People conflate happiness with joy. I can be happy and sad at the same time. I cannot be joyful and sad in the same instant, though I can flit between the two rapidly enough to occasionally cause alarm.<p>What you want to avoid is misery. I banished misery from my life sometime in my early twenties. I am unhappy somewhat often, but never miserable. Misery means not seeing a way out of the circumstances making you unhappy.<p>I believe emotional health revolves as much in how you see your emotions as which emotions you're experiencing. Reframing the emotions you feel can be a quite powerful experience for those not too jaded on the woo-woo aspect of it. "I didn't lose my girlfriend, we just weren't right for each other." If all you do is reframe, and never do any real learning, then sure, you'll end up miserable. But in general finding a way to reframe setbacks is a great way to find the energy to keep moving rather than wallow.<p>For some people, creativity is tied intimately to misery; I believe that people for whom their creative output relies on drug use are ultimately deriving it from misery. Minds need to be in a loose, free state to mix seemingly-unrelated concepts together. When one is truly miserable, they cannot see a way out of their predicament and so mind naturally finds a way towards that state. If they could see a way, then they'd focus on that way, and having a single point of focus is pretty much the opposite of creativity.<p>The most prolific creators make a workflow out of managing their minds. They'll tune out in order to become unfocused enough to get an idea, then they'll focus on putting that idea to paper, or electronic media or whatever. Good coders are well-attuned to such a workflow, but often don't think of themselves as creative, perhaps because their output isn't immediately pleasing to the senses. Artistic, maybe not. But creative? Absolutely.
My own experience led me to a slightly different conclusion.<p>I'm considered to be "creative" by my peers as I enjoy the arts and applying them for practical use. Contrary to the article, I found that I was significantly <i>less</i> creative when I was depressed. What was extremely frustrating was that it all felt 'stuck' - you can imagine a composer letting out his black-hole reservoir of pain and sadness in a stream of intense, out-of-world music, a cry for the greater ... but sadly for me it was less romantic. I just got stuck. Unable to speak properly, unable to write or draw or express <i>anything</i> for that matter. And yet it felt like I was ready to explode.<p>Now that I've recovered and drawn a line to separate those demons, I can get intellectual. One consequence of depression is too much noise; of bad chattering and self cruelty and <i>emptiness</i>. Emptiness can also be crushing. That could explain why I couldn't be 'creative' at all.<p>On the other hand, the author of the article mentioned a very good point:<p><i>>>Negative emotions appeared when they fell on hard times financially, when their health became poor or especially when a close relative died.</i><p>But I interpret this slightly differently. Poverty gives pain but I don't think this is the part that gives rise to creativity. I grew up in a very rural area where there was nothing interesting to do like video games and cinemas. That was when I was at my most creative <i>and</i> proactive, like using poor materials to make something really awesome and crazy. I prefer to call this "resourcefulness" but thinking about it now, maybe that <i>is</i> what creativity is all about: the ability to transform something deemed to be poor or average into another thing that is so much more than the sum of its parts. It's a weird irony that when my family moved to a "richer" environment, I found myself hopelessly stuck. Here are the things all laid out for me to draw and model. Here are the information to do this and that. Here's an infinite supply of paper. What a joykiller.
I find it odd how they seem to use depression and sadness interchangeably. I'm not myself entirely sure where I would draw the line between the two though. The most simple analogy I can think of is sadness can result naturally from a loss (like the death of a family member or friend) that takes a natural course that fades over time. Depression can be much more ambiguous and is not always directly related to life-events and is sometimes rooted in mental illness.<p>Speaking of mental illness, I'm pretty surprised bi-polar disorder is not mentioned at all in the article. I think its been fairly well researched that bi-polar individuals (both today and before bi-polar was an understood mental illness) can have highly productive periods (manias) that have lead to great works of music, art, and science and oscillate with periods of depression.<p>I have known multiple people to fit this description (some diagnosed, some not) and it would be easy to miss or not understand these cycles and think that their depressive nature contributed to their creativity when its really their mania cycles that produce the most.<p>Personally, my creativity takes a nosedive when I am sad or depressed, which likely changes from person to person. Things that reduce depression also increase creativity for me (exercise, sports, good food etc).
Perhaps I'm missing something, but on first glance, there are some things that jump out at me:<p>- Sample size of three.<p>- Linguistic analysis. Perhaps they're not actually sad. Perhaps they just happen to be writing about sad things.<p>- Unrepresentative sample (they're all successful musical composers).
A few years back I was significantly depressed. Every day felt the same and without meaning. Desperate for an outlet, I began to keep a daily journal to remind myself that every day, whether good or bad, was a day in my life, and therefore had meaning. The journal itself did not lift me out of depression, but it helped me cope through those dark times.<p>Last year I met someone more dear to my heart than I had ever imagined. Nearly every day since then has been of joyful bliss. However, I was enjoying myself so much that I stopped bothering to record my journals for months at a time. How ironic is it that in this time with so much meaning and so much happiness and shared experience to record, I felt that there was no need to record it, because I was having such a great time. Now I regret not having a reference for us to look back upon.<p>The article may not apply to everyone, but to me, it certainly does.
What about a simple time-management explanation? When one is feeling melancholy, one tends to also be anti-social - this leaves more time to focus on one's artsy tasks.
From a <i>research</i> POV ... the study focussed on exactly <i>three</i> cherrypicked, successful artists. It's a very small sample from a very different time and culture than today. Can a conclusion with relevance to today be drawn?<p>If the goal was to give anecdotal hope or inspiration to the average "sad" person today, then this is interesting. :-)
here, i will spell it out for you, as the article so carelessly evaded:<p>the nail that stands out is hammered down<p>people HATE those who are creative (don't bother with your counter-example to my blanket statement; it isn't relevant) and make a mess out of them from an early age. it also doesn't help that creative types tend to be eccentric; once again, the nail that stands out is hammered down. being hammered down results in depression/sadness that coexists with other difficulties like losing loved ones etc.
Somewhat related, but in <i>On Writing</i>, Stephen King talks about the cliched link between great artists and substance abuse. Basically he says in his opinion it's bunk and a really damaging belief because it leads to substance abuse and not necessarily great art.
Zhirinovsky, the populist leader of the LDPR party with ~20% of the seats in the Russian Duma, put suffering and otherness at the center of creative process. In his lament to Putin about the lack of cultural development in Russia he said the following:[0]<p><pre><code> Why did Dostoevsky become a great writer? 10 years of hard labor.
What conclusion do I draw? We must incarcerate.
After being in jail for three, four or five years, a Dostoevsky will appear...
[sic]
The history of art and culture is developed by jail or by sexual minorities.
We utilize neither today, therefore we don't have any great cultural creators.
A straight person living in a luxurious Moscow apartment will not create.
For creativity you need a trouble maker. A freak will create.
</code></pre>
I don't subscribe to his views, but I do find his opinion relevant to the article. Hope you are richer for having read it.<p>[0] <a href="https://youtu.be/Hl_VvgpwNMw?t=4m54s" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/Hl_VvgpwNMw?t=4m54s</a>
I stopped making music some years ago after realising that everything I created was driven by an endless dark hole, pure death. And only that. Was too much even for me to listen and, hell, I'm not even a depressed person.<p>And I realised that even the most darker blues, or the greatest tragedy is driven by some kind of light, by what they call redemption.<p>You fall down, you hit rock bottom, you see some light, you feel relieved, maybe just a bit, but you do.<p>I felt like I just cannot see any light.<p>It's all about counterpoint, after all.
The funny thing is how prevalent this is in music.<p>The best example I can draw is James Hetfield. In the early Metallica days, his writing was amazing. Dark, depressing, powerful. Then he decided to get sober and nearly overnight he's creativity dried up and we got "St. Anger". The albums since his sobriety have been mediocre at best and lampooned by critics.<p>I have other examples, but this is probably the one that really jumps out at me.
Two thoughts.
1. What is creativity?
Keith Johnstone (whom I had the chance to work with) in his work on theater improvisation adds substantially to the definition of 'creativity': A work of creativity does nit need to be 'complicated', 'new' or 'extravagant'. Often the most simple thoughts and actions are 'creative enough'.<p>2. Is creativity linked to motivation?
Motivation and resulting action is U-shaped. While being not motivated at all will result in (nearly) no action, both negative ("sadness", anger, hunger, etc) and positive motivation provide a good basis for getting active. That may explain why being sad 'is better' than feeling overall satisfied. However, positive motivation has a much stronger impact. So instead of forcing yourself to be sad and miserable in order to be creative (and god knows alot of actors exactly do that...), get interested, 'catch fire' like we say in Germany. Results wil be the same or better. And your overall quality of life, too.
Just my 2 cent.
My experience is that being in a depressed state makes me want to do anything to get the depressed feeling out of my body, which drives me to write/play music/whatever it takes. For me, expressing the sadness/whatever negative emotion I'm feeling can slowly chip away at it.
Perhaps relevant, the TV Tropes page Creator Breakdown (<a href="http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CreatorBreakdown" rel="nofollow">http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CreatorBreakdown</a>):<p>"[...] and it would be hard to argue that angst can't help you make some really good art. People who have something to work out through their creativity also tend to put a lot of effort into making it good, if it's concerning something important or special to them."
To paraphrase the author of Leftoversoup: "Every day I drive past a church sign saying in big letters STOP SUFFERING. Every drive I pass it thinking 'Fuck you but no, I will do as I want. I have more important things to do than stop suffering' "<p>Heh.
Funny how every comment here is "I'm more creative when I'm happy!!!!!11", and their creative output is probably just some phone app or a poorly written poem that only your partner liked.<p>The article is talking about deep creativity. Things that changed the world forever, that are still loved hundreds of years later.<p>No one will remember your two creative lines of code within a couple of months. Stop comparing yourself with real creative geniuses.
Aah, the good old romanticising of depression makes it to the top of HN again. You gotta make up reasons why depression is valuable, otherwise it would be pointless to suffer, wouldn't it?
Let's not forget that "X makes you creative" articles are bullshit. <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8916132" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8916132</a>
Happiness, defined as self-deluded positive attitude maintained by confirmation bias and caffeine, is a mild form of stupidity.<p>Seeing things as they are, ideally without differentiating for "good" and "bad", and calling things by its proper names is beginning of intelligence.<p>Joy, contrary to happiness, is a natural state (that's what makes children so different), which has nothing to do with social and environmental conditioning.
It's just a film but the counter-argument to this is well put forward by: <a href="https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/frank_2014/" rel="nofollow">https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/frank_2014/</a>