Most people’s creativity is being used to thwart themselves and others, most of the time.
The mystery is how outliers like Elon Musk and David Deutsch have their minds structured to devote >50% of their creativity to solving rather than entrenching problems.
(Despite appearing to have almost opposite psychologies/temperaments! So ingenuity cannot fundamentally be about things like “be a ballsy power player and energetically do all the hard things” or “be a hermit, don’t be hard on yourself, follow whatever’s fun”. It must be deeper.)
The sad thing about using creativity to thwart others is that we’re not even doing it intentionally.
We just follow scripts (anti-rational memes) — hoping to avoid being punished ourselves.
Whenever we are scared, hurt, angry, upset, and we speak from that place (the place of “you are not on my side”), our creativity has been hijacked by a coercive script.
It gets worse:
Coercive scripts (anti-rational memes) sabotage our ability to tell we aren’t feeling good.
And prevent us from recognising why not feeling good is significant.
(Despite as a child seeing this suffering/deadness as horrific.)
It’s horrific not just because we are unknowingly using our creative effort to hurt and sabotage the creativity of others when we follow these fear-driven scripts.
It’s horrific because we’re doing it to ourselves — thereby acting to prevent ourselves from doing anything else.
Not feeling good is significant because that’s when we’re running these scripts.
That’s what ‘not feeling good’ is:
For most people, most of the time, ‘not feeling good’ = being actively stuck in parasitic coercive scripts.
When ‘not feeling good’ is not coming from our own coercive scripts, it’s either:
a) A simple fight against nature / the unknown (not out to get you; passes when solve it or do something else)
or
b) Coming from someone else’s — i.e. the entrenchment process is happening now.
So what is to be done?
1. Have compassion. Blaming oneself or cursing others is just part of the game.
2. Play something else. What do you really want to be up to in life?
3. Notice. Nonjudgmentally notice these patterns in yourself and others. Back to 1.