Consuming vs. Creating

Every day we have an opportunity to consume or to create.

Consuming promises to satisfy the desire that only living out our original design as mini-creators can really do. Will we use our faculties to create something new? or just ingest someone else's ingenuity? One requires action & intention that pays off - the other passivity that only leads to more laziness and malaise.

These thoughts have been rumbling around in my old noggin' for the last year or so.

It really is quite amazing what little we can be satisfied with...I'll spend hours reading magazines & status updates, watching mediocre shows or movies chock full of stuff I don't even like, just undiscerningly eating whatever's placed before me; and then mere minutes on writing or creating something new and I like to think that's a passion of mine. Are we just that prone to walk the easiest path?

Our culture certainly doesn't help me cultivate my creativity -- we are wired to want and the catalogs and ads and signage all feed on that. American ad world (of which-full disclosure- I am guilty in my profession of advancing) is structured around all of us believing that our core identity is consumer. Life plus product or service being sold is better. That's what I have to believe, but it's never couched that way...it's couched as the 'good life' will be realized through buying the product-nay, the dream being sold. The reality is that even if we are consuming, we DO end up creating in our minds as we imagine a world that is perfect here.

I was thinking more on this the other day because of the book I've been reading lately On Paradise Drive by David Brooks. I'm continuing with my American cultural criticism "pseudo class" of sorts. In it Brooks discusses what makes Americans and their spirit unique, from life in the suburbs, to higher learning, spirituality and our shopping sprees - and through it all he discovers our uniqueness lies in our striving, our desiring to move forward and improve. There's something engrained in our spirit, our American psyche that says "Life can be better, we can improve" and that drives us...but we rarely notice that it robs us of contentment in the present. We don't think about how life is only lived in the now, not tomorrow.

This passage was especially enlightening - He's speaking on what happens as we do something as simple as read a magazine:

"What people are doing as they page through these magazines is this: They are enjoying the longing. They are constructing fantasies of what their lives might be like, using the goods and images they see in these magazines. They are not there yet, and in truth they may never get there, but they get pleasure from bathing in the possibility of what might be, of sloshing about in the golden waters of some future happiness. They achieve a transubstantiation of goods, using products and gear to create a magical realm in which all is harmony, happiness, and contentment, in which they can finally relax, in which their best and most admirable self will emerge at last."

Because we have eternity in our hearts, our coveting is limitless, and our imaginations only help further this. The key is realizing how overactive your imagination is and to try and reign in the longing and desires before they develop....but our world plays on that, and our hearts are so deceitful.