The Overlooked Importance of Creativity in Daily Life #055

How creativity makes us happy

Hello and welcome again to Every Dawn. My name is Andy. If you have not been here before, I'm a lecturer in philosophy. In this series, we try to apply philosophical ideas to our everyday life. Today, I want to talk about something that we have already discussed before in other longer videos on my other channel, Daily Philosophy. But I think that it is something that we all underestimate in our everyday lives, which is the importance of creativity.

This is a very central idea for both Bertrand Russell and another philosopher, Richard Taylor, who wrote a whole chapter in a book about that. Aristotle says that every human being has a purpose and being happy consists finally in reaching that purpose, or in working towards reaching this purpose. As long as we are progressing, as long as we are working towards becoming better and reaching the purpose, which is to use our virtues in order to be better human beings, more fulfilled human beings, and also more beneficial to others, then we're doing it right.

And when we don't try to develop our virtues, when we don't try to be better, then we are wasting our life, and we are not becoming better or happier human beings. So, being morally good and being happy somehow belongs together in this idea.

But there is more to it because you can ask, okay, what is really the purpose of human beings, and what is it really that will make us better? Is it really rationality? And today, you know, if you look around, we have AI that is perfectly rational, we have chess computers that can play chess perfectly. This is a sign of rationality, we have calculators that can calculate better than a human being. So one could question whether rationality is really what being human is all about.

You could argue rationality is okay, it is important, but it seems to be something that also other things even can have, like computers. What makes us uniquely human, and this is where Richard Taylor disagrees with Aristotle, he says what makes us uniquely human and what is the purpose of a human being is to be creative because creativity is something that is not available to machines.

Machines can produce things randomly but not creatively. The creation is also one of the features of God in many religions. It is the idea that there is some divine spark, some special power that allows us to make something out of nothing, something meaningful, not something random.

When the wind blows leaves into a pile, then yes, it makes something, it makes a pile of leaves, but this is not a creation. This does not have a meaning, this does not have a purpose, this doesn't express anything about the condition of being a leaf. While when we humans make something, when we make a statue, when we write a book, when we make a movie, or whatever we do, we are putting our experience as human beings into that and we make it express the feeling, the condition of what it is to be a human.

But the point now is that we don't need to think in these lofty terms about creativity. It's not all about being an artist and making sculptures and making paintings and making movies and so on. Creativity is a feature of the human life on any stage, on any level. It begins when we are children. Children, the first thing children often play with is a pen. They take a pen, they can take a piece of paper, and they start drawing what is around them. Creativity is spontaneous in human beings, and even a child that has never had instruction in art will start drawing.

Later they will start taking Lego bricks and creating houses, airplanes, whatever their imagination tells them to. And even later, we will make up stories to entertain others, perhaps at a dinner. But even this is still a limited form of creativity. Even more, every day, every time we cook, we are being creative. Every time we make an everyday decision, we have a chance of being creative.

Now most people are not because they miss this opportunity, but we can take it. Take the example of an office lunch. Every time you go to lunch in your office, probably for most of us, this is every day of the year, like 200 times a year. We go and eat something, and this can be different ways. But as long as we are doing the same what everybody else in our office is doing, then we are not being creative.

And the point is that we are missing an opportunity there to express our own individuality and also to become more creative and more informed human beings. Because every human on earth eats, and all cultures have produced food, individual specific food to their culture that depends on their availability of ways of cooking, the availability of ingredients.

And every culture has their own things, and it's very easy for us, you know, to identify an Indian dish or to identify a Mediterranean dish, an Italian dish. We have all these different ways of cooking, a Chinese dish. We look at it, we know where it comes from because it is specific to a particular culture.

Now when we want to connect with another culture in order to understand it better, one way of approaching a foreign culture, for example, through their food. So instead of eating the same thing which we have been always eating in the canteen, we can for example make a point of ordering something that is foreign to us, and thus we increase our appreciation, our knowledge of foreign cultures. And in this way, we increase our physis, you remember Aristotle says, you know, physis is this ability we have to judge our virtues and to employ our virtues.

And the more I engage with the foreign culture, the more I also learn about their ideas of virtue. So eating a Chinese dish doesn't need to be restricted to just shoveling in some noodles. You can see it as a kind of approach to that culture, and you can use it as an opportunity to learn about this culture.

Or we can even be more creative with our lunch. We can say, I cook something, for example, instead of going to the canteen, and cook something, and perhaps my colleague also cooks something, and then we talk about it, about our experiences, or we exchange what we have cooked. And in this way, we give even more meaning to our lives instead of now just being passive consumers of a lunch that we don't even like most of the time.

Now we become cooks, we become originators, we become creators of something. And there's not much involved, it's not difficult to cook a lunch for oneself or for another person. This can be as simple as boiling an egg or frying an egg and putting it on top of some potatoes. It is not a difficult thing.

And I think very often these cooking channels and so on, they do us a disservice because they show off dishes that are difficult and complicated, and no one wants to cook this stuff, no one wants to sit there with 50 ingredients and 3 hours of time and start cooking. But this is not what cooking is. I cook all my own food at home, and it takes rarely more than an hour in the evening, and most of that time is just waiting for it to be done while I'm doing something else.

So the preparation takes, you know, perhaps half an hour for a meal of four people. It is not a difficult thing, and by doing it, we improve our abilities, we improve our happiness, we improve our satisfaction in life because we get this feeling of satisfaction. Now I've created something, now I've done something that is valuable, that I can eat, that sustains me, that you know, gives me energy for life.

And in this way, perhaps you can think what it is in your life, what you could do in your everyday life to be a little more creative, to get back a little more of that control of life that this consumerist society is trying to take away from us. To take over control and to make it yours and to feel more satisfaction and more happiness in everyday life.

And this is creative. This is as good as painting a picture or making a sculpture in terms of making you a happier and more satisfied person.

Thank you!