The Urge to Create
There's this meme from the Watchmen comics about Dr. Manhattan sitting on Mars, contemplating his life through the years. And the joke is that throughout the years, the same things happen. Sometimes the joke goes that in 1989, 2005 and 2022 a darker grittier Batman movie releases. Other times the joke is that in 1984, 2021 and 2024 both Ghostbusters and Dune were in cinemas. Well, here's my take on that meme:
But for me, it's not a joke. This is real life. Throughout my whole life, I've always been a 'creator'. My medium has changed (quite dramatically), but the urge to create has always been present in my life. And without creating stuff, I feel empty, I feel unfulfilled, incomplete.
I remember having a typewriter, the old things where you pressed a button and it would hammer on a piece of lint with ink and transfer that to paper to type out text on a page. And I used that typewriter to write little poems. They were short and stupid and childish, but I was a child so that was OK.
Then I became a teen, and I learned how to play the guitar. And I used music to express myself. But that toned down and while I occasionally still pick up my guitar, most of the time it just stands next to my desk gathering dust.
Then I went to college, and I picked up photography as a hobby. I bought an expensive camera and lenses, carried it everywhere and took pictures of everyone and everything. Had people 'model' in front of my camera, use Lightroom to bump the contrast and make it more artsy fartsy and published the results on Facebook and on my website.
That reminds me! I used Dreamweaver to create an HTML4 (yes I'm that old) website about planes! I liked planes, I liked technology/computers, so I put the 2 together. I built the website for my dad who was part of a RV Campervan community so he could share pictures and stories about trips our family took with the RV. I built the website for the band me and my cousin where in when we were both playing guitar in the attic or in the garage. I built my own portfolio website to showcase my photography. And I built this website to host my various musings. I also built https://music.vuokko.be/, a blog dedicated to showcasing music I like.
I kept a journal on and off, wrote in that, created in that. Short stories, poems, lyrics of songs. Nowadays, I use a bullet journal style notebook to keep my mind organized (or at least I try to keep it organized).
I write code for a living, I create documentation and readme's and all other types of text for my job, and I like doing it! I type fast, and it helps me with that.
My most recent venture has been learning to draw. I suck at it, but I've been getting better and most importantly: I've been having fun while doing it.
Long story short: for my whole life I've been creating, the medium has changed, but the urge to create has always been there. There have been periods where I wasn't creating, only consuming content others made: binging tv shows, doomscrolling, gaming. But those times were the darkest times, I was in a rut then. My school results would suffer, I would be unproductive at work, I would just lay in bed/sofa and not do anything.
But then I got the urge to create, something innate inside that yearns to create. And I picked up a pencil, a guitar pic, a camera. I got out of the house to gather supplies, to take pictures, to meet people and jam together, and I created, and my life had meaning.
I'm not the only one like this:
Danny Gregory talks in his book 'The Creative License' that creativity is all around us in nature: birds make nests, trees make roots and branches and leaves, ants make colonies, etc.
Cal Newport in his book Digital Minimalism calls for us to go on a digital detox for 30 days, getting rid of screens and phones (except for the really really important ones for work) and reclaiming all the lost time and replacing them with high quality leisure activities. He recommends creating stuff, fixing stuff, doing physical activities that produce something. As this is something that we humans have always done: "People have the need to put their hands on tools and to make things. We need this in order to feel whole." or as I like to call it, the urge to create.
The YouTube algorithm recommended me this video below, the creator goes about that the reason we create art is not because of talent or passion, but from an innate urge to create:
And it's that video that urged me to write down my thoughts on this and create this blogpost.
I don't care that nobody will read this (or maybe just a few people). I don't care that no-one likes my art on my Instagram. I don't do it for the likes, I do it because of that feeling deep down, that drives me to create.