Why Creative Men Are Depressed, Lonely, And Poor (And How They Can Fix It)
Originally posted to Actualization Hub on 4/3/2020. Moved here because I don’t think it fits the AH brand.
This will be a long post. And it will be abstract and not directly pragmatic.
There's actually three key insights here and two of them apply heavily to creative women. But I haven’t quite isolated them so rather than write nothing I’m just going to barf what I have.
I will go in to:
Why women are (at least initially) attracted to creative men despite that they do not have the characteristics understood to be attractive to women (power, status, resources, emotional resilience, etc).
Why there are so many creatives despite that the market cannot support all of them.
Why creative people are so prone to mental illness.
An intro to what to do about it.
90% of people consume the same hundred bands.
90% of people consume the same hundred books.
Same ratio occurs for movies, paintings, poems, or any other creative domain.
Despite that there are millions of bands or authors or directors or artists or poets.
Why?
Well first, we must answer the question of “why do we even consume art in the first place?”. A good answer is long and for another time but the TLDR is:
Art is how the unconscious communicates.
Art is how people survive psychological suffering.
Suffice to say: you'd be a complete wreck (even more than you are now) if you didn't have these things.
And so: ten thousand years ago, your musicians, painters, basket makers, poets, entertainers, etc were an irreplaceable component of the psychological health of your tribe.
And due to this universal psychology need, it just became hard coded into human biology that about one in ten people would be “creative”. Why only one in ten?
Because creativity has a lot of downsides. Low conscientiousness, poor impulse control, high neuroticism, low testosterone, a rejection of or obliviousness to the rules, etc.
This make creatives poor hunters, poor "worker bees", and many other roles necessarily for a tribe to survive. Meaning too many creatives would cause issues but so would too few. The “optimal” ratio that met the psychological needs of the tribe without “costing” too many laborers was the ratio we have today: about one in ten.
However, there is one more key aspect of this situation:
Due to how crucial creative consumption is for the psychological health of the tribe, the few creative producers were almost universally at or near the top of the tribal hierarchy.
Imagine if we just deleted our mass media of theater, music, poetry, comedy, painting, etc. You no longer had any of these available digitally. You bet your ass you would cling to your creative friends for dear life just to hear someone play the guitar or make you laugh. The rulers and the creatives were at the top of the tribal hierarchy for 99% of the human history.
And actually, 100% of human history.
Who is at the top of society today? Creatives and rulers.
All that’s changed is we’ve gone from “most of the creatives” to “a tiny minority of creatives”. In only a hundreds years we have gone from the majority of creatives at the top of the social hierarchy to less than one percent of them. Meanwhile all the rest stack up near the bottom.
Our globalized world of mega tribes of hundreds of millions of people have the same ingredients as they did ten thousand or even one hundred thousand years ago. The only difference is in the reach any individual creative can have.
When you had a tribe of a hundred people, you needed maybe ten creatives. But it doesn't scale linearly. You only need maybe fifteen creatives for a faction of tribes (say five hundred or a thousand people).
And further, when your tribe is three hundred million (or one billion if you include all the people who consume western media) you still only need maybe a few thousand creatives at most.
Why? Because creative production taps in to many universals that transcend tribal boundaries.
Ten thousand years ago when you had a thousand disparate tribes of one hundred people: each needed their own artist to satisfy their need. In my modern global world however, one guy can meet that need for all thousand tribes.
What used to require ten percent of our population, now require less than one. And this change occurred over less than a century, “screwing” the the overwhelming majority of creatives in the process.
Women
Now only women. Why are women attracted to creatives? Why do women lose their minds at some "hot band guy” (at least until he proves himself to be a loser) despite that he works at starbucks, is net zero on his band's income, weighs eight pounds, and is a suicidally depressed drug abuser?
Because as far as her genes know: creative means high status, high value, high influence, high resources.
Men who have the complete devotion and reverence of the tribe (as our biology expects most creatives to achieve) do not need the typical characteristics that lead to power and resources.
And women have been programmed over millenia to be able to instinctually sniff out men who are not yet successful but will one day be (as there much lower competition for men with potential than men who have already “succeeeded”). And give that this programming evolving over tens of thousands of years, of course it won’t magically change in only one hundred.
Obviously, in the event he doesn't pan out (as most of the time he won't, but that is unique to our time period) she will dump his ass. But many women will continue, pursuing this strategy—seemingly against their own best interest—until they are blue in the face, because that is what worked for 99.9% of human history.
So there's that answer. Now onto money.
Money
Creative value has a close-to-zero relation to labor involved — you are not selling your labor you are selling your final product.
You can "goof off" 90% of the time and create something amazing 10% of the time, and then become a world famous multi millionaire. You can also “work hard” 90% of the time and never relax and die in obscurity and squalor. Subjective theory of value and such.
This is very good for lucky or uniquely smart creatives. Because they can produce one thing and live off it for ever.
But it sucks for most creatives because they can put in a ton of work over decades and never be "make it”.
Compare this to a "worker bee" temperament or "business leader" temperament.
Worker bee has far lower upside but also far lower downside.
They can make reasonable money because they are a secretary or clerk or whatever. They will never make fuck-you levels of money, but they will also never be completely impoverished.
Business leader has basically only upside, they will be in the upper class regardless. These are typically true alphas (or bravos). The problem with them is most of the women are fighting over them. And so just by nature of flattening the curve, women evolved different strategies to be attracted to (and thus reproduce) different male sexual strategies.
Anyway, the nature of creative production results in a uniquely imbalanced value level in creative domains.
1% make all the money.
80% don't make shit.
Everyone wants to see a movie with Brad Pitt.
No one wants to see one with [actor who is 90% as hot, attractive, and charismatic].
Why is this relevant?
Well one, it shows why creatives are almost always lib left occupy wall street people (beyond their innate temperaments against hierarchy and boundaries). They are uniquely fucked by the current system.
Two, it elucidates just how important it is that you do something you are in the top 10% at. This is especially necessarily for creative domains, as Pareto Distributions are far more exaggerated here than in any other domain.
Probably other stuff too but I am going to move on.
Mental Illness
So next point: mental illness.
Creative people are uniquely prone to mental illness for two main reasons:
1. Because the creative brain has a predisposition for instability.
2. Because the current imbalance in the market for creativity exacerbates this severely.
What is creativity, fundamentally?
It is an equation of something like trait openness multiplied by trait neuroticism divided by trait conscientiousness.
The most creative people are high openness, high neuroticism, low conscientiousness.
In laymens terms: Creativity is sensitivity (how much you "notice" things compared to other people) multiplied by your lack of attention to boundaries between things (trait openness) divided by how much you enjoy the act of "working" (conscentiousness).
You can see why this might innately cause both positives and negatives.
Creative people cannot "compartmentalize". They do not see "work" and then "home". They do not see "business" and then "personal". They do not see "us" and then "them". Because a lack of mental boundaries is literally the definition of trait Openness.
They also have fire cracker levels of energy. Extreme burst of inspiration for a few hours or days, and then no energy for days or even weeks. ie they are low Conscientiousness.
This makes creatives amazing at coming up with unconventional ideas that provide “one and done” solutions, but terrible at dealing with highly complex consistent workloads of things they are disinterested in.
And then neuroticism is basically sensitivity multiplied by trauma. And I think it’s obvious given the first section of this piece why being sensitive—able to notice things others do not, able to detect or connect subtle things and bring them to consciousness—would make one a valuable creative.
And none of this is really a problem when creatives are "successful". Tribes are symbiotic. Creatives give meaning and positive emotion and beauty to the tribe. The tribe gives them resources, protects them, etc in return.
But when they aren't successful—which is infinitely more the case today than any time in human history due—now they have to work a job that is the exact opposite of what their brains were designed for (stability, consistency, rule following, etc).
And this does a bunch of things.
It makes them devoid of meaning, the one thing that makes humans able to bear difficulty. Just dead end drudgery (to them). This increases neuroticism significantly and leads to escapism (drugs, enmeshed relationships, video games, avoidance, etc)
It forces them to expend crazy amounts of energy. A creative person trying to do a "repetitive day job" for eight hours a day is a like a non creative person trying to write Moby Dick or research medieval history for eight hours a day.
It causes them to feel alien and like a failure and often resentful to society on the whole.
It makes them self loathing, depressed, anxious, because they know they are innately supposed to be at the top of society yet they are near the middle or bottom.
On point 4: Another thing that matters: serotonin. Serotonin—a neurotransmitter associated with contentedness, confidence, happiness—is dictated by our perceived status in the hierarchy.
This is so old and hard coded in to our biology that even lobsters noticeably stand up tall and triumphant when given SSRI's.
The key component here is "perceived". Because creatives see that they could be at the top of the hierarchy, being below the middle causes them far more distress than it does in types who were built for the middle (low openness, high conscientiousness worker bee type).
Being below "where you belong" in the hierarchy massively increases neuroticism.
I'm sure there's more but I think I've made a good enough case.
So, you take a creative person with limited focus and work ethic, unable to compartmentalize, designed to be at the top of society and then you take away their purpose, throw them in to a boring monotonous day job, and have them constantly reminded that they are losers (by not succeeding at their day job) what do you get? Mental illness of course.
Are you surprised most creative people are "so dysfunctional" today?
99% of psychiatry resolves around medicating in to “normalcy” creatives who are without purpose and status and income and support due to this odd situation we are in.
Okay I guess those are all my points.
So what can you do?
Well that's another giant article entirely (at minimum) and basically my life mission (to help creatives succeed in a world that no longer has room for most of them) so I can't encapsulate it here but I can say:
You have to develop yourself beyond what most people need to (your communication, your self resilience, your habits, etc)
You have to find "your thing" (The thing that you are or will be in the top 10%+ of based on your innate temperamental traits).
You have to come up with a plan and strategy for slowly transitioning in to “your thing”.
And then you have to learn marketing and a bunch of other shit so people who will benefit from your work will be able to find you.
On the bright side, its all been done and it's largely mapped out, you just need to figure out how to adapt it to you.
I'll leave all that for another time but feel free to comment with questions or whatever if you want some minor advice.