Creativity Hurts

Nobody wants to hear it. Welp… here ya’ go.

James Taylor Foreman
5 min readSep 24, 2024
Robert Frost chilling. ‘I only hope that when I am free,’ Frost says in “Misgiving,” that ‘[I] go in quest / Of the knowledge beyond the bounds of life.’”

Ease, flow, inspiration, joyful creativity, follow your bliss!… not interesting. It’s moms sipping wine and painting fruit in a class.

Why… why? is it so popular to write spiritual self-help books of a vaguely Eastern persuasion about how you can do anything if you just wiggle into the present moment good enough? I have to admit, I read a lot of those damn books (when I should have been reading the classics, in hindsight).

You’ll notice, for one, these spiritual self-help types have never written a great original novel. They just write books theoretically teaching other people how to be interesting (or worse, manifest money). They benefit from our spiritual confusion, and so the truth is sometimes scattered in the leaves.

Here’s what I’ve gathered: the West’s current animating myth is essentially Rousseauian. Meaning, we believe (or, we MUST believe) that our state of nature is pure and good, and the only thing that corrupts us is the state, culture, or mankind. Under this dogma, good can never come from an act of will (much less a heroic act of will). That would just be to further oppress the immaculate state of nature.

Plus, we’re super lazy. So, 1 + 1 = “Power of Now” gurus make a killing.

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James Taylor Foreman

Reality is narrative and our only job is to make it beautiful. Subscribe to move me directly to your inbox --> https://www.taylorforeman.com/