I believe that you are choosing to live your life on one of two paths. You are either living your life as a Creativist or as a Consumerist. And this is how this story and the dawning of my understanding between creativism and consumerism unfolded. I made friends with fellow uber-creative Olivia Sprinkel via Instagram. And I see in her bio she calls herself a creativist. I ask her what’s this?
She answers, “Hello! I saw a friend’s Facebook post about Eddie Izzard, an English comedian who asked ‘Are you a capitalist or creativist?’
“I’m not a capitalist, I am a creativist. I want to make money so that I can create things. Suddenly all these people have come along who want to create things so they can make money.” – Eddie Izzard –
She says,”I really liked the word so ended up building out my own definition of creating + connecting + acting .”
So I read Olivia’s Manifesto on Creativism and I am hooked ! In her manifesto, The Creativist Manifesto : Consumer or Creativist ? , I began to understand what I had already known in my gut. Our system of capitalism and consumerism is destructive. It’s disingenuous and abusive. It does not value the individuality of the creative.
I summed up my initial understanding of creativism in this post. Citing work by Author Orna Ross, another great resource for understanding creativism. The consumer wants to own or destroy what can’t be owned. This a masculine state of being whereas the creative state is the feminine. In this state we experience flow. We are responsible for our own happiness. We see the relativity of all experiences and input. We seek to work together as a collective to create a better outcome.
The way we perceive and use our minds differently in relation to these modes, Ms. Ross refers to as The Con-Mind verses the Creative Mind. That we are in different mind modes when we are creating as opposed to fixing and surviving and worrying is absolute. From my own research on anxiety and creativity, it is physically impossible to have an anxiety attack and be in creative flow at the same time. Physically, the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous systems can not be engaged at the same time.
The initial understanding of what we are being asked to do to fit in and survive leaves me numb. Our inner children are outraged at the crimes we are committing by denying our creativity. And only in valuing our individuality and ingenuity will we not only be happier beings but we’ll begin to truly create a sustainable existence. I hope this sparked you to ask more questions abut this subject. Awareness is the first chapter to change.
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And, as always, Thanks to you for your visit.
