The Death of Creativity

    In this digital age, I find that everything is recycled. From TV shows to book plots to trending videos, we have all seen it before. We are often unable to come up with something new, and I hate how aware of it I am. In my own work, no matter how hard I try or how original I try to make something, it has been done before. Even in making this post, it was not an original idea that I thought to discuss.

    Creative originality has been done in recent movies like Sinners and Mickey 17, but it is so rare to see something like that come out in the past ten years. There is more commonly a theme of rehashing old ideas. Why do we need a Toy Story 5, or a Moana 2, or a live-action version of anything? Why not instead make something new? Big corporations are failing to try and make something new. The same goes for music, as artists sample songs over and over again. There are only so many notes, just as there are only so many words and so many ways you can twist a plot.

    The issue with this is that I have no clue how it could be fixed. Not that it's my job (thank God), but as someone in the creative arts, it weighs on me. Everything seems to be a watered-down or mixed-up version of something that already exists. The last short story I created, for example, was a twist on Merida and Mulan's characters. I think one of the main benefactors of the loss of creativity is AI and society's inability to think for itself. People run towards AI when they can't think of what to say or do, instead of relying on their minds and the living world around them.

    Trends are another way that we lose our creativity. People recycle tweets they've seen, make them seem like original thoughts, and post them on TikTok or Instagram Reels. I remember seeing a tweet saying something along the lines of "I've never told a long story short; I tell a long story long." I then saw it as an Instagram post a day later, and someone else said it on TikTok afterwards. There was no credit where credit was due, and everyone praised the person as if they were the first person to ever say it. There was another micro trend (image above) that was going around of saying, "People mistake my kindness for flirting." I am not saying there is anything wrong with the saying itself, but everyone doing it over and over again is where they lose me. You can follow a trend and input your own experiences, but even those get old and overused.

    The lack of creativity is also an underlier in this conversation. While some people consume too much to the point of everything melding together, there are people who refuse to experience new creative endeavors. People aren't reading enough or watching anything new. I think you CAN boost your own creativity by what you consume, especially if you don't stick to one genre. There is a balance between just enough and too much. I can shamelessly say that I watch too much TV, but it's never the same genre. I will go from watching The Bear to Arcane to Lost to High Fidelity to Percy Jackson to The Wheel of Time. I can acquire creativity from those pieces of media because of how different they are. You won't find the same character. 

    My fear with my own lack of creativity is that with whatever new content I read and watch, I will still feel as though I am taking what someone has already made. Characters that I have been writing for years that I think have never been done before are being created in front of my eyes. Now I feel like I have to rush to make it known that I thought of it first. Even when you think you have made something new, someone can pinpoint part of it to something else that they know of. 

    Unfortunately, I do not have a happy way of closing this out. All I can say is that filling our minds with new creative material and thinking for ourselves might be what saves it. I'm hoping it is at least what saves me!