Undermining your creative potential without even realizing it.

In the last several decades, we thought we knew the correct path for managing creativity and innovation.

But compelling evidence from multiple sources shows that a decline in creativity has been happening for some time now.

Kyung, a renowned educational scholar and creativity researcher, discovered that children’s performance on the most reliable measure of creativity has declined more than a full standard deviation in the last generation.

According to her study of hundreds of thousands of creativity tests, nearly ninety percent of today’s children are less creative than their counterparts from back in the eighties. Since then, children have become less able to produce unique and unusual ideas. They are also less humorous, less imaginative and less able to elaborate on ideas.

Now, multiple theories have been attributed to this decline.

One is our government’s initiative to raise annual standardized test scores, which of course don’t include any questions on creativity. Just math and reading. Teachers haven’t exactly been stressing the value of divergent thinking during literature class.

Another hypothesis is the rise of television watching, which is a passive activity that doesn’t require human interaction. No need to form original thoughts while binging thirteen episodes of reality shows?

Then there’s the cultural shift around over scheduling young people’s activities, which has been clinically proven to increase anxiety and leave less time for pretend play. That’s how people’s creative muscles atrophy.

And don’t forget about the unintended consequences of economic prosperity. Particularly in first world nations like ours that offer unlimited resources, tools and opportunities for young people. And the more stuff we have, the less imaginative we need to be.

Okay, here’s one last hypothesis for the decline in creativity. It’s yet another cultural trend. We have multiple generations of people who were born into an instant gratification culture of digital infinitude. Anything is instantly available to everybody, everywhere, for nothing. Good lord, who in the hell needs to invent their own backyard games or make forts when there’s a bottomless trough of prefabricated media following their every digital footprint?

The point is, it’s a jungle out there. Powerful cultural forces are stacked against the human brain, and it is possible that our creative potential is being undermined without us even realizing it.

Man, it kind of makes me grateful for all those lonely, boring nights and weekends during high school and college, sitting in my room, playing guitar, putting my feelings and experiences into songs.

It may have been sad and isolating at the time, but it also built a creativity foundation that has served me in almost every area of life.

When was the last time you were bored?