Inside the Black Mirror of “Creativity”

We live in a world where terms like creativity and imagination have become the most clichés probably in the history of, ever. First of all, there is absolutely no consensus about what the fuck these words mean. One can say the same word about a 3-year-old holding a pen or a postmodern artist who’s taking a piss in the garden. The only meaning that makes sense, which ironically no one wants to consider, is that it’s purely subjective.

Now this is creating a problem of multiple dimensions: since it’s subjective, then it can be taken however one intends to. So I can suggest that YOU have the power to be unleashing your creativity because you’re using a product—my product—or because you’re working on following up with trends, metatrends, and whoever caught the wave of the trend early on.

Another problem, which looks like no one’s really fucking talking about, is the idea of time—this intimate, unbroken connection that has carried productivity and creativity hand in hand until now one can’t exist in the same space without the other. That leads to the fact that you’re only “creative” if you’re “productive,” regardless of what you create.

A few of the artists I actually respect always say you need to create no matter what. But the more I think about it, the more I see how they missed the bigger picture of this “you need to produce” mantra. There’s a hidden undertow, a cost of this so-called “unleashing your creativity” that’s really just another form of production pressure.

It might be too late to say this, but companies that control the crowd have split into two models: either they sell you the means of “creativity” (which is really just productivity in disguise), or they give you platforms where your “creativity” is the product, and you pay with your data and your time. We’re in a continuous degradation of what creation really means, pushed by this insatiable need to automate, hyper-do, and survive in a Black Mirror reality we barely even recognize we’re living in.

I feel like any attempt to create genuine value outside these dictated standards is killed at the cradle. Is there even a way out of this? Are we collectively too blind to see the consequences? Are we just layering more and more bodies of so-called “creativity” for the next viewer to bury, while empathy and honesty get buried underneath?

Is the world really that bad? I’m writing this while waiting to board another business trip to talk about ideas that shape the same world I’m now questioning. Is there any way to compromise, or to actually create a “better” world where “better” isn’t just subjective but genuinely better for everyone?

Creativity, automation, and the future are all tangled together. The future won’t matter if the present stays the same. I’m living between the beauty of nihilism and the horror of watching the world shape itself into something I barely recognize, all while our so-called “creativity” just builds more pathways of power for the few to control the many.