How Creativity Will Change What Happens Next
Recently, I had a conversation with a friend about how art is going to change over the next few years. How different it will be to go to a concert, or see a movie. I asked her if she thought art would be different from now on. “Not what is produced,” she said. “But how.”
Over the last 7 weeks, we’ve already seen how releasing art has changed dramatically. Musicians are putting together live performances on Instagram and Twitter, writers and illustrators are doing online “book tours”, and artists are putting together panels and other events to share their work. Films slated for this summer have already been released or have been pushed back. There is a very good chance that how we consume art has changed forever.
The thing about art, about creativity, is that it doesn’t just influence the entertainment industry. Creativity permeates everything, from how we write academic papers to how we design our gardens. It also will change how we continue to serve people in healthcare, and how we begin to heal from this event — both health wise and as we start to think about what happens with our economy.
The way our healthcare system has had to think outside the box over the last several months is deeply steeped in creativity. Designing new ways to get people access to healthcare isn’t easy, especially when you’re also trying to keep yourself protected. It becomes even more difficult when you consider the barriers faced by a system designed to focus on profit instead of health. In a crisis, profit can no longer matter. Access must.
The American workforce has and will continue to change over the coming months, with more and more companies figuring out how to put their employees to work remotely or making the hardest decision of all and shuttering their doors completely. People will continue to lose their jobs or reduce their hours. Our gig economy will shift again and again as people reach a breaking point of trying to make money while putting themselves at risk.
Listen, I get that it sounds bleak. We’ve never faced this before. It doesn’t matter if we’ve seen pandemics like the Spanish Flu or gone through the Great Depression. This is different. So it’s time for something different.
There is an Edward de Bono quote that reads “Creativity involves breaking out of expected patterns in order to look at things in a different way”. If you don’t catch it immediately, here’s what I’m trying to say — we’re already outside the expected pattern.
The deep beauty of creativity is that, while it can be occasionally fleeting, it also shines a light on how people engage with one another and how things can change. Creativity gives us the opportunity to be bigger than we are, to push harder than we ever have.
My current favorite example of this is a man named Erich Bergen. Bergen is an actor and singer, known for Jersey Boys and Madam Secretary, who has suddenly become an online event producer, bringing actors and musicians and performers together on every size screen to raise money for COVID-19 relief. It started when Broadway shut its doors and he saw that people needed help. It just keeps going.
I don’t know Erich Bergen. Probably neither do you. But the exceptional thing we can learn from people like Bergen is that creativity comes leaping out of the most difficult times and shakes the ground we walk on (or, you know, the house we’re stuck in).
The next few months, likely the next few years, are going to change what our country and our world look like. It’s going to take all of us — the writers, the performers, the activists, the healthcare providers, the economists, the politicians, the gig workers, and everyone else you can think of — to keep us moving. It’s going to mean ripping through the old patterns and starting new ones from scratch. And then doing it again.
Creativity breathes new life into things. As we move through the collective grief we are feeling and determine what comes next for our country, it will only benefit us to bring creativity along as well, allowing it to help us build a different world.
This post is part of a collective of posts sponsored by Illuminate, a writing community from The Kindred Voice. Read more stories on Creativity here:
Creativity in Decline (a poem) by Mia Sutton
I’m Not Really Creative. Am I? by Amy Clark
Creativity in a Pandemic by Sarah Hartley
A Cross-Creative Quarantine: Re-finding Purpose in Strange Times by Elizabeth Russell
I Haven’t Been Feeling Creative, and That’s Okay by Ashleigh Bowling
Illuminate: Creativity by Danielle Brigante
