ego is the enemy of creativity

what has been, will be again.

Imagine an idea comes to you. Excitedly, you begin to work on it, only to find, the idea wasn’t yours. Or at least you weren’t the first to have it. Suddenly, it loses all of its novelty. Why create if someone beat you to it? Why create if you can’t even think of one original concept? So you stop creating altogether. Leave it to the genius freaks who generate the original ideas. Your idea met its death in your own head before it had a chance to be born.

If some rendition of this thought process has run though your brain, once, a long time ago, or many, many times, you are like me. You are human. You are born with an ego.

Congratulations, that ego is yours to keep. It won’t go anywhere, it makes its home in a dark corner of your head. It must be tamed or it will eat you alive—and your creativity with it. I will not try to talk about all the facets of ego, although it would be fun—For now I will talk about how ego has gotten in the way of creating beautiful things.

What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.

— The Book of Ecclesiastes

If you wish to create something wholly new, something wholly yours, you will stumble into the footsteps of the greats…or some youtuber from Russia who did it nine years ago.

From the words of an ancient teacher, nothing is new under the sun. Although one could also argue, nothing is the same as anything else—ever. Due to infinite variables, nothing is quite the same as anything else. Even a print is different than it hand painted original.

But an original painting took it’s inspiration likely from an existing moment in time. And the brushstrokes were learned from another. The composition taken from an old master. The colors, well, those are the same colors painters have used since painting was invented.

If a painter is hard-set on painting something completely, unattached from anything anyone has ever done in order to create something of his own, he has lost the greatest and only thing that makes art valuable.

The painter has forsaken meaning. Only shared experiences can be meaningful to more than one person. Something completely unique has not pulled from the well of time and, therefore, can speak to no one. No one can begin to understand a language that has no commonality with their native tongue.

Abstract art works because an artist takes common experience, meaning, and color, then blends it up and spits it out in strange uncommon ways. But it still has taken from the same source material.

The hero’s journey works because it knowingly pulls from a seemingly universal arc of a layman called outside their comfort zone. Who has experienced discomfort? Everyone, I hope.

“If we’re free from the burden of trying to be completely original, we can stop trying to make something out of nothing, and we can embrace influence instead of running away from it.”

— Steal Like and Artist

Embrace that which has been done before, as it will be done again.

Why even create?

If I go at this with linguistics language I have been using, I would say—We all speak the same language. No new feelings are created, but new ways of describing them certainly are. And every speaker will have a different accent, vernacular and cadence.

One must keep speaking, even if they are using the same words as someone else. They must tell it their way, in a way that moves them.

It is so much easier to create unburdened by the small part of you that doesn’t want to create art that resembles someone else’s. I create and continue on creating because I love it. The fun left and I stopped only when I thought it was not worth making.

I no longer wish to create something so unique it’s alien, but I do wish to make something new out of what is old and well used.

Wonder is as old as consciousness, maybe older. Wonder hints at that which is beyond the sun, beyond what humans have created or will create. If art can invoke wonder, it does not matter if it is old, stolen copied or reinvented, it is beautiful because it points to something far greater than any human construction.

---