Keep the goose
What makes creativity, what creativity makes, and how to not confuse them for your sanity
There’s a goose that lays golden eggs in every one of us.
Before abstruse ideas like possibility or creativity, there’s the solid part of your brain half an inch deep from your forehead. The medial pre-frontal cortex or mPFC is responsible for constructing your reality right now.
This integral part of the human brain is the source of the best things in your life, which the golden eggs symbolise. But as Aesop’s fable goes, if you confuse the goose for what it gives you, you might kill it in obsession for more eggs. This is most applicable for creators like yourself.
How can this happen?
An animal brain does an input-output process for survival. It makes the heart beat, the mouth eat, and the legs run. This can be more or less complex, but separation of concerns is usually honoured because it’s lethal if you try to eat what eats you.
One day, one of your ancestors found this A-B
process too boring and evolved a mediator called consciousness, which lives in the mPFC. It makes a small room for contemplation between what you see and how you react, so you can conjure up some random connections.
This is why you crave novelty. A new travel destination, a recipe you haven’t tried yet, whatever your favourite merchant peddles anew, you buy it. Unlike the average animal brain that wants the same thing over and over, the human brain feels time and space like never before by making new connections in all directions. A piece of art is there to open up your conscious mind.
This new a-C-b
process made the ape sit and think in serenity. “When I hungry, what if I hit a rock instead of a bunny? Could get more bunny.” That’s how we ended up creating nuclear warheads we can’t eat.
Good things happened too. Consciousness was most useful for associating real-world stuff with random sounds that come out of the mouth. Language happened. 🍏 became apple, even though the fruit doesn’t make such a noise or look like any of the letters. At last, the ape was able to address an apple, tell others where apples are, and discuss how to build a computer.
This random association was more of a problem at first. Hallucinations and mental disorders have been trying the best of consciousness. It took believers and the courageous until they figured out how to do what they wanted to do: riding a horse, crossing the ocean, etc. And we are the proud survivors who indulge in their discoveries. It proves that creativity is inherently social.
Living with consciousness taught the brain one important lesson: you don’t get to be enlightened when a bear is about to have you for an entrée. That’s when the amygdala, the burst-action part of your brain, was authorised to declare martial law and suppress the mPFC when necessary. When your brain detects a threat, sweet daydreams dissipate so you can see the bear.
One of the problems with this approach is that your mPFC gives you the ability to vividly imagine the bear even when it’s not there. In real life, we have more than bears. You can replay that mistake you made a decade ago as if it’s happening right now just to flop what’s in your hands. You can even get cancer by stressing out too much about a cancer you don’t have.
Under the hood, the mPFC gets suppressed for what it has created. The amygdala draws energy from your higher self and the digestive system to heat your body, preparing it for war. Or, simply put, you panic. The vicious cycle of obsessive worrying blinds you from the creative solutions you already know.
So, that was the origin of the functional connectivity between the mPFC and amygdala. You are sane and creative when you chill. You are not when you don’t. And mentally torturing yourself leaves you in constant stagnation, reinforcing itself.
Then what happens when you make a living with your creative work? At first, you find your way around the shallow water, picking up clams. Soon you learn to navigate the beautiful coral reef, collecting the fruits of the ocean. This is when you enjoy your golden eggs the most.
But as you dive deeper into the thickness of the water, you experience this pressure you haven’t felt before. And it gets heavier and heavier as you reach the depth of your creativity. Then, at the point of no return, the light burns out.
You hunt for “ideas” in frustration. Your recent works don’t live up to the expectations set by your best ones. Business demands growth you haven’t planned out. The time it requires exceeds the 24 hours you have. And you find out that creativity doesn’t really scale.
And all those thoughts make you anxious and suffocate your creativity.
When this happens, one might try painting banal eggs golden. While creativity can be difficult to maintain, it’s easy to notice it or the lack thereof. Faking creativity only attracts the wrong kind of audience, if it does at all.
Some others might use substances. Drugs and alcohol can stimulate or weaken your conscious process, entirely altering the negative feedback cycle. They might have a burst-impact on your mind but never provide a sustainable solution.
You get nothing out of sacrificing the goose on the altar of creativity. There’s nothing in the goose. And you know this with your intuition. Creativity turns nothing into something. If you break the process, you only get a bunch of nothing. But when you are desperate for creativity, your insanity cuts the goose open.
If you ever find yourself in this situation, what you should really do is surrender and come back to sanity. You cannot force creativity. It’s the opposite of forcing. Creativity cannot be a tool for whatever you want. It can only exist as the ultimate goal itself.
The good thing is that, unlike the anecdotal livestock, your neocortex doesn’t die until you do. Embrace the uniqueness of your goose. It’s the single point of convergence of your universe. It’s unique by definition. If you fancy more geese, flock with other creatives.
Are you here for the goose? Or the golden eggs?
Keep the goose.