A gross misappropriation of our finest natural resource

Creativity is, at its simplest level, the act of turning nothing into something.

It’s this highly human phenomenon whereby a new and valuable idea is brought to form through a person’s imagination.

What a beautiful endowment we’ve been given as a species. It’s about as close to divinity as human beings can get.

Unfortunately, sometimes this process gets inverted. Because while it’s natural for our species to turn nothing into something, the converse can just as easily be true. Some individuals who have a persistent negative evaluation of life have mastered the art of turning something into nothing.

Perhaps you’ve met someone like this. They downplay and reject almost every experience, blinding themselves to things that are real. They stick a pin in every word and consciously drain life of its power to affect them. Even in the face of joy and meaning and mystery and magic, they choose to let life’s meaninglessness swallow them whole. In short, they turned something into nothing.

Creativity has inverted. By habitually labeling everything as nothing, that’s precisely what they experience.

Why do people act this way? It’s hard to tell.

Maybe it’s some kind of defense mechanism against the perceived perils of happiness. Maybe they’re sabotaging themselves in order to return to their more comfortable and familiar state of misery. Maybe they don’t believe they’re worthy of joy and meaning in the first place. Maybe their traumatic past has conditioned them to mistrust any experience.

Point is, they’re not building anything up, only breaking things down. They only use their powers to stop things, not to create. And that’s no way to live. It’s a shit response to life. It’s an insult to humanity.

And from the economic perspective, it’s also gross misappropriation of our finest natural resource, which is the ability to make something out of nothing. Makes me sick to my stomach.

And admittedly, there have been a few periods in my life where this kind of cynicism appealed to me. After ending a toxic four year relationship in my twenties, my cynicism skyrocketed for a good six months. Swore off intimacy like it was a plague of locusts. Who among us wouldn’t have responded to heartbreak in that way?

Another time in my early thirties, the association for which I was a longtime board member was having its worst membership numbers in a decade. That made me never want to volunteer for a leadership role ever again.

You would have felt the same way. Because none of us are immune to the seductive forces of creativity’s shadow.

But no matter how relentlessly life tries to beat the softness out of us, we can’t allow that to be the end of our story. We can’t allow our hearts to become calcified. Otherwise we’ll become black holes who keep turning something into nothing. Further robbing ourselves of the fulfillment we are worthy of.

Anything less is gross misappropriation of our finest natural resource.

Are you someone who builds things up, or breaks them down?