Human beings can turn anything into an artform, even our demons.
Like those days when you procrastinate. Let’s say you specifically set aside a day for getting an important project done. You clear your schedule, get up in the dark. The morning is brisk and energizing. You hope to get a day’s work done by noon, which will spur you on to a record day of accomplishment.
But then a few things derail you in the morning. It’s 11AM when you eat the breakfast you should’ve eaten earlier, which no longer feels like fuel, but added weight. It’s almost noon when you yawn. Then, anxiety sets in. The mindless tasks you pushed off to the afternoon—take up the afternoon.
So you skip going home. You spend the evening trying to restart. You rest your eyes, clean your desk. You finally sit down again, for a productive late night, and realize you can’t do a late night because you got up before dawn. You accept tomorrow’s another day and head home.
That’s a piece of art, when you crash and burn like that.
Creativity comes with fears and dangers equal to its promises. For example, understanding viruses to prevent them also gave us the power to invent more hazardous viruses. The specific case of antibiotics versus bioweapons gave rise to the concept of a “dual-use” problem fundamental to all invention.
We pay a similar price for using our imaginations individually. Creative people can dream up ideas and see them to fruition, but they also live with more imaginative nightmares about how their ideas—or simply they—might fail. Exercising any kind of freedom gives us more familiarity with its risks and what can go wrong.
As the people of the world become more creative, we need a better understanding of the nightmares and anxieties that come along with hopes and aspirations.
First off, dual-use goes both ways. Yes our dreams unfortunately come with nightmares, but our nightmares are also the warnings that allow us to hone our dreams more carefully. Our minds’ ability to foresee and prevent what could go wrong gives us license to keep imagining and making a better world.
Anxiety, nightmare, and procrastination are good balances for our ambitious leanings. I talk in The Interactive Voice about how procrastination is not something to punish. Often, it’s the rest we need to tackle a difficult problem, or our hesitation is telling us we need more time to think ideas through.
I’m more suspicious of speed. The founders of our country built a slow system to triplecheck our thought and action. Slow is deliberate.
Second, nightmares are not actions. Stephen King can think of all kinds of dark and awful scenarios. He’s no threat to anyone, but rather a windfall for our imaginations.
The 9-11 Commission Report cited the terrorist attacks of 2001 as a “failure of imagination.” Not enough nightmare scenarios were entertained to prevent the real nightmare occurrence.
In the past, we couldn’t separate dangerous thought from action. We believed in witches, and that words could be incantations, and we still tiptoe around this today. We send young Stephen Kings to the principle’s office and worry that mentioning danger out loud means inviting it into our homes, when just the opposite is true.
Imagining danger prepares us for it. Despite a popular culture that readily explores our darker sides, we do little to make sense of our fears, manage them, and utilize them constructively.
Which, finally, can debilitate us. Writer’s block obsesses over natural impulses to control and edit our words. Anxiety is a natural response to a world that is no longer trying to sedate everyone with routine. We are more innovative now, and disruptive. That’s a good and a strenuous thing that requires greater fitness.
Certain kinds of risk need to lose their allure. Too many people still think it’s not a successful vacation unless you lose a few brain cells or complete control of yourself. Most of us only think this in the backs of our minds so that we’re not actually breaking any rules, but are left feeling we’re not living enough life either, when that’s not the case at all.
Self-destruction is no longer liberation. It’s naive, wretched, and cliché. The most radical thing most of us could do in our lives is not destroy, but create something, unique, and dare to be judged for it.
Risks, fears, failures, anxieties, and nightmares are necessary tools because a better future is not instinctual or evident, but we have to employ them without succumbing to them.
It’s time to wake up.