What Happens to Creativity as We Age?

I will turn 45 this year. One of my principles for healthy aging is to make sure I&#x27;m learning something new and challenging every year or two.<p>I live in a fishing town in southeast Alaska, and I bought my first boat about three years ago. I bought a 16-foot boat with an open cabin, and it was an absolutely humbling experience. It feels like everyone here knows how to drive a boat, and sputtering through a harbor trying not to take out a row of motors was a really interesting learning experience. It forced me to be open to any and all feedback from all kinds of people. It forced me to seek out advice and assistance from people outside of my everyday circle of friends and co-workers. It made me pay attention to tides and weather in ways I hadn&#x27;t needed to before. In short, it made me feel like I was looking at the world with new eyes again.<p>That experience made me look for experiences every few years that are new enough that I have to see the world as a kid does again. Not in the wide-eyed wonder way, but in a way where I have to learn a whole new skill set. This year it&#x27;s been learning how to drive a truck with a boat trailer. I thought I knew it intellectually, and I knew what I needed to make the trailer do, but I couldn&#x27;t figure out how to make the back of the truck go where I needed it to. My neighbor was cracking up as he was helping me, and I think it was bringing him back into the mindset of looking at this kind of task from a beginner&#x27;s perspective as well.<p>I have a 6 year old son, and I love sharing these learning experiences with him. I want him to know that adults don&#x27;t know everything, and that you really can spend your whole life learning new skills.

I&#x27;m ancient (late fifties), but even so, I&#x27;m struck by the somewhat creakingly defensive tone of several comments in this thread - stolid narratives on the virtues of middle age experience and perspective. Fourty years younger me would be shaking my head. Present day me still is, a little bit.<p>I try to keep up. I am not necessarily very good at it, but I try. I have sort of given up on quite a few of my contemporary friends who seem to have sort of given up on trying. But all too clearly, ideas and crazy angles just aren&#x27;t coming the way they used to. I was probably at my creative peak when I was sixteen. Didn&#x27;t really know shit about anything, but my writings and drawings from that time are still holding up, as fresh and inspired as anything I ever did.

I&#x27;m not satisfied to define creativity as simply having &quot;unusual ideas&quot; as the article says in the opening paragraphs. The study focuses on cognitive flexibility, what I understand to be out-of-the-box thinking.<p>Other research that composes creativity as a mixture of empathy, pattern-matching, and seeing the big picture suggests that creative ability can be refined with age.

I too am in my 40s and I think that my creativity is still active. The main difference is now I have the experience to know when an idea is worth acting on and when it is just an &quot;wow, wouldn&#x27;t that be great.&quot;<p>Even if something would be great, that does not mean that an idea that you have is one that ignites your passion. If you are not passionate about an idea it is not an idea that you should pursue, at least not as a founder, inventor, etc.<p>I think creativity is simply the way you think. For me, when I see something that I like I always ask myself several questions such as :<p>1. I wonder why ...... 2. What would be the outcome of .... 3. What if..... 4. Wouldn&#x27;t it be&#x2F;function&#x2F;look&#x2F;inspire if 5. How can I make this.....<p>These are not the only questions I ask, but if the answers keep me excited about something, I continue asking myself questions to see if the resulting answers create something worthy of further pursuit. If so, then I approach a couple of trusted people and ask them &#x27;what if this did this or if you had this available to you&#x27; would you use it? Would you use it often? Would you tell others about it? What would make it better&#x27; etc. If you are lucky an idea or two or five are worth putting all of your energy behind. I have felt that way about a couple of ideas in my life but they did not always come at times that my life allowed me to pursue the idea with all my time and attention, until now. I liken it to finding your significant other, they have to challenge you, ignite your passion and the timing has to be right.<p>But overall, I believe that Creativity is not about age as much as it is developing your own way of seeing things and then arriving at something new. Not everybody questions most things they see, hear, touch, etc but for those of us that do, well age is just a number.

Before we get into the nitty gritty, did anyone else notice how dumb this article was?<p>It presupposed some things without evidence: &quot;we lose creativity&quot;<p>and then creates a convoluted study to support this notion. then creates a second convoluted study that undermines the presented presupposition and didn&#x27;t discuss that at all.<p>just right back to the conclusion that writer already had.

The thing that I&#x27;ve found as an artist is that, as one&#x27;s skill grows, the management of that corresponding complexity can overtake one&#x27;s creative capacity. At higher levels, the methods and structure required for competent execution are a cognitive load that crowds out other impulses. I think this is why you see a lot of older artists create works that are proficient, but repetitive, the habitual overtaking the innovative.<p>But I don&#x27;t think this is an unavoidable trajectory. Instead, one has to cultivate &quot;creative thinking&quot; in the same way that they do other skills. The thing that I&#x27;ve found most useful are arbitrary constraints derived from things like word association games. They encourage all kinds of divergent thinking.

I&#x27;ve wondered a lot about the relationship between creative output and age in terms of musicians. Across all genres, it seems that many talented musicians lose their ability to compose or take part in creative works as they get older. Sting talked about this (1); at some point in his mid-40s after writing and releasing new albums every few years the creative well seemed to dry up (he got it back later, and recently helped write and score a play). Other musicians shift to performance mode or give up creating new works altogether.<p>However, with many well-known authors it seems to be more mixed. At one end of the spectrum you have people like Walter M. Miller Jr. and Harper Lee who write a great work and then seem to stop publishing by the time they reach their early 40s, and then at the other, there are people like Ursula K. LeGuin and Stephen King who are machines for more than 50 years.<p>1. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;2014&#x2F;10&#x2F;03&#x2F;351545257&#x2F;how-do-you-get-over-writer-s-block" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;2014&#x2F;10&#x2F;03&#x2F;351545257&#x2F;how-do-you-get-over-...</a>

Just dropping by to say I really appreciate the HN community. I have learned a ton through this concentration of (mostly) smart, well-rounded and diverse bunch of people. Thank you. &lt;3

In my twenties I had a very large drive, but of shallow conceptual level. Since my brain slowed a lot, but I can grasp much larger problems and still progress.<p>It&#x27;s a smoother exploration process rather than youth random rush through unknown space.

I&#x27;m yet to hear a really good, rigorous, and reproducible definition of Creativity in the first place.

It seems to me that we would naturally become less &quot;creative&quot; as we age because we are emmasing knowledge and experience. As we do so we have a much larger bank of solutions to new problems we face. When we are young we have to come up with creative solutions because we can&#x27;t draw on past experience and accumulated knowledge.<p>This is probably why we seem more creative when we try something new and novel. We now again have to come up with creative solutions because we have no other reference to go by.

What the article doesn&#x27;t touch is how to stay creative.<p>One of computer scientific ways is to be epsilon-greedy, meaning everytime you have an action to take, you do <i>(1-epsilon)</i> (so 90% if epsilon = .1) times what you think is best and <i>epsilon</i> times something completely random.<p>Of course, that is a heuristic that doesn&#x27;t really make sense without a context because you wouldn&#x27;t want to do it in your job interview or your marriage proposal.<p>The other extreme is following the following quote which I find quite inspiring:<p><i>If you don&#x27;t fail at least 90 percent of the time, you&#x27;re not aiming high enough</i> (attributed to Alan Key but who knows)<p>While that&#x27;s quite a high bar I personally do something quite different:<p>When I see something strange happening, e.g. a bird landing right in front of you and looking at you, or you have a deja-vu or you see somewhere some strange reference that looks like a message that only you can understand because it&#x27;s something that happened in your past, then I&#x27;m going to take the other choice.<p>It happens a few times in a year and mostly biases explorative actions towards when I have a congnitive surplus anyway cause otherwise I wouldn&#x27;t perceive the strange event in the first place.

I&#x27;ve always found it interesting that &quot;creative activity&quot; as relates to age is apparently quite different depending on the discipline. It&#x27;s well-known that mathematicians (usually) get their most life-altering ideas quite early in life, while artists often create their most unique impacts much later in life.

I&#x27;ve always sort of thought about it as you get older and learn more about things you&#x27;re interested in you lose the ability to misunderstand something and possibly come across something novel. Creativity becomes less of a coping mechanism as you begin to refine your mastery of your interests and have fewer chances of a misinterpretation taking you down a road of creative explosion.<p>Which is why I find it important to try and learn new things and find new interests when you can. But even then, &quot;creativity&quot; so often results in a dead end since the chance of discovering something new, effective and possibly better is slim in the first place. But hopefully experience helps in sussing out obvious bad ideas - like not eating vegetables to grow young again.

I&#x27;d say this idea itself is already quite controversial and far from settled. Old people are not necessarily worse off in their abilities to think or their &quot;creativity&quot; or whatnot. Children might come up with a load of ideas because their knowledge has not been trained&#x2F;structured in the same way as the adults have yet. But that doesn&#x27;t mean their ideas would be particularly useful in solving real problems, since they tend to be far less reality-based.<p>Also there are psycholinguistic researches at my university that suggest old people don&#x27;t actually learn more slowly, they have just pruned some nonsensical connections and consolidated knowledge based on real world experience, and are thus worse at learning invented examples that might not make much sense.

If you are concerned about your creativity, I highly recommend looking into improvisation.<p>Although I am on the young side, I have devoted an evening a week to take improv classes. One of my previous professors did his Phd on how improvisational techniques can help with product design [1].<p>P.S. Spaghetti !?! Maybe tomorrow...<p>[1]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dspace.mit.edu&#x2F;handle&#x2F;1721.1&#x2F;61610" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dspace.mit.edu&#x2F;handle&#x2F;1721.1&#x2F;61610</a>

The first example of the article is completely flawed though. It&#x27;s not a matter of creativity, it&#x27;s that the adult knows that aren&#x27;t vegetables making you an adult, so he might be thinking a better, more efficient approach (doing something that forces you to learn). Sure there are creative things kids can do, but the first one is an example of ignorance, not creativity.

What you lose in creativity, you gain in knowing &quot;not eating vegetables&quot; is a fucking stupid idea!

(only) 41, I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;ve ever been particularly creative, but I&#x27;ve never been as enthusiastic about learning new things than now. If anything, it seems my short-term memory isn&#x27;t as good as before.

It gets better and better if you don&#x27;t quit your creative practice. Lets look at Nels Cline, the guitarist for Wilco. Now he is very successful,but for most of his life, up until he was over 50 he was a starving jazz guitarist. He never gave up his practice. For some musicians they suffer injuries or health issues that end their career. But as long as you stay healthy and limber and keep up your practice you don&#x27;t start having issues until you&#x27;re starting to get close to 80.

This is similar to old companies compared to startups. The two together give a nice balance between stability (and efficiency) to experimentation. I wonder if the analogy extends to the article&#x27;s observations about teens. Are &quot;teen&quot; companies fairly well established with what they are making but still willing to explore various relationship or management models?

Something has happened to me. I&#x27;m 28.<p>I used to have a shit tonne of ideas, ready to execute. Now that I&#x27;m approaching 3 years since graduation at a job that continually seems to demotivate me, all of them have gone. I wanted to be something special, now I have nothing to show.<p>Don&#x27;t ever take a job which you don&#x27;t consider to have a meaningful impact on society.

Creativity comes in various flavors<p>- exploiting the latest technical advances into something new. Favors recent academic grads ==&gt; youth<p>- ideas that require lots of hours of work to create ==&gt; youth with more energy and productive work hours<p>- connecting things from unrelated fields together to create something new and unexpected. Favors those with larger, broader experiences ==&gt; age

My feeling is that as an adult I have the ability to &quot;think creatively&quot; when I want to. I don&#x27;t feel like a study of this nature really takes that into account. I&#x27;d be curious what would happen if they added a segment of the test where they ask the subjects to intentionally come up with a creative response.

I preserve creativity by allowing my internal disobedience to flourish and question things. Creativity is about seeing things differently. A lot of the &quot;aging process&quot; can be seen, at least from my perspective, as a grinding down into conformity in a lot of ways. YMMV.

well one thing that&#x27;s happened for me is that I have maybe an hour to work on things a night, therefore I can only be creative in my chosen field, but creativity as a general rule for me happens most when exploring the new, less exploration of the new less creation.<p>The other thing is that while I might have great ideas I only have an hour a night to work on them, therefore I will not be implementing them and the end result is if someone would be trying to analyze my creative output now as opposed to my youth when I had more time they would say ah, there has been a precipitous drop in Bryan&#x27;s creativity.

For examples that go against this idea, check out the work of Maurice Sendak, Julia Donoldson or the cartoon Sarah &amp; Duck, all of which can give any kids imagination a run for its money!

Speak for yourself haha. This is a matter of trajectory. As you get older, you&#x27;ll follow the trajectory you maintain. I exercise creativity more than fitness and I feel incredible hahahaha.<p>Here&#x27;s the key: Balance practice with theory.<p>It&#x27;s very sad to see so many people correlate creativity with childishness. What a farce!<p>Kids are an amazing source of inspiration, and I make a point to cherish every moment around them. But, as you grow, you will probably develop more rigid understandings of the world and society. There&#x27;s little there that means you are less creative; quite the contrary. But, maybe it&#x27;s less likely you are exercising it. There are a lot of misnomers out there these days, and the understandings are not found where they should be (like art school).<p>The point about process is one of the hardest parts these days. Rare alternative art histories offer radically different interpretations of creativity, and they are usually more archaeologically&#x2F;anthropologically sound as well. Either way, our hurdles are related to many modern cultural trends like habitual idolization, genius fantasies, missed relationships with time and presence. It&#x27;s a hard one and I have struggled with it a lot, so know you&#x27;re not alone. The reality is that art is so rarely abstracted in the mind devoid of medium and time. Art is an interaction with materials and process BUT NOT an obsession with them. Obsess on other things. The gap in the middle harbors what we call the creativity. If you don&#x27;t maintain the boundaries, you won&#x27;t maintain the gap. Or, if you focus on creativity, you&#x27;re missing the point and just getting older.<p>Good luck!!! Oh and put yourself into art history because it&#x27;s all interpreted anyhow. &quot;We don&#x27;t know! Let&#x27;s find out!&quot;

When young everything was easy, because you knew so little.

This is average people in a statistically (hopefully) relevant study.... average people are not creatives. Average people get locked into world views and ideology as they become adults. Average people don&#x27;t take creative jobs.<p>Creative people-- that would be an interesting group to study.<p>As an older engineer, I&#x27;m not less creative. I&#x27;m slower at writing code, but I need to write a lot less code. In the end I execute at the same speed or faster than younger engineers (Who often seem to take off writing code before they&#x27;ve thought thru the problem and end up shooting themselves in the foot more often than coming up with an idea I hadn&#x27;t considered. Not that there&#x27;s anything wrong with them on the balance, just not a slam dunk that younger programmers are more productive.)<p>I don&#x27;t see this declining with aging, though my patience with people who can&#x27;t respond to logic and facts is declining rapidly.

naive is not the same as creative.

As we age we succumb to our prejudices.