Why We Create

We’re impermanent. In the long run, anything we do now will be gone. Despite this, we feel a need to create and make something to call our own. Why?

I think it comes from our denial of our impermanence. The vast majority of people will not like the fact that in the truly long-term sense of the world, they are no more than a small blip on an infinite road. Their impact will be felt very briefly and will be almost imperceptible to us as a whole.

In all honesty, this is a comforting thought to me. I find that knowing I have no truly lasting impact on the world to be freeing. Rather that being worried about what could go wrong with a project or fretting on the unending worries that plague us, I’m reminded that they too do not matter. So why care? Why worry about something that is quite frankly negligible? Yes, it may not seem that way during it but it will pass, as all things do.

By reminding myself that whatever holds me back is unimportant, I’ve broken free from the shackles. Or at least partly. My blog is an example of this. Rather than committing myself to write 2 posts a month (which is quite reasonable in all honesty), I switched over to writing as I please in my app of choice and publishing the most coherent ramblings of mine. I used to feel an obligation to create; that I had a platform that should be used. It took a month of not picking up the metaphorical pen to realise that I was writing because I felt expected to rather than because I truly enjoyed the process of stitching together ideas to create a presentable Frankenstein to the world. Not only that, I didn’t have an audience to pressure me so it was the worst of both worlds – the pressure to create and that being self-imposed arbitrarily.

Of course, this ideology also has the downside of anything good you do also being insignificant. This is something that can upset a fair number of people. If it doesn’t matter, why try? Since I’m impermanent, what’s the point in putting in the effort? There’s no good response to this.

The success of this way of looking at things depends purely on your outlook – on whether you’re a glass-half-full or glass-half-empty person. As you can tell, I’m the former and while what works for me may not work for you, it’s certainly worth a shot. Just take a deep breath and remember your mistakes will be lost to time and keep going.