The other day I was commenting with someone who said they were struggling to find content to write about and I asked what they did with their time. The reason is, that in my own experience, what we do will heavily affect what we write about in various ways and the heaviest consumers of content, tend not to be the most creative. I think the reason for this is that "experience" becomes a second-hand experience, constantly viewed through the perspective of others.
The general consensus from the consumer audience is that content consumption inspires creativity and it indeed can, but the way we have set up a lot of the entertainment industry is to be largely passive, where very little "audience participation" is required. Everything is delivered to us now, the sights the sounds, the story, the closeups, the priming, the leading lines, the hints, the queues, the problem solving - Nothing is left to the imagination, there is no longer room to think.
It is our imagination that is our superpower, it is our ability to take the components of our reality and transform them into something else, something that doesn't exist - but could - even if only in the our minds. Our minds are powerful, they create everything we know, love and despise.
When we relegate ourselves to passive consumers feeding off the experiences and imaginations of others, we degrade our own ability to create. The "use it or lose it" factor comes into play and our minds slow, even while we hold the sense and feeling that we are feeding it a healthy diet of diverse content nutrients.
Healthy eating doesn't stop a sedentary body from atrophying.
And our minds are becoming thoughtless.
People seem to forget that we are physical beings in all respects, that our brains are a complex and evolving set of physical pathways, connecting points of our experience, making sense of them and providing our ability to use what we know, to create something we haven't yet seen. Without exercise and practice, we do not build new connections and possibilities and when we lower our ability to imagine more broadly, we reduce our opportunity to create.
It has been my fear for a long time that while we have become more connected and have access to more information as individuals, we have also built systems where the information we access has narrowed and become more homogenous. We consume the same and similar, meaning that we are moving more within the same parts of the normal distribution, our creativity is taking the same paths.
While we can still be creative as individuals, our range as a group is narrower and therefore, our human ability to problem-solve across large populations is narrowing. This creates an additional problem, as not only are we less capable of finding broad solutions, because many are finding similar solutions due, to a narrow standard deviation, consensus will be found, the answer obvious - everyone will agree.
Group agreement does not mean correct.
It is a centralization of thought and function, meaning that direct the masses into a place they can agree and support will be found, common movement accomplished, direction controlled. The decisions we make start to default to the decisions of the group and we compare ourselves to the average, even if the average is not where we are at our best.
We can already easily see this in trends of consumption, where despite all that we know, despite our increasing ability to provide for and affect ourselves, we are getting fatter globally. For example, seventy percent of the US population is overweight and over forty percent are considered obese - is being comparable in fat percentage to an "average American" considered healthy? Yet, we are shifting in a common direction at an incredibly fast rate globally and we know that this is happening. Countries that only a decade or two ago had little weight issues, are aligning with normal.
How come this is so obvious to see, yet when it comes to a very comparable trend like the health of our imaginations, we do not see the same pattern emerging?
Well, because it takes imagination and because we have access to a large collection of other people's imaginations sourced globally, we feel that that there is a lot to choose from and, we do not notice the loss of our own.
We feel nourished, even though our imaginations are starving.
When I bring this up with people they often argue with me, as they know they are feeding themselves from many sources, taking in many different types of content, filling their minds all of the new ideas and having discussions on all of the topics that are important to the world. Yet when I ask,
What have you created yourself?
Most struggle to speak.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]