— so nothing really is, because everything is. So, how can we actually measure creative potential without becoming a fortune teller? Or else, if creativity can be anything, why even try to define or assess it? In the end, when we’re constantly chasing the next shiny thing, there’s no time left for reflection. And thinking takes time. Creativity takes time. As Becky Korich beautifully wrote: “What’s missing is the lack. (…) It’s not with excesses that voids are filled. More than that: some spaces exist precisely in order not to be filled.”
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Is Simplicity Killing Creativity?
Unfortunately, we live in a world that idolizes simplicity. The mantra is always the same: make it clear, make it fast, make it scalable. But what if that very impulse — to strip away messiness, nuance, and contradiction — is quietly suffocating the conditions creativity needs to thrive?
Reading Sand Talk made me sit with that question. Tyson Yunkaporta, an Australian academic and author, delves into the roots of Australia’s indigenous culture, past to present, moving in spirals, loops, and seemingly disjointed stories that slowly start to weave something coherent (if you’re willing to engage with it). But he does that not by offering a traditional argument, but by offering knowledge as a system.
And at its heart is a powerful challenge: what if knowledge doesn’t live in discrete facts, but in the dynamic, often messy connections between them?
In Western traditions, as he argued, knowledge is often seen as something to be collected, stored, and transmitted in discrete units. However, knowledge is not a commodity; it’s a living flow. By thinking of knowledge systemically, we see that “every unit requires velocity and exchange in a stable system, or it will stagnate”. This shift, from knowledge as object to knowledge as movement, reframes our assumptions not just about learning, but about creativity itself.
Creativity, in this perspective, is not the product of isolated minds generating ideas in a vacuum. It’s an emergent property of interaction and participation. Therefore, instead of focusing on the things (isolated parts or individuals), we should focus on the connections between them, and then, beyond those connections, see the patterns they form. Creativity, then, is what becomes possible when we stop trying to impose order and start allowing systems to self-organize, paying attention to their delicate connections.
Another argument that I particularly loved in the book was the tendency to oversimplify complexity. “Viewing the world through a lens of simplicity always seems to make things more complicated, but simultaneously less complex”. This sentence captures something I see frequently in creative and educational settings: the pressure to streamline, to scale, to make things manageable, often ends up flattening the very dynamics that make real innovation possible. In trying to control systems, we kill the complexity needed for creativity to thrive. Simplistic views generate simplistic ideas.
This view of knowledge as a living system also informs his critique of education. In his words, “Any knowledge passed on as discrete information or skills is doomed to failure through disconnection and simplicity”. Real learning, he argues, comes from experiences that connect abstract ideas to real-world contexts.
He outlines five ways of coming to knowledge: close observation, helping, storytelling, deep listening, and reflective thinking. These are not individual activities; they are relational ones. They emphasize context, participation, and feedback—precisely the conditions in which creativity thrives.
Sand Talk doesn’t just talk about systems—it behaves like one. It is a book that resists hierarchy, embraces ambiguity, and invites the reader to enter into its logic rather than extract points from it. In a world saturated with information but starved for meaning, Yunkaporta’s book reminds us that knowledge doesn’t live in parts. It lives in the space between.
In a modern culture that praises objectivity, control, scalable solutions, and knowledge in easy-to-digest pills, could we be losing the very complexity that fuels creativity? If we are to see knowledge as a system, we must first realize that “information is in each part, but the knowledge lies in the connections between them”. In doing so, we step away from the algorithmic logic of simplification, and toward something older, more human—and perhaps more sustainable: human connection.
When we rush to simplify, we often end up severing the very ties that make things meaningful. Of course, simplicity has its role. But if we make it our guiding light, we risk flattening the world into something digestible but without flavor.
So maybe the real question isn’t if simplicity is killing creativity, but rather if we are willing to sit with complexity long enough for creativity to emerge.
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Creativity is social
In this post, I decided to do something different: an interview. I’ve never done it before here. And I have to say that it was a lot of fun!
I have known Prof. Zorana Ivcevic Pringle for quite a while, but mostly through reading her papers and newsletter. We met in person around two years ago at a conference, and we have been in touch from time to time to discuss projects, ideas, and creativity (of course) ever since.
If you don’t know her, let me introduce her to you. Prof. Zorana Ivcevic Pringle is a senior research scientist at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence studying creativity in all its forms, from that of artists and scientists to professionals at work to creativity in everyday interactions and relationships.
She recently wrote the book The Creativity Choice, so I seized the opportunity to ask how the process behind writing the book was. This opportunity is precious, especially when we are talking about creativity, because we normally only see the final result: the book, edited and published. But, how to get there (as she will explain) is the complicated part. And as one of my favorite quotes in the book goes, “creativity is fundamentally social even when the act of creation in itself is not.”
To start, I’d love to hear something more personal: What drew you to your field? Was there a particular moment or experience that led you to become a researcher, focus on emotions, and pursue an academic career? How do these different aspects (being a researcher, a writer, and so on) come together in your work today?
I first became interested in the study of creativity when I was an undergraduate student and considering a topic for a thesis. My approach was to read broadly to see where inspiration would come from. And I came across a line by Frank Barron, creativity scholar from the 1960s, which was the first golden age of research on this topic, spurred by the space race between the US and USSR. He said that creative individuals are, “occasionally crazier and yet adamantly saner than the average person”.
I found that so intriguing that I knew I wanted to study creativity and never looked back. For a long time, I was interested in conducting basic research about the nature of creative individuals and the creative process. With time, I noticed that much of very good scientific research is not translated accurately or effectively to the general audiences so that those who want to promote and teach creativity can do it with the best tools available. And that got me started on writing and speaking to everyone who is interested in creativity, but does not happen to be a scientist.
Now, and perhaps the most important question, why did you decide to write this book in the first place?
I came to realize that most things in life happen serendipitously. A few years ago, a colleague whose opinion I respected, mentioned that I should write a book. She recognized something that I did not yet – that I am able to communicate in ways that are accessible, but rooted in science. I started writing for Psychology Today and recognized that she was right. My writing struck a cord. In the book, I talk a lot about how we can harness the power of emotions to boost creativity. And I recognized that the excitement of putting out a regular a column is telling me that writing a book is something that I should pursue.
What was the writing process like for you? Were there any moments that surprised or challenged you along the way?
The writing process was hard. Because creativity that takes a long time, such as writing a book, is hard. It was made more difficult by the fact that I had a demanding full time job and a family and somehow had to make it all work in the same time. And the only way to do that was to reflect on how to take my own advice and use the tools I discuss in the book. I had to create a distance between my day job and writing and I did it by physically changing where I work; so much of the book was written at a local bookstore.I also reminded myself of the relationships between feeling and thinking and arranged my writing to take advantage of daily fluctuations in emotions. I am not a morning person and tend to be gloomy in the mornings; these moods facilitate critical thinking and are great for editing. So that is what I would do in the morning. My mood is sunnier in the late afternoons and that is when I would do new writing. And finally, I remembered that the strategies to get out of a creative block. Even when it felt I had no time to take a break, that is at times necessary to take the edge off from the feeling of being overwhelmed by frustration of being stuck.
Is there a chapter that feels especially personal or meaningful to you? What makes it stand out?
Two chapters are probably most meaningful to me because they deal with the aspects of creativity that are rarely discussed in other writing. One is the chapter on harnessing the power of emotions and the other the chapter on the creative block. Creative work is full of emotions, from anxiety in front of an empty screen to excitement of new ideas, to frustrations when facing obstacles. It seems intuitive to people to think that emotions are something that is in the way of clear and effective thinking, but the fact that emotions can be an asset and boost creative work is something rather surprising to many people. It might seem that creative blocks would be something commonly talked about, but rather puzzlingly, it is not. What I found most meaningful in writing about this topic is that these experiences are so difficult that we need to apply all the tools, especially those dealing with emotions, that are discussed in the rest of the book.
Which chapter was the most challenging to write, and what made it difficult?
It was most challenging to write about the creative block. And this is for a surprising reason. Although people engaged in creative work experience this state of being stuck to the point that it could be considered a common part of the creative process, it is rarely studied directly. I had to pull from different kinds of research and put it together in a coherent whole. It made it the most challenging, but also one of the most meaningful chapters.
Finally, I’m curious to know: did the process of writing this book change or deepen your own understanding of creativity? If so, how?
The process of writing this book made me see the different strands in creativity research in a more unified way. In the world of science, some people study the traits of creative individuals, others the emotional side of the creative process, and other still the social influences on creativity. Writing this book pushed me to consider not just each of these topics individually, but also how they fit together. And I came to an understanding that our beliefs and attitudes (especially about risk and how we think of our own creativity) are primary influences on whether we will even decide to act on creative ideas we have.
The tools for how to effectively direct our creative drive, how to use and manage emotions, how to identify, frame, and reframe problems are all strategies that enable persistence on long-term creative work. And finally, the social side of creativity – interactions with others who influence our work in ways implicit or explicit – constitute opportunities that make creativity repeatable. So that one success does not become a one hit wonder.
If you are curious to read The Creative Choice: The Science of Making Decisions to Turn Ideas into Action, you can order it on Amazon here. Zorana can be found on her website, Substack newsletter, LinkedIn, BlueSky, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
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Can AI make us less intelligent?
The emergence of AI is calling into question what it means to be intelligent. However, the problem may not lie in tech vs. humans, but instead in our very definition of it.
I’ve been playing for a while now with the idea proposed by Donald Clark that our education is mainly text-based. “From 5 to now 25 [years old],” explains Donald, “young people spend almost all of their time reading, writing and critiquing ‘text’ in an educational system”.If you think this through, it makes sense. Our very definition of intelligence is text-based. Intelligent people are those who know how to read and write very well -or do something that comes with knowing how to read and write very well. Considering that less than 200 years ago almost 90% of the population were illiterate, if not more, knowing how to read and write puts one among the 10% and gives access to information, ideas, opportunities, and long-range communication.
However, even today with most young people having access to education, reading and writing performance continues to drop, but we do not exactly lack brilliant people doing extraordinary things. Why?
In 1921, psychologist Lewis Terman began an audacious experiment that would span decades and shape our understanding of intelligence and success. Armed with IQ tests, stacks of questionnaires, and an unshakable belief in the power of intellect, Terman set out to answer a question that had haunted educators and psychologists alike: What happens to gifted children when they grow up?
Terman and his team scoured California schools, identifying 1,528 children with IQs above 135—an extraordinary threshold. These children, whom Terman affectionately referred to as his “Termites,” became the subjects of one of the longest and most ambitious longitudinal studies in history: the Genetic Studies of Genius. The premise was simple but profound: if intelligence was the key to success, these children were destined for greatness.However, intelligence, Terman would discover, is only one part of a much larger equation. At first, the results seemed promising. Many Termites excelled in school, pursued higher education, and secured stable, respectable careers. Some became professors, scientists, doctors, and lawyers. Yet, beneath the sheen of success lay a messier reality. Some Termites with extraordinarily high IQs failed to meet expectations, while others with merely “above-average” scores achieved remarkable feats.
By the time of Terman’s death in 1956, the data painted a nuanced picture. Intelligence correlated with success, but it was far from a guarantee. Motivation, perseverance, emotional intelligence, and even sheer circumstance mattered just as much, if not more.
Just like Terman concluded, a text-based education is not nearly enough to prepare students for what comes next. However, with the upcoming threat to text-based education, the Large Language Models (LLM) AIs, most traditional education systems are advocating against it like antibodies fighting a disease. I have explored this threat in education before, but the same is happening in the workplace.
Doing meaningful work demands automating as much as we can in the systems, with technology doing better and faster the work we shouldn’t be doing anymore. This principle is not new in civilization; humans always created tools to make life easier, automating parts or all the work.
For those who work depend heavily on text, automation may be seen as a threat, not an opportunity, as we will see these jobs be transformed or even disappear. But as Kenneth Megill explains in his book, Thinking For A Living: The Coming Age Of Knowledge Work:
“An enlightened ‘owner’ of his labor has a very different attitude. Automation is welcomed, for the work becomes easier and if tasks are taken over by machines, this is a liberation, not a threatening force. The work of the enlightened ‘owner’ is the work of someone who is open to, and eager to, innovate and create. These are the primary characteristics of knowledge work.”
Not surprisingly, many of these systems, such as educational and organizational, are perceiving the use of AI as cheating. But if an AI can pass university tests and job interviews, is technology the real problem? Or is it how we insist on doing things?
Just like we changed horses for cars and iron cogs for silicon, my point here is that our systems need to change or adapt to this new technology. In other words, our modus operandi should be revised.
For good or worse, AI is now part of our daily lives, and excluding it from education and the workplace (or at least think that it is possible) is just nonsense. If we are in need of good ideas, AI can be just what we need if we only know how to use it correctly –and for that, we need to learn how to use it.
Anyone is now able to do at least mediocre work using an AI that otherwise would be just bad work. In contrast, this is also an opportunity for incredibly competent professionals. They are free of mediocre work (because the clients can do it themselves now), but having the knowledge of how to do outstanding work or even knowing what outstanding work looks like is still reserved for them.
Also, knowing how to work with an AI will be also a challenge. There is a big difference between going through an iterative process with an AI and just asking it to do it for you. If you need brilliant and effective work, hiring a flesh-and-blood professional still is your only option.
Just as Terman’s study revealed the limits of text-based intelligence in defining life outcomes, AIs are exposing the flaws of relying too heavily on it. The rise of AI challenges not only our traditional systems of education and work but also our deeply ingrained definitions of intelligence.
From the printing press to the internet, technological advancements have consistently forced us to redefine our understanding of the world. Intelligence is no different. The question is not whether AI will make us less intelligent, but whether we are willing to redefine intelligence in a way that embraces these “new ways of doing business”.
Intelligence in the AI era will belong not to those who fear or reject it, but to those who learn to work with it, question it, leverage it, and push it to new creative and intellectual frontiers.
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What 2024 Taught Me: Key Insights on Creativity, Education, and the Future of Work
Looking back on 2024, I realize how much my writing has revolved around a core tension: the balance between the boundless potential of human creativity and the structures—both external and internal—that shape or constrain it. Whether it was through exploring mentorship, curiosity, technology, or attention, I found myself repeatedly drawn to the spaces where growth meets resistance, where the unfamiliar nudges us toward discovery, and where stillness becomes a prerequisite for insight.
Mentorship, for instance, isn’t just about receiving guidance—it’s about humility. It’s about acknowledging that our individual perspective is limited and that growth often comes through the courage to accept someone else’s wisdom. In contrast, curiosity thrives in solitude and uncertainty. The unknown is often uncomfortable, yet it carries within it a gravitational pull—a quiet promise that something meaningful lies just beyond our current understanding.
But curiosity and mentorship alone can’t counteract the pressures of an overstimulated, overly efficient world. Technology, for all its transformative power, often threatens to make us passive—content with algorithmic certainty rather than driven by messy, unpredictable exploration. Creativity suffers when everything becomes optimized, measured, and predictable. We become spectators rather than participants, mistaking efficiency for excellence.
Attention, too, became an obsession for me this year. In an economy that thrives on fragmentation and surface-level engagement, deep focus has become an act of rebellion. The ability to sit with an idea—unrushed, uninterrupted—has become as rare as it is valuable. But this ability doesn’t emerge in a vacuum; it requires a deliberate choice to slow down, embrace boredom, and allow thoughts the space to unfurl naturally.
Flexibility became another recurring theme—a kind of currency we trade in the pursuit of meaningful work. Too much rigidity stifles us, yet boundless freedom can leave us directionless. There’s a delicate balance to be struck between discipline and adaptability, and maintaining it requires self-awareness, honesty, and a willingness to recalibrate when things start to tilt too far in one direction.
And then there’s education—a space where all these threads converge. The conversations I encountered at the Creativity in Education Summit reminded me that our systems, much like our individual lives, often prioritize short-term outcomes over long-term potential. If we fail to nurture it in our schools, we risk raising generations who are adept at following instructions but incapable of charting new paths.
As I weave together these reflections, I’m struck by how interconnected these ideas are. Curiosity fuels creativity. Attention sustains it. Mentorship refines it. And flexibility protects it. Technology, if wielded mindfully, can amplify it. These aren’t isolated concepts—they’re part of a larger, intricate ecosystem that shapes how we think, how we create, and ultimately, how we contribute to the world.
If there’s one lesson I’m taking forward, it’s this: the most meaningful progress happens not in grand leaps, but in small, intentional moments—when we dare to ask better questions, when we allow ourselves to get bored, when we listen to a mentor, and when we choose to embrace the discomfort of not knowing. Creativity isn’t a switch we flip; it’s a state of being we nurture, protect, and fight for. And in a world that often feels like it’s moving too fast to notice, that might just be the most radical thing we can do.
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Insights from the Creativity in Education Summit
Recently, I attended the Creativity in Education Summit at the UNESCO International Institute for Educational Planning and OECD headquarters in Paris, organized by the Global Institute of Creative Thinking.
It brought together a global and diverse group of education leaders, policymakers, researchers, and innovators to discuss the critical role of creativity in shaping the future of education. With a focus on reimagining traditional learning environments, the summit addressed the challenges and opportunities for integrating creativity into global education systems and presented projects from different countries that are already adapting education to foster innovation, problem-solving, and critical thinking in the face of rapid social and technological changes.
During the event, I had some insights that I considered key to rethinking Creativity in Education. I’d like to share them here with you in the hope that they can be food for thought and lead to new reflections and inquiry.
1 – Creativity “toolkits” and assessments will not make a difference to already overloaded teachers and overcrowded curriculaIf you talk with any teacher, chances are that they will tell you that they are burdened with heavy workloads. In the rush to address all the demands of packed curricula, the introduction of creativity tools, techniques, methodologies, frameworks, and assessments can easily be seen just as another task to the long to-do pile. Also, if students’ fate depends on their standardized test scores, teaching creativity is ludicrous.
In other words, if we do not address the root causes for the absence of creativity in the classroom, such as lack of time, support, and space for flexibility, it won’t change much. For creativity to flourish in classrooms, systemic changes are necessary. Creativity should not be an add-on but integral to the curriculum and embedded in a way that reduces teachers’ burden rather than increasing it.
So, how can creativity be integrated in a practical way in the classroom without overburdening teachers?
2 – Schools have little incentive to change since education is mandatoryBe honest: would you change the way you do things if, despite the quality of your product or service, clients keep coming in by the thousands?
In most countries, if not all, education is mandatory (thankfully!). However, it creates another problem: schools may not face the same competitive pressures that businesses do, where poor service may lead to losing customers, resulting in schools’ resistance to innovation or improvement because their “clients” do not have another option if not accept it as it is. If we want real change, it may need an external push—whether through policy, community demands, or creating more avenues for student, parent, and teacher feedback.
What mechanisms can be introduced to incentivize schools to innovate and improve the quality of education?
3 – Students do not have many options for learning formats besides traditional schoolingYou probably met some colleague that was “not made for school”. But this same colleague may have thrived if another learning format were available for choosing (or at least experimenting).
Henry Ford famously said that “any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black.” In the same sense, most formal education still follows the 19th-century model: a teacher lectures, students take notes, and exams measure success. This old structure may have been powerful in the past, but it does not address today’s needs anymore. As pointed out in the insight above, schools’ “clients” such as students and parents have few learning options available, if any. The same goes for teachers. We should expand educational choices to include various formats, such as project-based learning, collaborative problem-solving, or hands-on experimentation, giving students and teachers more control over how they engage with learning.
How can schools diversify learning formats to offer students alternative pathways to traditional schooling that better support individual learning styles?
4 – Learning is (mainly) social, so incorporating creativity in education doesn’t need to be that complexCreativity doesn’t always need fancy tools, exquisite frameworks, or fancy lesson plans. In a recent research conducted by my colleagues and I, we observed that fostering a positive and supportive learning environment where students feel free to explore, experiment, and learn at their own pace is essential for creative behavior.
As a professor once told me, doing the simple is the hardest thing, and achieving the simple without being simplistic needs extra effort. So, in order to incorporate creativity in education, it requires a simple shift in mindset: from viewing education as a rigid process of knowledge transmission to seeing it as a dynamic, collaborative, and social activity, where the role of the teacher becomes that of a facilitator instead of the holder of knowledge.
So, how can schools create simple yet effective environments that nurture creativity through social interactions and self-paced learning?
5 – Creativity is an abstract concept, so the focus should be on the skills that potentialize itIf you think about it, creativity is an abstract concept—or an ideology, as Prof. Michael Hanchett Hanson likes to say—and as an abstract concept (like freedom, justice, or beauty), people may adapt it to different situations or contexts.
When it comes to Education, rather than focusing solely on creativity as an abstract end goal (creative to whom?), which can be tricky to control or even measure its full spectrum, educators should focus on fostering the skills that potentialize it—such as critical thinking, risk-taking, perseverance in the face of setbacks, flexibility, and tolerance for ambiguity, to cite a few. When students are encouraged to inquire, challenge assumptions, and push through difficulties, creativity becomes a natural byproduct of the educational process. In other words, creativity shouldn’t be an adjective for specific tasks or lessons, but a collateral of good education.
How can educators shift the focus from creativity as an abstract goal to fostering essential skills like critical thinking, perseverance, and flexibility, which naturally support creativity in the learning process?
6 – Focusing on idea generation and divergent thinking is not enough to promote creative behaviorIdea generation and divergent thinking may be seen as crucial aspects of creativity, but it’s not the whole picture. If we want to promote creative behavior in our students, we need to give them time to think and space to sit with ideas, reflect, experiment, and figure things out on their own.
Education systems often prioritize efficiency and quick solutions, but creative thinking requires a deep engagement that only comes with time. Instead of rushing students through assignments and jumping from one “creative solution” to another, we should allow them to explore different paths, make mistakes, and learn through trial and error. Therefore, the focus should shift from immediate “visible” outcomes to long-term cognitive and socioemotional development.
How can education systems allow students more time to reflect and experiment, promoting deeper creative engagement and evaluating long-term achievements?
7 – Problem-solving is a great way to develop creativity, but the type of problem mattersProblem-solving and creativity often walk side by side. However, it concerns me which kind of problems we are giving our students to solve, since we may be giving only the ones we think are important. While societal problems like climate change, hunger, and poverty are “everyone’s problem”, students must also have the space to work on problems they think are important, ensuring that they have a voice in the problems they are solving.
If we only present them with predefined problems, we may end up with students incapable of thinking critically about their contexts. They need the opportunity to identify and work on problems that resonate with them. Ownership over the problem construction process is key to creative work.
How can educators balance guiding students toward societal issues while ensuring students have the autonomy to solve problems they identify personally as important?
8 – There is an art bias in creativity, but it should be about “thinking like an artist” and not just “making art”Creativity is often mistakenly equated with artistic expression. However, what it needs is not just “making art” but rather thinking like an artist. Quite often, artists follow a hunch, without really knowing where it will lead them. Artists experiment and try things out to see what happens, embracing uncertainty.
Traditional Education prioritizes knowing the answer over the process of discovery, and not knowing where you are going is not a desirable situation. But this could be exactly what we might be missing: let ourselves follow a hunch (or even have one) wherever it leads us. This artistic mindset—one of curiosity, exploration, and risk-taking—can be applied across all disciplines and potentialize creative behavior.
Cultivating an environment where students feel comfortable with not knowing where their exploration will lead them can do wonders in the learning process. This embrace of uncertainty is where creativity takes root, and artistic thinking may aid us in this process better than any other thinking style can.
How can we shift the narrative around creativity to focus on the process of “thinking like an artist” rather than confining creativity to artistic disciplines?
9 – The OECD Summit may have missed key voices in educationWhile this Creativity in Education Summit brought together policy-makers, researchers, and heads of educational institutions, it may have missed the perspectives of other key pieces of this educational puzzle that were not in the room: students, parents, and teachers.
To make meaningful changes in education, we need to hear from a wider range of voices and understand how they participate in our learning ecosystems. Including students in these conversations would provide insight into what works and what doesn’t from the learner’s perspective. Parents could bring valuable insights about the home-learning environment and the skills students need to thrive in the real world. Finally, teachers can make vital contributions to educational reforms by sharing their hands-on classroom experience, offering insights into effective strategies for diverse learners, and shaping practical, realistic policy recommendations that reflect classroom dynamics.
How can we include more voices from students, parents, and teachers to drive more holistic reforms in education?
The insights from the Creativity in Education Summit offered valuable directions for rethinking how creativity is approached in education. However, to foster meaningful change, we need broader participation from all those who make the education system happen.Therefore, I would like to invite you to join this conversation. How do you see creativity evolving in education, and what steps should we take to make it an integral part of the learning process?
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Budgets of Flexibility
Creativity requires not just a “high level of art” (i.e., expertise), but also being up to date with the “state of the art” in your field in order to make an effective and relevant contribution.
In the eagerness to “be creative”, most people forget the effort required to make this contribution. For example, although we consider people like Charles Darwin and Isaac Newton to be geniuses, we ignore the fact that it took both of them more than 20 years to make their new “art” work.
The famous phrase “genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration” (the percentages can vary by 2 points more or less), normally attributed to Thomas Edison, poorly portrays the effort required for creativity. For this effort to be sustainable over time, we must consider what Prof. Michael Hanchett Hanson called in his forthcoming book, Creative Work and Distributions of Power, the “budgets of flexibility”.
As he explained, we need to consider three different aspects:
- First, the relations between components of any system worked within budgets of flexibility, and over/under spending over long periods would stress the components.
- Second, the people involved. They need to be wise in prioritizing the long-term commitments as well as the needs of their larger environments.
- Third, the ecologies of ideas. Attention to the needs of larger systems draws on unconscious sensibility but also requires conscious awareness when using ideas. The ecology of ideas works like evolution; whether an idea survives depends on its repetition and its relation to other ideas.
In short, and for the effect of the point I’m trying to make here, each person can be flexible in situations outside their comfort zone for a certain amount of time, which can vary from situation to situation.
For example, if you have to learn how to use a new software at work, this will be uncomfortable for a while until you master it, and will therefore take up little of your budget. Now, if that software changes every week and you have to learn everything from scratch again and again and again, one day you won’t have the patience or energy to deal with it. The same goes for small situations that accumulate. You will spend a bit of your budget on each one, making it unsustainable to keep up with them all at once.
Many have experienced that during the pandemic. From one week to the next, our lives were turned upside down and we had to deal with many things at once, like family, health, work, sanity, etc. For those who were already at the threshold of the budget of flexibility (which has unfortunately become the default mode for most people), the pandemic was the final blow. And when the budget runs out, the symptoms are high stress and, eventually, burnout.
Therefore, having a low flexibility budget makes it impossible to devote yourself to any creative activity.
But that’s only part of the problem.
In today’s Attention Economy, getting around all the distractions has become one of our biggest challenges. Creativity demands time, which quickly runs out when “just 5 minutes” on social media costs us an hour. The search for entertainment, powered by algorithms and AIs, keeps us anesthetized until we realize that the day is over and it’s time to go to sleep -to do it all over again the next day.
Creativity goes far beyond the simple generation of ideas. You will need to know how to manage your resources (flexibility, attention, and time, to name a few), as well as how to put in effort and intention for prolonged periods of time until you finally get meaningful work done.
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How boredom moves the world
[This text is part #2 of the trilogy I wrote with my dear friends William Barter and Mirian Rodrigues. The idea for exploring these topics further came from our podcast episode together. You can read the full text of part #2 in Portuguese here.]
Technology has undoubtedly made us less susceptible to boredom. Any idle moment has been replaced by the scrolling of a screen, whose main function is to keep us entertained.
In his controversial article Quit Social Media, published in 2016, Cal Newport commented that “at the time, in response to my critique, it felt like a cultural immune reaction. The idea of completely moving away from powerful new tools like social media was simply not acceptable. (…) The use of the phrase ‘quit social media’ in the title of an important publication was like a temporary glitch in the matrix that needed to be quickly corrected and then explained.”
But the immune system of “entertainment at any cost” has been fighting boredom for a long time. As communication theorist Neil Postman explained in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death back in 1992, the struggle between technology and traditional values has been resolved, with technology emerging as the clear winner.
The result has been the submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technology. For example, it’s not hard to see 2-year-olds today with tablets in hand to keep themselves entertained at family dinners, where the smartphone is the main guest. “Once a technology is accepted, it fulfills its role: it does what it was designed to do,” Postman wrote, “our task is to understand what that design is, in other words, when we admit a new technology into the culture, we must do so with our eyes wide open.”
So, it takes an initial effort to resist the urge to turn to our pocket boredom-killer in favor of something that may not be so pleasurable initially, but which can be much more rewarding in the medium or long term: thinking.
Reflecting on the questions we want to answer can provide interesting answers for both our personal and professional lives.
But what would be the “price” to pay for having to deal with boredom?
As I’ve argued elsewhere, you must both restrict yourself to freedom and balance the relationship between autonomy and dependence.
For author George Dyer, “films and books make us think that there will be certain moments in our lives when, if we can make some grand and unique gesture of renouncing or defending a certain principle, we will be liberated, free. But there’s no escaping everyday life. In fact, it takes a daily effort to be free. Being free is not the result of one decisive action at one time, but a project to be constantly renewed.”
Dealing with boredom is the same thing: a project to be constantly renewed. Only, in accepting boredom, the real question is not to be free from what, but to be free for what.
Moments of boredom will always exist. This means that embracing boredom means choosing the freedom to reflect and/or devote yourself to other things. So, it’s up to you to make a conscious daily decision about where you’re going to spend your time.
Less screen time to avoid boredom equals more time to devote to what really matters.
As psychologist Howard Gruber has argued, meaningful work depends on how we reorganize our resources. Therefore, the “freedom for what” is our autonomy, and the “constraints” are our dependencies.
Our freedom is negotiated daily, balancing the autonomy-dependence relationship so that we can devote ourselves to what is most important to us. In other words, giving up the entertainment of technology in order to face boredom will always be a trade-off (“Do I want to give up X for Y?”).
So, know what questions you’re trying to answer and be ready to free yourself from certain dependencies to ensure maximum autonomy in learning to deal with boredom.
FELIPE ZAMANA
Professor, Writer, Speaker, and Researcher. His work aims to bridge academic knowledge and professional practice through Education.
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