The Atrophy of Creation
In a world that feeds us everything, we’re forgetting how to feed ourselves.
When I first started writing earlier this year, it was really to satisfy a personal urge. Initially, I struggled to determine what exactly that urge was. I constantly found myself dealing with a mental storm, my brain scattered and jumping from thought to thought. I was unable to focus for extended periods of time, reading constantly interrupted by a need to check my phone or look at an app. I needed to do something to disperse the energy that was built up in my mind and body, but somehow left me feeling constantly fatigued. I needed something to ground me in the present moment. The realization dawned on me - I was missing the act of creation. Literally using my mind or my hands to make something that previously had not existed, not just sitting and consuming something mindlessly. This sounds extremely basic, but I venture to bet if you are similar to myself in regards to your age (shoutout young millennials) and are not an artist by trade; that you rarely, if ever, are actually “creating” anything.
Think about it. We wake up, and 99% of us immediately grab our phone. We start frying our central nervous system with dopamine-hijacking 12-second videos or 140-character messages. We go to work, sit in front of screens, move numbers around, and answer emails. After the taxing workday, we need to unwind. So, we sit in front of an even larger screen, playing something we barely watch while we digest our nighttime serving of digital sludge.
This is not meant to be a depressing diatribe on the state of the world in 2025, just more of an observation that I have been thinking about as I have begun to build my creation muscles back up. Atrophy is the act of muscle mass disintegrating when it goes unused. Just as your physical muscle mass disappears if you don’t actively use it, so too does mental muscle mass. I cannot be alone in noticing how difficult it is to concentrate now, or how rarely I go throughout my day without watching something, or feeling the need to click into one of the various trillion dollar applications designed to feed off this urge.
Writing turned out to be the rare activity for me where I was completely unaware of how much time had passed while I was doing it. As someone whose life has revolved around competitive fitness and finance for over a decade, measuring numbers and time pretty much dominated my life. Suddenly, it was not about tracking some quantifiable variable - but simply creating something.
Creation, in whatever form, literally requires different parts of your brain than just consuming information. I have always prided myself on being a very active reader, but even as someone who reads a tremendous amount - digesting information does not have the same effects as taking those inputs in your mind, mixing them in a stew, and delivering outputs.
The outlook for society does not rapidly seem to be improving in regards to how skewed it is towards consumption vs creation. The rise of the internet and mobile phones has dramatically increased the convenience of our lives, but at the cost of the ability to engage in making things of our own creation. Boredom or inactivity often led Gen X or Baby Boomers to writing great works of art, painting masterpieces, or cultivating vibrant social lives. Millennials and Gen Z inversely have limitless forms of “entertainment” at their fingertips - there is rarely the space to think and create that said physical or mental inactivity often provides.
We haven't even gotten to the generation raised on iPads and TikTok yet. In the coming decade, a whole cohort of young people will enter adulthood, having spent the majority of their time in front of screens from almost the moment they experienced consciousness. Long car rides, once spent daydreaming or reading, have been replaced with flashing content and declining attention spans chasing the next distraction. This group will have gone through school using artificial intelligence that gives them every answer, rather than forced to go to the library or even filter through Google search results. In their spare time, endless online forms of “entertainment” numb their brains from developing an original thought or perspective, hindering critical thinking ability.
I am glad I grew up when I did. I’m still struggling to pay attention, and I’ll binge television or play video-games for hours with the best of them - but I'm glad I grew up with legos, action figures, books, and [insert boomer voice] playing outside. Writing really illuminated how much my “creation” muscles had atrophied. It also made me audit how much time I was actively using them vs just consuming.
Ordering food on an app vs cooking, scrolling social media vs writing or drawing, streaming content vs playing an instrument or learning photography- the ways in which our lives have totally been shifted towards consuming vs creating are numerous. There’s not a takeaway I have here, or a nice little motivational directive. Creation can look different for everyone, maybe its food for one person, relationships or social activity for another. Whatever it is, I hope we can all take back our ability to get out of pure consumption mode. Maybe we can all take a step back, or outside, and do something with our hands and our minds. Otherwise, I’m not even sure there will be much left to take over for the iPad kids.