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Re: Friday, May 30, 2003
That's a very succinct way of putting something I've been noticing for a while now, and I'm glad to find I'm not the only one who's noticed it. Basically I've just been paying attention to the things I do when I have free time and I've found that some of these spontaneous (in the more general sense of "done freely and under no obligation") activities fall into two categories: the ones that wear me out and eventually bore me and make me restless and vaguely dissatisfied-feeling for a while, and the ones that make time vanish and engage me and make me feel alive and energized and alert. Examples of the first sort of activity include watching DVDs and playing video games, while writing or teaching myself some new computer thing are examples of the second. So I just wanted to share my conclusion that the main difference here is whether or not creativity is involved. The more an activity requires me to be engaged in a creative way, the more I think the activity winds up "giving back" something to me, unlike non-creative play which just seems to take and take and take (time and energy). I've also noticed that as time goes by I have less and less patience for non-creative entertainment and more of a need for creative fun. I used to be able to sit for hours on end in front of the game console, now I can't. I don't want to say that one way of engaging with the world is more mature than the other (though I'm tempted to), but I think it might be a natural part of psychological development to move from an infant-like, passive, expectation of gratification of pleasure to a more adult, self-motivated, creation of pleasure. And I have to wonder if you didn't mean "the perversions of television."
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