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Personally, I don’t like Plato’s definition of creativity.
Our good Greek of The Cave regarded creativity as mystical or divine—an act of madness rather than human skill.
Kant got a little closer, prizing originality and freedom of the imagination. Unfortunately he also put a lot of stock in “innate genius,” which, in my opinion, is often a culturally condoned way of furthering icky supremacist ideas about who is special and who is not.
I think that under the right circumstances we’re all creative people. It’s a matter of connecting disparate influences + perseverance + the steel ova required to try a new approach without letting your fear of ugliness or mediocrity own you.
But there’s more going on in the background, too.
Virginia Woolf posited in A Room of One’s Own that the intellectual freedom required for creativity also depends on material things—money and privacy—plus the time in which to enjoy them. And who has access to all of that is another browser window’s-worth of complications. In lieu of dragging this on too far, I’ll open just one last tab for Audre Lorde. In her essay Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference, Lorde nuances Woolf’s position by reminding us that no art happens without a certain degree of privilege.
“A room of one’s own may be a necessity for writing prose, but so are reams of paper, a typewriter, and plenty of time. The actual requirements to produce the visual arts also help determine, along class lines, whose art is whose. In this day of inflated prices for material, who are our sculptors, our painters, our photographers? …we need to be aware of the effect of class and economic differences on the supplies available for producing art.”
So. In an age when people seem to have less non-work time and when access to the privileges that nourish art are uncertain, where can we exercise our innate creativity in an everyday way?
I have a weird suggestion that is quieter and requires fewer materials, but is just as meaningful as making visual or literary art: we can take our creativity into our human relationships. With a little agency.
Philosopher Elliott Samuel Paul says that when we talk about creativity, mostly we focus on its new, valuable products—ideas, performances, or artefacts. But creativity is also about the actor that generates them.
“The creative process needs to be performed by an agent, by a being who is responsible for what they are doing. A water droplet freezing around a particle produces a unique snowflake, something new and aesthetically valuable. But the water droplet isn’t creative. That’s because it isn’t an agent. Real creativity is an expression of agency.”
Every time that we exert the agency required to choose something different, we’re asserting ourselves as creative beings—including when we make surprising daily choices with one another.
And with that, dear reader, we’ve made it to this week’s episode of Simplify!
Therapist and writer David Richo is an authority on the sticky wickets of human psychology. He does grief. He does being a grown up in relationships. And now, he’s focused on something we see unfurling ever more darkly across the world stage: revenge.
Dave felt called to write his latest book, Sweeter Than Revenge: Overcoming Your Payback Mind, in the wake of the October 7th events in Israel and Palestine. The book draws on mindfulness practices, Buddhism, Shakespeare, and plenty of science to help us understand and transform the very normal human desire to get back at the people who wrong us. In our interview he told me:
“The word retaliation comes from two Latin words. The first part, R-E, means back as in hit back. It also means repeat as in repetition. And the second part, T-A-L, retali, T-A-L in Latin means such. So it's do such back as was done to you. That's retaliation. And the very word itself shows you that retaliation is not creative. It's not something new from you. It's just a copycat.”
Across centuries of literature, film, and theater, we see clapback culture in action. But it’s actually incredibly… boring? It doesn’t call upon the best pieces of us as human beings. It isn’t special or surprising or new. It’s titting for tat—the easiest, meanest of reflexes. So what if in the face of a hurt, instead of payback we choose what Dave calls “loveback?”
Now that would be interesting.
I spent the first part of this letter building a case that creativity’s in everybody—not just the perfectly enlightened or innately ingenious among us. And even if we don’t have the time or privilege to buy a passel of paints and set up a little studio in our living rooms, what we do have is a broad canvas of human relationship on which we can choose to make a more interesting, challenging, loving mark. This talk with Dave can help us nail the “how?”
During the episode we get into the four letting-gos, Dave’s protocol for quieting your payback mind, grief, and why we hurt the ones we love most. But what’s stayed with me from this talk is that in the face of an offense, we’ve got the creative agency to decide who we want to be: somebody who returns an affront with copycat precision, or someone who does something surprising.
I know who I want to be. How about you?
More soon,
Caitlin
P.S. Please share with a friend you think will enjoy this episode. It’s the best way you can help Simplify stick around! Also, let me know what you thought by replying here or writing to me and Ben at [email protected].
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