Laziness and Creativity

2010.06.16   prev     next

THE iPad signals a sea change in the field of computing, where the great majority of people will be using a device that doesn’t really have creativity in mind — it’s more about enjoying the creativity of others. In other words, there will be many people for whom the iPad (probably plus their iPhone) is their only computing platform. These people will not be able to create iPad apps. Creative acts on their iPad will be limited to a little writing, and some basic forms of image manipulation. Video editing? Yes, I can see that being fully implemented on the iPad. But coding? iPad app development? I’m guessing not. You’ll continue to need a MacBook to do that.

Some have called this a bad thing, but I don’t think it is. What percentage of users would actually develop apps even if their device supported app development? Not a large percentage. Most people don’t want to do much creating with their computing device — they want to use it for consumption of things that other people have created. Why is this not a bad thing? Simple: because of mass-production and our seven-billion-strong population.

Designed Laziness

This, I think, is our creators’ plan for us:

1. Humans were put in this universe to have fun.
2. To maximize human fun, we’ve been programmed to want to spend most of our time lazily consuming the creativity of others, and to want to spend almost none of our time working to create things for others. This sounds like an unworkable contradiction, except that:
3. As humanity grows into a huge population, the rare creativity of a driven few can be mass-produced, and enjoyed by millions of mostly uncreative people.
4. The ability of millions of people each to chip in a small amount of money that adds up to cushy fortunes for the creative few, provides those creative few with the incentive needed to overcome their own pre-programmed laziness and spend a large portion of their time creatively — time they could have spent consumptively.

Laziness is castigated by popular religion as one of the “seven deadly sins,” but I believe that our creators gave us this laziness as a gift. They gave us the ability to enjoy our lives in a rich variety of ways. And it’s a good thing they did, because if they hadn’t, there would be no reason to create. If survival was all that mattered, then we would, like ants, do nothing but harvest food, eat it, build dull shelters, reproduce, and maybe work on the technologies needed to spread out to the rest of our incredibly vast universe. There would be no music. No movies or TV shows. No pretty pictures. No sex, except as necessary for reproduction. Of course, like the ants, we might not know any better, so we wouldn’t be dismayed by such an existence. But it seems pretty obvious to me that our creators wanted so much more than that for us.

When humanity was just starting out, the population size was small, the technology of mass-production was non-existent, and survival was a constant crisis. In such an environment, it is easy to understand why laziness would be considered a sin. But today, none of those conditions exist.

Far from a sin, laziness is the gift that allows us to experience beauty, awe, and deep appreciation of all the cool things that this life has to offer. And the monetary spending fueled by that laziness, combined with creative persons’ own lazy desire to have a cushy fortune, is what fuels most of the creativity that the population enjoys consuming.

Update 2010.07/09 — added paragraph “When humanity ... conditions exist.”

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