Creativity Is For Suckers

The revolting truth is that creativity produces vigorously medium profits. It’s exhaustively time consuming. It requires a level of personal commitment which is unfashionably inconvenient. It selfishly demands its practitioners to learn and keep learning a very specialized set of evolving skills. The value of creativity is highly subjective and analogous to other esoteric trades where skill and experience are of amorphous value; such as plumbing and cosmetic surgery.

It’s also outrageously expensive to keep all those highly skilled and experienced people coming in three days a week on a hybrid work schedule. If we're really being honest, magnificent creativity births at least as many problems as it slays.

So, as a responsible profit oriented industry, we have taken steps to develop advertising that reduces creative effort. These utilitarian ad products have proven to be a huge relief for everyone who is calmed by spreadsheets and uncomfortable having to choose a font. Through our diligent efforts, we have successfully made creativity such an insignificant part of our industry that we speak of it the way we would about a peculiar aunt, who endlessly buys “collectable” Dutch figurines of chubby children frolicing in obcenely pastoral scenes. hashtag#Creativity is a ornamental frivolity, an indefensible indulgence.

Which is 100% true.

And that's why it works.

The things we remember, the relationships we value most are never the dullardly utilitarian things. They're mind-meltingly beautiful things. The impossibly stupid but I-can’t-stop-looking-at-it things.

The things that change our minds and behavior aren’t the zestless lunch salads eaten at our desks. They’re the crazy, the extravagant, and the wholly unprecedented. We don’t invest our love in the soporifically functional. The ardent dreamers of the world don't put up posters of a 2002 Toyota Camry. We woolgather on extraordinary things, considering preposterous ambitions and wholly impractical fancies.

Yes creativity is vanity. And it works because we are all vain. We all want to be entertained, delighted and surprised. We accept what is functional as necessity. But what we want from life isn’t utility, it’s fulfillment.

So, my beautifully talented adfam, our choice is this:
make something for love
or make it for money

Money is fine, but it won’t miss you when you are gone.
I go for love every fucking time.