What is the opposite of creativity? Thesaurus.com notes that it is uncreative, ungifted, unimaginative, uninspired, unproductive or untalented.

Even though in itself each of those individually can be debated to no end, I feel that it is more interesting that this website uses negative adjectives only, to describe the opposite of creativity. Now that may be a lazy website giving a lazy or “uncreative” answer, but it is a common thought that being not creative is associated with the negative.

From young I would treat studying like a machine, and punch words into my head one by one like a typewriter, stamping it into the memory paper of my brain. But in art class and design+tech, it would be about inspiration and my brain wouldn’t really need to repeat and remember things at all.

So when I look back at it what I enjoyed most was definitely these classes. It requires less monotonous work but I was still rewarded with an outcome, a mark or a result just the same as a boring essay would have.

So the opposite of creativity is mindlessness and apathy? Which one is.. better?

If everyone were creative or delved into creative thoughts exclusively, would society sustain? If one were only creative and never did a mindless and repetitive thing in their life, be productive or progressive? No. But neither would it work if you were entirely mindless. This world has both types of people and both are needed for progression and work.

However as I mentioned, too many times repetitive work is seen as lack of creativity and negative. This is what I would like to challenge, or would try shift the social norm if I could. It may not be good to be a robot for your whole life, but never look down on people that are or choose to be mindless in work or in life. I say this not because I worry for creative people’s egos, but because you will lose sight of the value of hard work and forget to appreciate the other side of the coin. I see a problematic trend towards creativity, especially in the younger, generation Z (due to multiple factors such as spoiling but this is another time), that idolises creativity which is very dangerous. Hard work will always and forever be a stronger foundation.

(one moment)

Continuing on to my childhood school memories (I feel so old), there were classes at the same time that involved plenty of work and repetition (mathematics, piano) but these subjects hit a point that was different, where it felt natural, almost creative. These subjects were the ones I were good at and enjoyed but required immense amounts of work. This is where I felt contradiction, that tasks or subjects that involved such prominent hard work and repetition in the form of past papers and textbooks of exercises, were in turn becoming natural and organic. It was as if the answers came to me and I wrote them down, instead of going through my mind to find those answers.

To make the connection to creativity is that, creative work is often liken to be, creating or recording what your imagination brings to you. That is, it is not from reciting or remembering that brings out the creation.

To pair with this thought, I recently found this chart –

I feel that this graph really sums up where I want to get at in this long winded post. Maybe my question into what is the opposite of creativity lead me to question the definition of creativity.

Creativity, as I have talked about here, I am considering more as passion, interest and ‘arousal’. I wanted a clear explanation as to why creativity is preferred and why I felt so strongly that it is also a caveat and weakness if not managed well. The Yerkes-Dodson Law is a psychological perspective of the relationship between performance and arousal. Too little arousal is apathetic, too much arousal is stressful and leads to anxiety. There is a peak performance which lies in the optimal middle of the graph, of ‘arousal’.

To summarise, Creativity is preferred because it is a form of arousal, of natural discovery which involves imagination and feelings of ecstasy and primal joy. Whereas repetition is boredom which leads to deeper emotions of disgust (Plutchik’s wheel). But as boredom leads to disgust, creativity if overloaded will lead to anxiety and stress. That is why, as always with everything in this damn world(!), it is always important to practice moderation and reap the benefits of each type of action or form of emotion.

Never let creativity slip away and for you to fall to boredom, but don’t dream so much that you live in a world of imagination that leads to no progression or work. There is no secret to success but these two opposites. And never let this sort of contradiction sway the direction which you are walking, instead question the reason of your path.