I’ve come to wonder if materialism is truly the enemy of creativity?
I guess it’s because I’m hyper-sensitive to ads and nice cars and status symbols and other flagships of our materialized culture as I’m technically unemployed right now…I’ve been thinking about the cool things that I want and can’t justify spending money on at the moment.
Then I think about the projects that I have on the table that I have that insatiable desire to finish writing, and wonder why that can’t be enough.
I remember my artist friend saying to me last weekend, “you don’t need stuff.”
But we’ve created this monster of society that wants to have more, to buy more, and therefore to work more. To slave away, caught in the machine and not having any time to create. And, as Madeleine L’Engle says, we’re not truly alive if we’re not creating, because that’s what God designed all of us to do at some level. And this idea that we don’t “need stuff?” Well, that’s pretty Scriptural when you think about it.
So I wonder if less material cultures produce deeper and better art that America? I think this could be why we see so much shallow garbage produced that people call art. And I think that many of the most profound creators in our country are counter-cultural in the sense that they’re poor.
Poor in a material sense.
In realilty, though, they’re wealthier that we can imagine. That is the wealth I wish I had at the moment.