Exploring Cultural Hostility Towards Creativity
My partner is a musician, and this week she just released her first single. I am so impressed and inspired by her every day. I have been excited to share her work with friends and acquaintances alike. Most have been very enthusiastic and supportive. What I have found however is that a sizable percentage, especially friends that are a little closer to my moms age are more pessimistic. They don’t even care to listen to her work, but they want to have a “frank” discussion with me about my partner’s future. The message is always the same, that I should be realistic and convince my partner to give up her dream of being a successful singer-songwriter and encourage her to pursue something more realistic and achievable.
The lack of regard for any boundaries of propriety is surprising for a generation that is generally so emotionally cloistered. I shared a piece of creative work or indicated that it exists and the response is an invasive and unrequested foray into my partner’s and my own financial situation. These relatives and acquaintances have never felt compelled to provide their financial wisdom at any point heretofore, but at the indication of my partner starting a creative career in earnest, they can’t help but offer up sage advice that she should quit immediately and get a “real” job.
This attitude is similar regardless of political affiliation. There is a fixation on safe, secure, and “respectable” careers, and a near total de-prioritization of happiness or personal fulfillment. An entire generation essentially forfeited any semblance of a fulfilling vocation and now, they are recommending to my wife that she be “realistic” and do the same.
For better or for worse, many millennials give their parent’s opinions considerable weight when trying to determine the best path for themselves to have a enjoyable existence. The boomers were brought up by the greatest generation, a generation that went through the trauma of the great depression and two world wars. The greatest generation projected a deep insecurity and aversion to risk onto their children along with an inescapable sense of duty to society. This insecurity and sense of duty was hijacked by greedy corporatists to enforce a slavish devotion to work above all else as a moral good. Now the baby boomers are exiting the time warp of 40–50 years of exploitative meaningless careers and entering into retirement with either a conscious, but more likely subconscious, regret for a life not lived. Yet, the intergenerational trauma manifesting as recommendations to doggedly pursue high paying passionless jobs persists. The deep cynicism and nihilism of the baby boomers starts to make more canonical sense.
It is fascinating that our culture has this self correcting algorithm embedded in the trusted nodes of parental figures that funnels young people into a life of meaningless corporate slavery. Is it really any wonder why depression and anxiety have been sky rocketing over the past several years? Under the auspices of financial pragmatism thousands of dreams are forgone every day, life forces are being harvested by nihilistic corporate megalodons to pursue profit above all else.
The moralistic underpinnings of capitalism require a twisted compartmentalization of causality on the part of the worker. If a worker devotes 20 years of their labor to a company that in retrospect over the course of that 20 year period was committing morally reprehensible harm to society the worker can still be a good person. This is because of the protestant belief that has permeated capitalist culture as noted by Max Weber that work is a good in itself. The use of a person’s labor to indirectly cause net harm to society is not the fault of the individual that unbeknownst to him contributed to the harm because he was carrying out the moral imperative of working for the sake of work, since work is a good unto itself.
Not working in this same context is the ultimate evil. Even if the reason is that the corporations available are not deemed by the individual to be worthy of their labor due to the belief that their labor will be harvested as a means to worsen society. The individual is maligned as a lazy scourge on society. He is demonized as a vampiric parasite that feeds of of the labor of his fellows. His moral objections are cast aside as mere excuses to enable his free riding.
Only marginally better than free riding is attempting to be a creative or artist. Inherent in an entrepreneurial artistic pursuit is a freedom that is so thoroughly envied by those that gave up their autonomy to a life of corporate slavery that they reactively and vociferously condemn the artistic life as one of self-indulgent narcissism. They eagerly prophesize the artist’s failure as just and inevitable to soothe their insecurity.
The ultimate metric by which to judge an occupation is the salary and benefits that one will receive. This is accepted as a truism within capitalist culture. The ultimate score by which members of a capitalist society compare their worthiness is the annual salary. It is the real question lurking behind the inevitable small talk rejoinder, what do you do?
It is in this context that the moral history and projected future of an employer are deemed unimportant. No one ever asks how has your employer contributed to the betterment of society? Why is not appropriate for the potential MBA hire of a fortune 500 firm to ask what percentage of the companies full time employees live below the poverty line; or what the company’s plan is to not contribute to the microplastics found in the air we breath and the water we drink? Why are these questions inappropriate?
One reason is that a feudal deference to the proverbial capitalist lord is a thoroughly ingrained cultural default. Asking these questions is akin to a Soldier asking a General during the Vietnam war how dumping agent orange on tropical forests was based on a long term strategy prioritizing the welfare of the Vietnamese people. You may or may not get an answer, but you were certainly wrong to ask.
The default morality is to work for works sake with no genuine regard for how one’s labor and life force is employed so long as they salary is high enough. Selecting a life of creativity is a vain pursuit and only marginally better than electing not to work at all. Prodding one’s progeny towards the highest paying jobs they can pragmatically attain is the overriding recommendation of the elders in our society. It is under these capitalistic cultural norms that corporate misconduct has run amuck. There is no expectation of a self regulating morality among corporate firms. So these mega firms have harvested the working lives of the members of society to achieve their own selfish ends and the citizens happily prostrate themselves before them for a competitive pittance since it is seen as moral good.
Work is not a goodness in itself. How one’s labor is employed and to what ultimate end is something every laborer should be concerned about. Understanding that awareness and concern in this regard is a luxury, and not one that every worker has the time or resources to attain. If we all work for warring titans that are hell bent on market domination at all costs the cost will be collectively too high and at our expense. If all the options for labor are morally repugnant, not working can be a morally justified decision. If employers fail to articulate a future and demonstrate a history that is based on worker wellbeing and societal enrichment then they have failed and do not deserve to have the devotion of the labor that they demand.
Creativity can be a good in itself. The act of creation can be a transcendent experience for the creator. A creative work cost almost nothing, and yet can be enjoyed in perpetuity, bringing joy and color to existence to all that experience it. The nihilistic refrain that “well we can’t all just do whatever we want” is a resignation of one’s own power at best and a justification of a wasted existence at worst. Creators and artists have to push through the cynicism of a miserable society to bring us works of beauty and deserve our support during that journey.
