Note: From Making Time (Baker, 2025). Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Citations have been omitted.
It doesn’t matter whether you use the word artist or creative to describe yourself or not, or whether the idea of creativity conjures a professional wearing fashionable glasses, a divinely inspired solitary artist, a kid covered in finger paint or something else entirely. I define creativity as cooperating with reality to draw out more life. This is a serious act – holy and practical play. When we stop cooperating, we sit out of the game. And we wonder why we’re not having any fun.
Holy and Practical Play
Productivity is doing for its own sake – acting on the world. Creativity reflects the fact that the life in you is in a reciprocal relationship with the life outside you. So rather than asking what to do, a maker asks what spark of life is inside them, asking to reach into the world.
It makes sense if this sounds unfamiliar. In the land of productivity, the term “creativity” lacks teeth. Its everyday meaning lies somewhere between “hobbies to distract you from real life” and “commercially viable novelty.” It’s one of those words that sounds really meaningful, but when you look at the kinds of activities it is often actually associated with, it appears flimsy. When I tell people that I write and teach about creativity, I wonder if they imagine me professionally encouraging grown adults to take up macaroni art or tree-house decoration. Or maybe they think I’m helping corporations exploit people more easily. The creative potential of people is “the ultimate resource,” says venture capitalist Marc Andreesen’s recent “Techno-Optimist Manifesto.” [Marc Andreesen, “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto”]
Some have argued that the modern concept of creativity is an invention to soothe the workers in a postindustrial society, to assure them that they are not replaceable cogs in a machine, inputs in an algorithm. “Look how creative we expect you to be with your presentations, with your time, with your own schedule. You’re not a frustrated employee; you’re a rebel! A true maverick at your whiteboard.” To celebrate creativity in all its vagueness soothes the anxieties of our capitalist, Western mind.
How Did It Get This Way?
In the “Doing Deep Effort” chapter, I explained how the verb “create” originated in the Middle Ages as an already-completed action which was performed by God, as in various existing facts (planets, nature and so on) that God had brought into being from nothing, something that was simultaneously timeless and utterly new.
This meaning was fairly quickly transferred to certain kinds of “god-like” human activity, especially to artists, and since then it has been gradually further democratized. After being extended to certain privileged humans, beginning in the nineteenth century and culminating in our own day, creativity has come to be seen as part of the birthright of all humans.
Before the Renaissance, in Europe “artist” was a broad term, denoting something like “having skill in making.” Once it became strongly associated with the idea of god-like creativity during the Renaissance and culminating in the era of the Romantics, however, “artist” became associated with the heroic, solitary genius working in a few select “fine” arts. He (they assumed the artist would be male) was responsible for capturing high feeling, meaning and beauty, primarily for elite consumption.
The artist was “a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind,” the Romantic poet William Wordsworth wrote, “delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings on of the Universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them.” [William Wordsworth, preface to Lyrical Ballads, in The Complete Poestical Works of William Wordsworth, vol.10, p. 18]
By the mid-nineteenth century, people like the critic Matthew Arnold had taken issue with this version of creativity, arguing that creativity extended well beyond the realm of solitary genius and fine art as such, pointing out that “if it were not so, all but a very few men would be shut out from the true happiness of all men.” [Matthew Arnold, “The Function of Criticism,” in “Culture and Anarchy” and Other Writings, p. 28] Creativity was an important part of individual ethics, in other words; it was something that should be accessible to all as part of a full life.
In the late nineteenth century, the designer, writer and activist William Morris sought to democratize the idea of creativity further, criticizing the schism between fine art, the province of the elite, and working-class and peasant “craft,” a division he saw as one of the chief mechanisms undergirding the capitalist cultural order.
Getting to Know Our Creativity
This trend of democratization has continued to today, with both life-giving and unhappy results. What has become democratic is not necessarily the role of artist as such, which still retains many of its elite connotations, but the main property artists possess, creativity. This has been particularly true in the workplace. “If you think creativity is only for artists,” the US Bureau of Labor Statistics noted in 2018, “think again.”
Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello suggest that since roughly the 1960s, management styles in Western corporations have tended to view employees as “self-organized, creative beings,” as opposed to the earlier form of workplace administration that viewed them in a somewhat mechanistic way, through the lens of the specific tasks they performed. [Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, p. 75] A good shift, with some downsides. A “creative” workforce is easily made into a workforce of quasi-entrepreneurs, an army of gig workers who “would really prefer not to be traditional employees.” Creative beings are often assumed to be willing to work at their passions harder, longer and for less pay.
We may overlook more fundamental problems with the culture and economy if we believe, at least, that it frees us to pursue creative self-fulfillment. “You’re not an unfulfilled worker; you’re a nonconformist at your desk.”
The result of all of this gradual democratizing and the entry of creativity into the market has been twofold. On the one hand, the land of productivity has harnessed our creative potential as a new natural resource to exploit, a new “essence” that offers a seemingly endless source of value for the market. On the other hand, though, since the nineteenth century and increasing dramatically now in the twenty-first, more and more people are aware that they do in fact have powerful, creative essences within them, parts of themselves that can be shaped and harnessed by others but which are, at the end of the day, truly their own. More and more of us have become curious about how we can know this creative dimension of ourselves better and get to know it independent of external control.
In other words, the history of creativity in the land of productivity has led us to a unique place where we can see a path out of creativity-for-production’s-sake. One that’s always existed in one form or another. This is a path that is not fixed by the whims of market forces or paved with old stereotypes, but a road lit by our inner knowing. This inner knowing transcends mere doing and becomes a way of creative living I call “making.”
Moving from passive consumers or frantic producers into collaborators, we shift creativity out of its role as a resource, or commodity captured by the market outside our control, and into a daily practice that we own.
Note: Content taken from Making Time by Maria Bowler ©2025. Used by permission of Baker Books.
Maria Bowler, author
