Tedium - The Tough Climb ⛰

Today in Tedium: Today marks the debut of a fresh new look for Tedium’s newsletter that fully reflects my views on customization. It’s something built by hand, tested over numerous long nights, and ultimately a refresh that reflects a modest shift in direction for this newsletter. As I was finishing up the final touches, I was thinking to myself, why do this? Why spend so much time building a custom design when people are making huge salaries by running cookie-cutter Substacks? And I think the reason, beyond my views on ownership, comes down to the fact that some people need their creative victories to be hard-fought. So in honor of this new design, today’s Tedium is about the value of climbing creative mountains the hard way. — Ernie @ Tedium

(Chrisopher Burns/Unsplash)

Why we need intentional barriers to creativity, sometimes

Sometimes, simple prompts are all the motivation we need to start working. When the blog first gained prominence in the early 2000s, one of the reasons it was a fascinating phenomenon was because it was rooted in the simplicity of creativity. The medium was still new, but just flexible enough to be dangerous.

People who wanted to spend a few minutes just writing could do that. People who wanted to build something more ambitious could do that, too. If you wanted to throw a ton of PHP or Perl at your problem, go right ahead.

I think, for most people, a simple Blogger or LiveJournal site was just perfect for expression. Its shape was simple and it didn’t require much to get your thoughts on the virtual page. This kind of simplicity brings in the masses.

But sometimes, you want more from what you’re doing. You want to have additional control over the final result. You want to sweat over every single pixel. And when things are not perfect, you keep working until you do.

You’re stationary, stuck in your house with nothing better to do, but you climb that mountain. It’s hard, but it shows results. This was the kind of mountain climbing that led me to create a brand new template for my newsletter, from scratch, in a single-week rush, where I conceptualized the basic ideas, pinpointed the weaknesses of the old design, and tried my best to modernize things while keeping true to the spirit of what I already built.

(Just don’t ask me to climb an actual mountain.)

It was a lot of work, and there are details I’m still working out—I am trying to set up Twitter embeds that work natively in the newsletter, which is actually fairly complicated to do for those wondering—but it in many ways reflects the way I think about creativity. Sometimes, it’s a long slog. Sometimes it’s a huge leap.

This is the kind of creativity that drives developers, graphic designers, artists, people who put a pen onto a sheet of paper and just go for it.

But it fits in other settings as well. In a world where IKEA has turned furniture into a literal plug-and-play project, what makes someone spend literal days putting together a fancy desk by hand? Watching videos like this has become a recent YouTube guilty pleasure of mine. When you have wood shoved into a vice for a day to ensure the wood glue dries correctly, you’re clearly not cutting any corners.

Another example is music. Free apps like Garageband changed the dynamic of making music significantly, basically making it possible for even inexperienced musicians to create cool things. In many ways, the basic elements of making music have been solved by these simple tools. But of course, people make stuff with incredible levels of sophistication using high-end tools. Ambition scales up.

Creativity doesn’t require a lot of extra tools, but people still want those extra doodads anyway, because they’re aiming for something higher.

Is art creation? And does creation allow for re-creation? This was an existential debate about creativity for decades. (Khara Woods/Unsplash)

Why the kind of creativity we fully embrace today initially didn’t “click”

Up to this point, I’ve been describing modern creativity paradigms.

But for centuries, the tension of creativity was, at least in some cultures, not seen as fundamental in the sense we consider it today. Much of this awkwardness comes down to the origin of the term, with its basis in the Latin word ‌creatio.

Greeks didn’t even have a word for creation. They just were creative in the modern sense, using the term “poiein,” which translates to “to make” to describe what they did.

But this concept of making amazing and original things and having ownership of them was complicated significantly by the addition of Christianity. A key philosophy of early Christianity was the concept of creatio ex nihilo, or the idea that everything in the world was created from nothing by a single entity. This approach, widely accepted in the Christian church and hardened by Medieval times, complicated the conceptual nature of creativity, as many saw that, by this definition, you can’t create new things from what was already created.

It was a terminology thing—obviously, the world was creating things left and right—but the hold of Christianity on the Western world during this time was such that it complicated the way we talked about other kinds of creativity.

Creatio ex nihilo did not leave room for any other kinds of creativity, at least not under that name. Art was art. Poetry was a craft. And other things just didn’t get treated as worthy of value in the way they should have. In many ways, it’s the very definition of inside-the-box thinking.

Think about Shakespeare or da Vinci, for example. Just masterful creators of some of the most important examples of creativity the world has ever seen … taking a backseat to this idea that the only creation that mattered was the original Creation. In many ways, the Renaissance was driven by those who saw strong inherent value in individual ideas and works, though they may not have necessarily called what they did creation.

Eventually, this limited view of creation was thrown off to the side, in bits and pieces. An early figure to question the standpoint was Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski, the 17th-century Polish poet and theorist, whose work De perfecta poesi posited that poets “create anew” “in the manner of God.” (Sarbiewski, notably, only limited his view on creativity to poets.)

After that formative first strike, many took their turn at chopping this limited philosophy down over a nearly 300-year period, with creativity becoming common in art theory starting in the 18th century (as Polish philosopher and historian Władysław Tatarkiewicz explained in his work ‌A History of Six Ideas: An Essay in Aesthetics), but perhaps the person who most effectively put creativity in the correct terminology is Alfred North Whitehead, who explained the concept like this in his iconic 1929 book Process and Reality:

“Creativity” is the universal of universals characterizing ultimate matter of fact. It is that ultimate principle by which the many, which are the universe disjunctively, become the one actual occasion, which is the universe conjunctively. It lies in the nature of things that the many enter into complex unity.

After so many others downgraded the power of human ingenuity, here was someone taking the absolute opposite approach: No, creativity is the driving factor around how the world works.

And just in time, too. Now, so much of what we do is driven by this concept of creativity, how it bleeds into everything, how it defines craft and concept.

To leave something so fundamentally important in the exclusive realm of religion or theory would be to limit it unfairly.