The Creative Caveman

I redid last week's posting on Jealousy. When I posted it, it seemed clearly written. But after setting it aside for a day, I realized it was a jumbled mess.

I offer fresh connections, explanations, perspectives, and insights here, at least on good days. Credible ones, too...usually. Perhaps not always air-tight or fully-baked, but that would be asking too much. I imagine that fresh credible ideas are interesting and worth consideration, if I make it a good read. That part is essential. If it turns out blurry (a writer can't always tell!), that's a problem, even if the ideas are strong. Here's why:

We're not built to swallow fresh ideas and perspectives. Our tribal, conformist minds struggle to ingest that sort of thing. A caveman or two in each tribe was gifted with the slippery ribbon of human creativity, but evolutionary adaptation ensured that the others would resist endless efforts to reinvent and reframe sloth hunting and tool-making.

The gang might have appreciated a couple of Herbie's early hits - e.g. his clever trick for rain-catching - but inevitably would come to ignore his exhilarated flow of preposterous, annoying eurekas. They were, after all, busy, with sloths to hunt and tools to make.

Novel thinking is an irritant (because it doesn't swallow easily; we need to apply limited assets of effort and concentration) and a distraction (who has time to entertain this crap?). We're built to favor familiar thinking so we can get on with it. At most, we might consider a fresh rewording of some familiar message.

Fortunately, truly fresh ideas, explanations, and connections are exceptionally rare. How often do we encounter such things? Step back a light year or two and you'll notice there's little new under the sun. Just incremental retreads, with, at most, an enticing new angle on the familiar.

It bores me terribly. So I use my writing skills, honed from decades spent coaxing bologna sandwich eaters to venture out for Cubanos, to make the swallowing part easier; to make my exhilarated eureka flow (EEF) worth the effort and concentration of entertaining such crap. I strive to be a more entertaining Herbie.

But when it fails, yikes.