About a year ago, I was invited to attend a lesson of a religious education teacher. She complained about one class in particular, calling them "the seven little terrorists." (Better than a seven nation army, no?)
After one hour of her desperately trying to get the kids (ages 10 to 12) to listen to the story of Adam and Eve, and being met with comments on Eve's perky tits instead of curiosity, she explained to me that the kids are just unteachable and disrespectful these days.
While not entirely untrue, I saw seven highly intelligent kids whose incredibly fast brains could neither be contained nor properly directed by the teacher because they underestimated the sheer processing powers that those kids possessed and couldn't possibly hold against it with their approach and lack in structure.
Wherever I go, I meet young people with tremendous creative energy that is often stuck on the mental plane. Creative energy has to find an outlet, if it doesn't, it turns into a destructive force and discharges in relationships, self-destruction (observed as mental health issues), or destruction of external things.
Taming creative energy and properly channelling it is a skill that must be acquired. Creative does not only refer to art, music, etc. The building of a house is creative. The optimisation of a system is creative. A relationship can be mended in creative ways (unfortunately, our favourite to dismiss).
Creativity does not have to be perfect nor impressive. The moment your solution-orientedness is aimed at external problems, you enter creator mode right where you're at, and from there you slowly expand into new terrority.
People complain about creativity being outsourced to AI, but at the same time, most folks are too lazy to ever think outside of the box even when it comes to minor problems. They do not even recognise small opportunities where creativity could lead to different outcomes. We also have a habit of asking the wrong questions. We develop software that optimises or handles some other software, never asking ourselves if it should take that much software to handle software. One time I got an ad for some sort of masterclass on AI that said: "Instead of starting at 0, I now start my day at 30mph using AI!" Well, if you're headed towards a wall, going faster is not necessarily better, is it?
There is a heavyness in people's thinking, an inflexibility in their movements, and a desire in the youth to act old before they've ever consummated being young.
In our public discussions, we do not hesitate to spend enormous time trying to find someone to blame for our circumstances. (Probably the reason why people are waiting for Jesus to return, so we can finally crucify an innocent person again.) It's women, men, the patriarchy, money, the system, the lack of a system, the newspapers, social media, a lack of technology.
What I do notice and agree with is the absence of the masculine energy, which can be described as rational, logical, steadfast, proactive, but most especially, felt as the willingness in people (not just men) to properly define what they're truly responsible for and who they're willing to serve with humility (Demut -> Die Gesinnung zu Dienen).
Responsibility is not given but chosen, and choosing it wisely requires discernment.
One of those responsibilities is to understand our own capacity for creation and its inherent unconscious force for destruction if left untamed and unstructured. How we use it is still our everyday choice to make.
Although LLMs might be good at generating a lot quickly, a large part of people is still drawn to the organic, aliveness of human work.
There was never a better time to fully dive into the use of our potential for creating beautiful things (I mean, take a look at modern buildings, come on...) or optimising systems, products, and services in a way that is actually useful and reduce our mental load instead of increasing it.
That's a good question to expend some braintime on: What do we truly need? And how do we go about getting those needs met without harming ourselves in the process?
"To do less, better." — Marcus Aurelius
Cheers.
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Some of my favourite reads regarding creativity/problem-solving:
- Thinking Visually: A Strategy Manual for Problem Solving, Robert H. McKim
- Mastery, George Leonard
- Management, Peter Drucker