To Be More Creative, Cheer Up

Maybe: Extremes of feeling make us more creative? (just a guess, mind)

And with this added element, we got the missing link between "To Be More Creative, Cheer Up" and "Feeling Sad Makes Us More Creative".

On one hand, drinking will cheer you up. On the other hand, it will also make you feel miserable.

Add to that the fact that boredom is one of the top reasons to drink and we have a link with "How Boredom Can Boost Creativity".

To quote Bukowski: "That's the problem with drinking, I thought, as I poured myself a drink. If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen."

But then we also have "How boredom can boost creativity". I wouldn't say boredom is an extreme feeling.

As someone with clinical depression and who is also a writer: this is purest self-fulfilling, self-indulgent bullshit, and exactly the kind that kept me bound to my own illness for over a decade.

Depression does fuck all either way for creativity, but what it is very good at doing is making sure you're afraid to be rid of it lest you lose that, all the while actually serving to make every creative act an uphill battle you will probably lose. Getting out from under that rock produced the finest and most productive creative phase of my life.

The myth of the tortured artist is one of the ugliest in modern culture. Go look at the lifestyle indulging that produces, and tell me that's a good route to creativity with a straight face. Because I will grant it one concession: guilt and self-recrimination can indeed be a pretty powerful quality control measure, but it is also a short jaunt from there to self-destruction and even suicide. Hemingway drank himself to death. Woolf drowned herself. I'm pretty sure you could lose count inventorying the lives of musicians who've spiraled down that hole.

As far as I'm concerned, this romanticism for depression is no less destructive and unhelpful than "pro-ana" boards; it is an enabling fiction for the mentally ill, and nothing more.

Also, being bored makes us more creative: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8915371

From those results we could make one of three conclusions:

* Any sufficiently strong emotional response inspires creativity

* Different people respond to different emotional queues and the studies had samples of people biased in different directions

* It is all a load of bunkum.