Day: September 7, 2018

I spent a significant portion of my younger life playing role playing games. I started by making up games and scenarios late into the afternoon while I waited for someone in the neighborhood to play with. It continued into college with an ever shrinking cast of friends who enjoyed the practice of spoken imagination. We told stories and acted out those stories, each of us in the role of a different character, and through those eyes we saw worlds shaped by our own creativity. I’ve written about those worlds and characters for years. Since the play has diminished the creation too has diminished. I used to imagine new realms every week. Now it has been a year since I considered what a world different from that which I already know and write about could look like. 

To say there is a connection between play and writing is to say there is a connection between exercise and good health. One enables the other in a very basic way. When you exercise the ability to create you become better capable of creation; moreover, you develop and continue the habit of creation. It is a habit of mind no different than questioning or gathering data. It is a habit of mind that I have long been conditioned to ignore. Creativity never held value in my family. Even through marriage creativity continued to be defined as a distraction from the more pertinent habits of mind. You could say I have always resisted through creativity. 

Yet, now I find myself in a void of sorts. 

I don’t stimulate creativity in my home or in my family. I don’t lead a culture of creativity. In many ways I do my work in secret; locked away in my office with the work product –even the work process–never shared with my kids. I let them rot on video games that inspire nothing more than repetitive button mashing in memorizable environments which offer nothing more exciting than the satisfaction of reaching a point and a product before someone else does. Where I am made of creativity I give them cold, hard math. 

Understanding is always my first step in growing. So, let us see where it goes from here.

I heard a very old clip of an Issac Asimov interview today in which he talked about how people who do the same job over and again for years will experience a great deal of confusion and loss when that simple job is automated and they are now expected to do something knew. Asimov suggested those people would not be able to do something new/use their creativity, because it would have been beaten out of them by the repetition. This started me thinking about the students I deal with regularly and the kids who I am raising who too strive to do the bare minimum and strive –i mean strive– not to engage their creativity unless they actually are required to do so. 

I’m worried about how much of our society is being reduced to a sort of minimum qual stupor. It feels more and more like we are being conditioned to be docile consumers whose only real sense of choice is Android or Iphone and the financial/social stratifying implications that come with it. We are raising a generation of NPCs–drones that seem uninterested in independent thought or function. 

This idea has been brewing for some time. Even when I think about my kids and my partners kids I think of the majority of them as being developed to be cogs in the machine–NPCs who will grow up to perform a designated roll vs. push or pull human society in a direction they desire. 

I feel like people, for the most part, want to be led. Leaders are rare. Vocal leaders are less rare, but true leadership is based on ideas and those are extremely rare. I don’t know how to better cultivate that in the classroom or the home, but I am starting to suspect it is already too late.