Creativity is essentially an exercise in optimism.
If we're going to try to bring something new into being, we have to believe that the future can be brighter than the past (or the present). That positive, often dramatic, change is possible.
And yet, the pull of pessimism/fatalism/realism is real. The news media offers a steady stream of doom and gloom. Many cultures fall into a "crabs in a bucket" mentality where anyone trying to climb to new heights is pulled back down. Even statistics can sap our optimism as the majority of new ventures fail within 5 years, the majority of manuscripts never get published, the majority of art never gets exhibited. And personally, we can fall into the trap of thinking that we're too old to make a major change. That our biggest changes are behind us.
This last one is what psychologists call "the end of history illusion”. The term was coined in a 2013 article where the researchers asked over 19,000 people aged 18-68 how much they had changed in the past decade and how much they predicted they would change in the next decade. Across all age groups, people “believed they had changed a lot in the past but would change relatively little in the future. People, it seems, regard the present as a watershed moment at which they have finally become the person they will be for the rest of their lives.” It's hilarious how for me, even as a coach committed to my own personal growth and that of my clients, this still somehow resonates.
In an interview with the NYT about the study, identity researcher Dan McAdams (not an author on the study) commented that, “The end-of-history effect may represent a failure in personal imagination.” I think it's partly that. Naturally, it's easier to remember the events of the past (that actually happened) than it is to imagine a range of future possibilities (that may never happen).
But I think it's also the obsession we have with seeing our lives as a story. Don't get me wrong, I love stories. Storytelling is one of my passions. I incorporate storytelling festivals into my holidays. I read folktales for fun. And I was thrilled when my friend Sotiria Kal invited me to give a guest lecture about story structure to her creative writing students last month.
As part of that lecture, I shared some research (from Dan McAdams among many others) that seeing your life as a Hero's Journey increases your sense of meaning. With the Hero's Journey lens, you see yourself as an active protagonist who experienced a major change in circumstances. Who went on a quest to achieve a goal. Found allies and overcame obstacles. Culminating in personal transformation and the ability to offer something of value to your community.
Rogers, B. A., Chicas, H., Kelly, J. M., Kubin, E., Christian, M. S., Kachanoff, F. J., Berger, J., Puryear, C., McAdams, D. P., & Gray, K. (2023). Seeing your life story as a hero’s journey increases meaning in life. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1–84.
I don't dispute the findings and I would say that meaning is only one of many psychological reasons why the Hero's Journey structure resonates with us so deeply. There's a reason that Joseph Campbell found the structure repeated in thousands of myths from all over the world.
However, I'm realizing that a very real limitation of the story lens on our identity is that we're always at the end of the story. We're always the oldest we've ever been. Our life story is typically told in retrospect. (There are exceptions to this, especially in the start-up space where charismatic founders love to position themselves at the beginning of a hero's journey. Although this also has a dark side as fascinating research by my friend Susanna Kislenko highlights.)
With a story lens, the center of gravity is in the past. Story, on one level, is simply a chain of cause and effect. Stories give us meaning precisely because they're able to connect the dots in a way that makes sense. But precisely because of this linear cause-effect relationship, it can sometimes feel like our future "effects" are merely a product of past "causes". That our history determines our destiny.
But if we drop the story lens, what can we replace it with?
When I asked myself this question, this was the image that came to my mind:
Ash (2003), by Bryan Nash Gill, an artist who has a whole series of large-scale relief prints from the cross sections of trees captured beautifully in the sadly now out of print book "Woodcut".
A tree does not grow linearly. Its past is no prediction of its future. It will have years of scarcity where the rings are narrow and years of abundance where the rings are wider. Just because a tree may have weathered some lean years does not mean it can not grow quickly if the environment makes more resources available. A tree has a cyclical story, not a linear one.
This image helps me tap into a feeling of freshness about the future.
Circling back to the research on the end of history illusion. One way of interpreting the findings is that I'm basically guaranteed to be completely surprised by how much I will experience change in the coming years.
That feels exciting. Like the aperture is expanding so I can start to perceive the limitless possibilities ahead. With this optimism restored, I'm reconnected to my faith in the freshness of the future and my creativity is reinvigorated.
From @jeffkortenbosch