Category: Creativity

The imagination age

Neera

Do you have any idea which age we are in?

Last time I checked, we were in the information age.

Now, I am told; we are living in the Imagination Age.

The Imagination Age is a period beyond the Information Age, where creativity and imagination are the primary creators of economic value. This contrasts with the information age, where analysis and thinking were the main activities.

Charlie Magee, who first introduced the term in 1993 in an essay, “The Age of Imagination: Coming Soon the Civilization Near You,” proposes that the best way to assess the evolution of human civilization is through the lens of communication.

Throughout human history, the most successful groups, whether they are tribes, kingdoms, corporations, or nations, are the ones where a larger percentage of people have access to a higher quality of information, and a greater ability to transform that information into knowledge into action, and more freedom to communicate that new knowledge to the other members of their group.

The technologies like virtual reality, user-created content, and YouTube are changing the way we interact with each other and how we create economic and social structures.

The rise of immersive virtual reality, cyberspace, or the metaverse will further raise the value of the imagination work of designers, artists, video makers, and actors over rational thinking as a foundation of culture and economics.

Michael Cox Chief Economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas argues that economic trends show a shift away from information sector employment and job growth towards creative jobs.

Jobs in publishing are declining, while jobs for designers, architects, actors & directors, software engineers, and photographers are all growing. This shift in job creation is a sign of the beginning of the Imagination Age.

Cox argues the skills can be viewed as a “hierarchy of human talents”, with raw physical effort as the lowest form of value creation, above this skilled labor and information entry to creative reasoning and emotional intelligence.

Each layer provides more value creation than the skills below it, and the outcome of globalization and automation is that labor is made available for higher-level skills that create more value.

Presently, these skills are around imagination and social and emotional intelligence.

Rita J. King, an artist, writer, and cultural philosopher, used the term in her November 2007 essay for the British Council, “The Emergence of a New Global Culture in the Imagination Age.”

King says,

“Rather than exist as an unwitting victim of circumstance, all too often unaware of the impact of having been born in a certain place at a certain time, to parents firmly nestled within particular values and socioeconomic brackets, millions of people are creating new virtual identities and meaningful relationships with others who would have remained strangers, each isolated within their respective realities.”

King further refined the development of her thinking in a 2008 essay entitled, “Our Vision for Sustainable Culture in the Imagination Age” in which she states,

“Active participants in the Imagination Age are becoming cultural ambassadors by introducing virtual strangers to unfamiliar customs, costumes, traditions, rituals, and beliefs, which humanizes foreign cultures, contributes to a sense of belonging to one’s own culture, and fosters an interdependent perspective on sharing the riches of all systems.”

She has become a crusader for expanding the Imagination Age concept through speeches at the O’Reilly Media, TED, Cusp, and Business Innovation Factory conferences.

Her blog “The Imagination Age” is worth checking.

A case for standing up while creating

Neera

Standing desks at workplaces are becoming increasingly prevalent. Despite complaints about aching legs and strain on spines, more and more people are choosing them. The pay-off is just not in health benefits but also in productivity.

An average person sits for approximately twelve hours a day. The doctors are warning that sitting is the new smoking.

In the most clicked article on standing desks, Cia Bernales writes that she used to have tight shoulders, lower back pains, and bad posture. Now she is not slouching, walks around the office more, and is more productive.

The advice to make sales calls while standing up has been around for a long time. Now there are calls for stand-up meetings and stand-up schools.

According to Andrew Knight, Professor at Olin Business School, groups are more creative and collaborative when they work standing up.

“The participants wore small sensors around their wrists to measure “physiological arousal” — the way people’s bodies react when they get excited. When a person’s arousal system becomes activated, sweat glands around the feet and hands release bursts of moisture. The sensors pass a small current of electricity through the skin to measure these moisture bursts.

Knight and Baer found that the teams who stood had greater physiological arousal and less idea territoriality than those in the seated arrangement. Members of the standing groups reported that their team members were less protective of their ideas; this reduced territoriality led to more information sharing and higher quality videos.” 

Science News: Standing up gets groups more fired up for teamwork

“Seeing that the physical space in which a group works can alter how people think about their work and how they relate with one another is very exciting.” — Andrew Knight. 

Many artists are known to express themselves better while standing up. Violinists, guitarists, and trumpeters all perform while standing up because you are holding your instrument upright when you’re standing. You are connected, expanded, tall, wide, round, inflated, supported, grounded, and free!

Ulrike Selleck, a classical singer, says standing is the best position to create beautiful, strong, and resonant sound because you are rooted in the earth through your legs. You stand like a tree, immovable throughout the storm, or the scales or coloratura or high notes or low notes, or interminably long phrasing, swooping melodies, or intricate lyrics.

Comedians perform standing up, and artists draw and paint standing up, then why don’t writers write standing up? 

Most of us struggle to stay up with new ideas when we sit in front of the computer after a day’s work. 

Our bodies in sedentary mode give the shut-down signal to our brains.

One way for writers to unlock creativity and break out of the too-tired-to-write routine could write standing up.

I will certainly test the theory next month, writing 1667 words a day (50,000 in a month) while participating in NaNoWriMo 2020.

Joys of mediocrity

Neera

At last, there are a few more people on this planet who have the same views as mine about ‘mediocrity.’

So much so that Tim Wu, the author of The Attention Merchants has written an opinion post in the New York Times In Praise of Mediocrity.

Tim has pointed out there is a slow disappearance of hobbies from our society.

A good old-fashioned hobby, a thing you do just for fun.

A hobby is something creative which you do for yourself and you alone.

You don’t need to be good at it. You don’t need to make money from it. You don’t need to get famous for it. You just need to do it because it makes you happy.

It appears that whatever free time people used to have to nurture a hobby is now taken up by screens.

“Lost here is the gentle pursuit of a modest competence, the doing of something just because you enjoy it, not because you are good at it. Hobbies, let me remind you, are supposed to be something different from work. But alien values like “the pursuit of excellence” have crept into and corrupted what was once the realm of leisure, leaving little room for the true amateur. The population of our country now seems divided between the semipro hobbyists (some as devoted as Olympic athletes) and those who retreat into the passive, screen leisure that is the signature of our technological moment.”

Tim goes on to say that our hobbies have become too serious, too demanding, and too much of an occasion to be anxious about whether we are really the person we claim to be.

“If you’re a jogger, it is no longer enough to cruise around the block; you’re training for the next marathon. If you’re a painter, you are no longer passing a pleasant afternoon, just you, your watercolors, and your water lilies; you are trying to land a gallery show or at least garner a respectable social media following. When your identity is linked to your hobby — you’re a yogi, a surfer, a rock climber — you’d better be good at it, or else who are you?”

For a long time, I have been giving myself permission not to strive for excellence in everything.

Some activities I do are meant to give me mere pleasure.

Singing is one of them. I have a loud voice, which sometimes is neither melodious nor pleasant. But singing gives me a lot of joy. Although singing in the shower or in the car is a safer option, it is no way near the joy I get in singing with others.

That means accepting my mediocrity and reaping the joy without feeling ashamed.

Unforgiving and overdisciplined

Neera

How unforgiving and over-disciplined we have become?

We not only can’t forgive others but also ourselves.

We are harsher on ourselves than we are on others. We judge and punish ourselves if we think that we have not done what we expected to do. We deprive ourselves of the kindness we preach ourselves to offer to others.

We berate ourselves over not being able to write well, write regularly, build an audience, summon our muse, or be good enough when all the time learning, getting better, and not giving up.

We are killing ourselves with the discipline we impose on ourselves. What to eat, when to eat, how much to eat, when to sleep, how much to sleep, how much exercise to do, how many words to write in a day, what goals to set, and how challenging they should be.

All these aspirations are not making us any more creative. They are, in fact, killing our creativity.

With all the advances in the twenty-first century, we have not freed the human spirit. Instead, we have imprisoned it to fulfill our wants. And wants never end. They keep on becoming bigger and bigger.

How about waking up from this delusion and liberating ourselves? Be kind to ourselves. Let go of the pressure of performance, productivity, and achievement, and let the mind wander freely into the realm of true creativity.

Permission…

Neera

Elizabeth Gilbert, in her book Big Magic wrote:

A clever, independent, creative, and powerful woman in her mid-seventies offered me a superb piece of life wisdom. We all spend our twenties and thirties trying so hard to be perfect because we’re so worried about what people will think of us. Then we get into our forties and fifties, and we finally start to be free, because we decide that we don’t give a damn what anyone thinks about us. But you won’t be completely free until you reach your sixties and seventies, when you finally realize this liberating truth—nobody was ever thinking about you, anyhow.

They aren’t. They weren’t. They never were.

People are mostly just thinking about themselves. They don’t have time to worry about what you’re doing or how well you’re doing it, because they are caught up in their own dreams.

Go be whoever you want to be then.

Do whatever you want to do.