Creativity requires solitude
dkb.show
dkb.show
But at different times of my life, I have been quite active socially. My college years especially were filled with social interactions that I grew to enjoy. It started out as friends and roommates dragging me to one thing or another, but after a while I instigated a lot of it.
But I naturally gravitated to a career in programming where I can spend 10 hours straight at the keyboard with almost no interaction. My hobby project is a major one that deals with a whole new way to manage data. It has consumed several years of my life as I spend a great deal of my 'free time' thinking about it, writing code, or optimizing something.
My introverted nature has affected my family life as I withdraw into my own little world. My wife sometimes wonders if I am depressed, unhappy, or stressed. Although I am perfectly content, I have to force myself to come out of my shell and interact much more with the wife and kids (and friends and neighbors). Many of my fellow programmers that I have worked with over the years also exhibit some of these tendencies.
I guess it is debatable whether this adds to or subtracts from actual creativity.
In grade-school, my family moved often. I never had the experience of a friendship longer than about 3 years. Tech appealed to me - I always wanted to know how things worked and since no one took kids seriously, outside of it being a bonding experience with my dad occasionally, it was an activity I did alone, one where I spent large parts of my days learning about and experimenting with whatever I could get my hands on.
College was the first time I was exposed to people who shared a common interest. It wasn't a large campus, and somehow I ended up getting a reputation for being one of the more competent CS students on campus. People would approach me every day in the university's coffee shop to ask for help with class or pick my brain for ideas on hobby projects. I grew to seriously enjoy talking to people about what they're working on. I also grew to enjoy teaching and tutoring people - to the point where I'd give unofficial supplemental lectures in our ACM meetings about things I felt were missed in various classes. Computer graphics was a huge passion of mine at the time and a lot of people hated the class because it did a poor job of bridging theory to practice. I did so, so many OpenGL tutoring sessions.
After college I moved away from everyone I knew to take a job in another part of the state. I didn't really start to understand until then that I now craved socialization. I spent the next few years without anyone to (physically) spend time with. Much of my socialization was my Discord gaming group of everyone from back in college (still all together 6 years later).
After the main part of the pandemic I decided I was tired of being alone. I feel like I spent 6 years of my 20s locked up so I packed my life up and transferred to where all the people I was actually friends with were. Multiple social engagements a week for the past 3 months - I haven't been this happy in years. I even have people to go to the gym with!
I feel like being alone turned me into a more negative and reserved person as opposed to the "can't wait to share the cool things I know and or learned with everyone" person I was in school.
I don't know what to call myself. A shy extrovert? I'm horrible at starting a conversation but wow can I keep one going if someone else initiates.
Unlike some other types of art, software is never really finished. I don't think that painters or sculptors regularly revisit their creations to try and improve them. They don't have versions 2, 3, or 4 of a painting or statue. The closest thing might be writers who sometimes have multiple editions to their books. There is always something to do to improve a piece of software so it can keep you up too late at night because it is just a compile or two away.
Oops, gotta go, I just thought of a new feature for my project...
On the subject of creativity, I (like many others Im sure) have found travelling to be great for creativity, alone or otherwise! There was an article linked here a while ago about a person who embarked on “staycations” where they just remained confined to their hotel room explicitly to enhance their writing.
I believe many professional writers, artists, even musicians exhibit similar traits - they live in their own self-created worlds, stories, imaginary inner lives - often to the detriment of their social lives in "real" life.
Some are extroverted, some are introverted, but most are solitary brooders and counter-intuitively, exhibitionists at the same time.
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This is a beautiful passage from the post.
> You need to get back to the solitude that you knew as a child. They see the world with eyes unclouded. They live in their own world, a world of pure authenticity.
Metaphorically, he seems to be saying (to me even more strongly than isolation): that motivation needs to be intrinsic, it should come from yourself and your own desires, not from others; and that you should practice your craft intensely and make sure the practice of writing poetry is free from interruptions or noise that cloud things. He may be naming the state of flow we all want using words for it that we’re not used to these days, along with a push for writers to set their own standards and not judge themselves by publishing metrics. These are fairly timeless and applicable ideas today, not to mention all of us programmers frequently dream of solitude and perhaps resent the fact that we almost never get it at work.
I liked reading this fictitious conversation by Rilke, but I’m not about to take it as bible truth and go live in the woods in hopes of being more creative. (And I don’t think he was actually suggesting that either, it seems like he was talking about protecting his work time, like during the day, because it’s an action that worked for him to achieve his goals.)
> Programmers are more likely than most to prefer solitude, but even that isn’t a constant.
True! And we often want solitude even when it isn’t the best thing. ;) I have watched myself and others go too far away from what is needed in some situations because the requirements weren’t understood well enough, and assumptions were being made, and because it’s super fun to dive into a clever algorithm or data structure, or a learn and implement a fancy technique. Programming in a business setting is a social process and sometimes means checking in with people early and often, iterating, and getting repeated feedback. I got in trouble in my very first industry job when I complained about having to report my progress daily because it took an hour to prepare and interrupted my flow, the note in my file about uncooperativeness stayed around for years. Later I came to believe I was in the wrong because of watching people drift away from the goals without enough talking…
I used to draw a lot in school. All classes. I was not on the same planet. The hum of the crowd gave me energy.
To me it's just one certain type of creativity, and there are also many other types to indulge in as well.
When I was a college student I was in science but we used to go to the full moon parties thrown by the art students. They would have a blank canvas about 6x12 feet on their main wall and guests had lots of space to paint in teams or contribute to the community effort. It was amazing to see what it looked like at different times during the weekend. Real soon you would never mistake that it could be the work of only one person. This would be a good idea these days, and have some webcams recording it so you could watch later in fast motion.
>It’s kind of easy to take this extremely literally and pick it apart
I don't think you have to pick it apart, but on the whole you could say if you spend a lot of time on your own you could eventually expect to start making up conversations with people who truly exist(ed), but unlikely to ever meet in person and flesh things out for real.
Maybe better than a non-existent counterpart, maybe not, who am I to judge?
Just as an aside: drawing is just a technical activity, no diferent than programming. It can be creative or pretty rote (just ask any game dev artist working on yet another big guy with an axe) - same as programming. Same with music, btw.
So if we think of design or writing as creative, yes I think programming is too.
Amazing, every word of what that guy said is wrong.
Maybe he was actually talking about cats, that would make sense. But humans literally can't function outside of a society.
We are fundamentally a tribal species. Our entire evolutionary history—the thing that turned us into the species we are—revolves around our incredible ability to cooperate and share information. The basic unit of survival for our species is the tribe, not the individual. So at one very fundamental level, we must be around others to survive and thrive. We must subsume parts of ourselves that are unacceptable to the tribe so that we can be allowed to be one of its members. "Us" is more important than "I".
But at the exact same time, the tribe only wants and needs us if we can provide value, preferably unique value to it. So while we need to fit in to survive, we must also stand out in ways that the tribe finds valuable, explore where other tribespeople won't and bring back resources (physical, conceptual, etc.) that others can't.
The tension between these two opposing forces—to conform or to stand out—is, I think, one of the key pieces of being human.
> A small-world network is a type of mathematical graph in which most nodes are not neighbors of one another, but the neighbors of any given node are likely to be neighbors of each other and most nodes can be reached from every other node by a small number of hops or steps.
The caveat being: there are also people who are the polar opposite, so the global scope of that statement is indeed a bit to broad.
Also consider this: we are social animals, but this does not automatically imply that everything we are doing we like to do in a social setting. E.g. most humans will prefer not to defecate in public. Many people instinctively pull back from society in times of shock, grief or pain etc.
> Because the subject wasn’t engaged in a specific task, it was easy for researchers to think of the default network as something that comes on when you’re thinking about nothing. A little self-reflection, however, makes clear that our brains are hardly ever actually thinking about nothing. Even without a specific task, they tend to remain highly active, with thoughts and ideas flitting by in an ongoing noisy chatter. On further self-reflection, Lieberman realized that this background hum of activity tends to focus on a small number of targets: thoughts about “other people, yourself, or both.” The default network, in other words, seems to be connected to social cognition.
Everyone generalizes from a sample size of one.
https://sectionhiker.com/dick-proenneke-builds-a-log-cabin-i...
Not to mention your counter claim makes no sense and is far too broad. Which humans can't function outside of a society? All of them? For how long? For 10 milliseconds? What do you mean by "function"? What does it mean to be "outside of a society"?
The post makes perfect sense to anyone who is actually willing to understand it, rather than poorly attempt to nitpick at some aspect of it you hold near and dear to your heart.
But are you taking exception to the parent chuckling over the premise of humans as solitary animals? Humankind of society and culture and trade and language and art solitary animals?
In it he said:
"Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me — they’re shy and they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone — best outside of corporate environments, best where they can control an invention’s design without a lot of other people designing it for marketing or some other committee. I don’t believe anything really revolutionary has ever been invented by committee… I’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone... Not on a committee. Not on a team."
This is not a rant, you need to believe in yourself to do art, you need to believe that your work is of the most upmost importance, otherwise you wouldn't be able to give in to it.
The problem is that, from the outside, that is not necessarily true, and often isn't.
I actually agree with the premise, I do need solitude to be creative. I don´t want to feel lonely, but I need to feel that my mind will not be perturbed at unexpected times, for unwelcome reasons. I just want to emphasize that calling ourselves artists is not making us any favors.
That's a loneliness epidemic. Whether or not rich people isolate doesn't contradict this.
[1]: https://mcc.gse.harvard.edu/reports/loneliness-in-america [2]: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/01/23/7986764...
At least that’s true for me. Organising things socially and then participating in social events, with all the awkward moments and crappy small talk, is painful and at times daunting. But I know after it, I feel enriched and over time it builds strong relationships that add huge amounts of joy to my life. But as we have more and more excuses not to put ourselves through this, like endless Netflix or smart phones, we end up not doing it and feeling lonely.
The low quality/safety of public infrastructure could be to blame. Why would anyone use unpleasantly hot and smelly public transportation, full of loud and potentially shady individuals, without any security around in case someone creates a commotion - when they could just pay a little bit more and not even worry about any of those things?
Why would anyone go to a public gym with a tiny shared space, number of subscriptions that far exceeds the capacity of the place, and deal with unpredictability of whether or not there will be room to train - when they can build a private gym and train whenever they feel like it?
Why would anyone stand around in the crowded "fan pit", having problems even moving because vendors sold more tickets then there is capacity, wait in the line for public bathroom, wait in the line for drinks, make yourself a target for pickpocketing, etc. - when they could just buy a VIP seat, enjoy their time, and go home?
People will stop isolating themselves when not isolating stops being so unpleasant.
What about collaborative creativity? What about spontaneous creativity which is independent of environment? What about the kind of creativity that happens when a person goes into a very public place and sits alone and writes poetry... is that solitude?
I know some writers who are exactly as described in the interview. They cannot work if they are not alone. It makes sense. I know others who are almost the opposite - who need the presence of humanity to be creatively productive.
Methinks the calculus here is more complex than Rilke states.
This is really great practical advice. Decide what you must do. Remove the roadblocks and optimize to achieve your goal.
"You’re looking outside of yourself for the answers, and that’s the last place you’ll find them. The only way for you to move forward is to move inward."
If I can only find answers internally, then why the hell would I listen to you now? What if my internal voice tells me the only answers come from outside?
"Do not strive to uncover all of the answers right now. The answers can’t be given to you because you haven’t been able to live with them. What matters is to live everything. So live the questions for now. Perhaps then you will gradually, without noticing it, live your way into the answers, one distant day in the future."
So, "Wherever you go, there you are".
The problem is that humans don’t work like that. We aren’t the passionate bunch the author think we are.
People work for money and status , we are extremely result oriented not passion oriented.
Even on here people enjoy technology , hacking etc. But if you gave us absolute certainty of economic and social success via some other drastically different path (e.g. a reality show such as Jersey Shore) , we would not hesitate one second and wear our tightest tank top and trunks , get tanned and play the part.
I say “us” because I include myself in this scenario too, and I despise reality shows but you cant argue with millions of dollars and millions of followers.
They are respectively the currency of financial and social success.
it’s far better to be a millionaire reality star whose claim to fame is clubbing and partying on camera than a professor with an IQ of 185 whose fusion startup went under
speak for yourself bro. i'm not it.
For me, my creative project is writing a non-fiction book. YMMV, as a sibling comment about musician’s jam sessions indicates.
In his book, Newport argues that modernity is at odds with solitude and talks about the disadvantages of solitude deprivation.
Newport's message always lands on the people that crave solitude the most. Some people work this way. I tend to work much better alone, distraction-free. But it's a dangerous game to take anecdata that speaks to yourself and extrapolate it out to an entire species with very different societies and cultural contexts.
In personal experience, I thrive with interactions; sometimes less and sometimes more. Other people's ideas spark new perspectives and reveal the limits of my thought canvas. Solitude just makes me lonely and depressed.
https://theinterval.org/salon-talks/02022/jun/14/drinking-10...
My theory is this; when everyone in your group thinks alike and members are highly attuned to each others' sensibilities, they tend to be careful to not offend each other (and they tend to be good at it) - this means that more safe ideas and fewer risky (potentially offensive) ideas will propagate throughout the group. Over time, due to the low exposure to risky ideas, members of the group become accustomed to an increasingly higher degree of safety, which feeds into the vicious cycle of increasing sensitivity, intolerance, self-censorship and dullness.
Do they? People are consciously holding back internal floodgates of offensive ideas that would otherwise flood their peers? I don't think artists and genuinely creative people are doing that among their own group.
It's encouraged and celebrated when artists express original, challenging ideas. That's the whole point of being an artist. It's why social groups among artists, writers and musicians are so much fun because of the inherent acceptance and good will associated with "risky" ideas.
Artists are adventurers, stomping new ground. They are not egg-shell treading, well-behaved clones.
As for solitude, obviously it has benefits. I don't think it matters though. Each artist or creative person finds their own ways and methods.
IMO, many modern artists only project a facade of risk but in fact, they are calculating and know exactly how far they can push things; they almost never go beyond that point, in the rare cases that they do, they will issue a public apology. They project the illusion of being controversial while in fact their repertoire gets safer and safer as they gain more acceptance. Almost all of them are living well within modern social norms; the successful ones are those who embrace the power structures, not those who confront them.
And yes, having people around is generally peace-destroying. But not absolutely.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Parker
>His attempt to improvise failed when he lost track of the chord changes. This prompted Jo Jones, the drummer for Count Basie's Orchestra, to contemptuously take a cymbal off of his drum set and throw it at his feet as a signal to leave the stage. However, rather than discouraging Parker, the incident caused him to vow to practice harder, and turned out to be a seminal moment in the young musician's career when he returned as a new man a year later.
On display in any jam session is thousands of hours of (solitary) practice, study, and reflection.
But not necessarily. Some musicians exclusively learn to play through being taught and jamming with others. I admit it's rare, and even as an extrovert it's not true for myself.
However, for a more damning condemnation of this "creativity requires solitude" viewpoint, we only need to venture into the world of improv theatre. Almost everyone in improv is unleashing non-stop creativity, but they've almost never practiced improv alone. It's the total counterpoint to this unnecessary association between artistry and isolation.
Highly extroverted artists exist. They rarely create alone. They rarely practice alone. I urge people to acknowledge that this is a worthy way to be a compelling artist, rather than acting like the preference of the introverted artist is the only worthy way of doing things.
Find me one professional jazz musician that is "100% extroverted" and I can find you twenty places or quotations that clearly demonstrate that s/he has listened and studied the history of the music.
I'm not saying who is "worthy", whatever that means. I'm saying what needs to be done to be educated, to understand.
Yes, I'd agree that all professional jazz musicians have spent considerable time working on their craft alone. That doesn't detract from what I was saying. Professional jazz musicians aren't the only type of people who do jam sessions, and they're not the only type of compelling artist.
In fact, even if every single artist in the world had spent considerable time studying alone, that doesn't necessarily mean it's required. The fact is, every single piece of music theory, every single thing you can read from a book or hear from a record, every single practice session, can be done in a group. It may just be that people prefer not to do that, or don't have the resources to do that.
The availability of prolonged solitude to practice an instrument is an aberration in human existence. Modern humans, and the historic rich, do not represent the wider experience of human existence. Unless you think compelling musicians are also an aberration in human existence, I personally believe a wider perspective is needed.
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As an aside, here's an article with Dave Grohl and Ringo Starr talking about how they never practice alone: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/dave-grohl...
GROHL: Well, I remember we talked about this. I think we were talking about practicing. . . .
STARR: I never practice [laughs].
GROHL: Nor do I! Because I don’t like playing alone. I only like playing when there’s music.
STARR: I’ll play with you all night, but on my own, after two and a quarter seconds, I’m like, “Ugh. That’s not what it’s about.” When I’m doing shows, and people hold up their little seven-year-old: “This is Tommy. He loves you, and he’s taking drum lessons.” And I always say, “I hope he’s not taking too many!”
Probably should stop listening to so much jazz. So glad I did not attempt to be a professional musician.
I agree that adversarial interactions can produce results. That's not what the OP is saying. What the OP is saying is that you need a whole lot of self understanding to create good work in the space of writing.
The article essentially suggests that considerable solitude is required to really take one's writing to a higher place. That might be the true, or it might not be true, and it depends on how we define 'good writing'. But we can agree that it's not so easy to dismiss.
On the other hand, the title plainly states: 'creativity requires solitude'. That's a clear-cut statement. And it's extremely debatable. Not to mention that Rilke never even said that.
This quote is getting lots of criticism but if you think about it , then you will realize it’s true.
Humans are capable of a wide spectrum of social emotions but 99.9999% of interactions are small talk and collaborations based on an already established pattern and procedure.
We are extremely lonely because although we are surrounded by 8 billion beings like us we only get to unlock the really cool stuff with about a dozen of them (after we spent thousands of hours in their company)
Civilization is highly alienating and dislocating, but we evolved in an environment in which we were near-permanently embedded within a tribe (or village) of people we knew extremely well. Strangers were relatively rare.
Rilke confused his alienating environment for a fundamental truth.
"Turn inwards and get in touch with your authentic self. If you’re able to write something in this state, it won’t even occur to you to ask anyone whether your writing is good or not"
I don't know of any person who writes and is not always aware of the quality of their own writing. Even if you write for yourself, you're still writing for an audience, even if that audience is in your head. It's always communication, imaginary or otherwise. there's no self without relationship to the other by the very definition of the term.
Even the tool you use for writing, language, is a means of communicating with others by its nature. A child raised in actual solitude can't even speak, let alone has something like an 'authentic self'.
Humans kept in solitude can’t speak, can’t walk on two feet, and don’t make abstract symbols.
But temporarily it can allow you to escape the constant folding-back of social learning and move outside the bubble.
Also, and importantly, this is an all-male interaction.
A lot depends on the individual(s) in question, their background(s), and the type of endeavor.
That thinking is completely wrong. You create something because you want that thing to exist in the world, not in order to be liked by people.
Many, if not most people want to have value to others. Including introverts. We want to behave in a prosocial manner within an embedded social context. Art itself was borne out of social contexts, especially music and storytelling. Most of us gain untold fulfilment from creating art that is valuable to others, i.e. art that people like.
I can speak to this myself: I have little motivation to create anything outside of a social context. When I create something exclusively for myself, it feels hollow. When the social context is there, I come alive. It brings me deep fulfilment to bring someone joy with art. Of course, I have to also like the art myself, otherwise it's just excessively sacrificial.
If you're individualistic enough to gain fulfilment from only creating for yourself, then all the power to you. But I'm tired of this being expressed as the only valid way to do things, especially since many people will be less fulfilled with this mindset.
If the intention is to please others, the art is at risk of being made in a top-down manner. The extreme extension of this being a public survey, the results of which determine what the artist does.
"People like boobs, so let's add more boobs". Or "people in the test screening didn't like the sad ending, we need to make a happy, audience-friendly ending".
There's always crossover. Artists must do things to make money (mass production of their work, selling their song to advertisers).
> "Of course, I have to also like the art myself"
And if not the art, then at least the pay day.
Some of the confusion in this thread is about the word "creativity". We can be creative in the kitchen tonight by adding a new ingredient to the sauce. We can't suddenly be artists in the kitchen tonight though.
If I understand correctly, your belief is that the art of 'highest value' is created in a vacuum from the approval of others. That's okay. However, for myself, and usually for most others, the most valuable art is simply that which brings them the greatest joy.
When it comes to creating art, I receive the greatest joy when I'm also giving others joy. I'm much better able to give others joy when I consider their tastes. So I take my own (actually quite extreme) desire for experimentation, my own sense of aesthetics, and find where that overlaps with people's tastes. It's a hybridization. Not top-down, or bottom-up.
My argument is that most people, being essentially prosocial, gain the most fulfilment when they incorporate the tastes of others. And sometimes, our value system can make us feel less fulfilled. In this case, I believe that the value system of 'ignoring the approval of others' makes most people feel less fulfilled.
Simply put, it's like sex: the best sex is simultaneously self-focused and other-focused. I view art exactly the same.
The original point about isolation is simple. It can be good for the creative process. That's not a controversial idea. Writers often get away, painters hide out in their studios. It doesn't mean they don't routinely draw inspiration from their social worlds.
By tapping into your own humanity, you tap into the joy of others. Your tastes will likely be shared by others. So in satisfying your own taste, you will be satisfying others. This can all be done in complete social isolation!
> I consider their tastes
Okay cool, but generally artists don't know the taste of their audience, other than they like art. That's why artists get nervous showing their work, because you're baring soul. The tastes and joy in others isn't relevant for the creative process that aligns with raw "truth-telling" artistic pursuits. Pleasing others is a nice secondary consequence of whatever you created, but when pleasing others is a key driver of the creative process, you might be limiting your work.
Information is hiding everywhere.
-Bukowski
It's nonsense and survivor bias all at once.
Everyone has external circumstances.
Another word for those is excuses.
Excuse me, neurologist/neuroscientist here. That's fundamentally wrong. We are social creatures.
DO your own thing...if sitting helps, sit. If moving helps, move.
It does sound catchy and inspires introspection - focusing on a single word/quality/idea. As long as we know that that is the game being played here and don't take it literally.