Life as a Creative in the US
By Elena Greco
Photo by Urban Vintage on Unsplash
Typical reading time: 3 minutes
July 23, 2024
The word creative is thrown about quite a bit now. As a creative myself, and as someone who works with and supports other creatives, it’s an area of great interest to me, and so I’d like to clear up some things about creatives.
First, there’s that term, creative. Creativity has always been used to refer to actions that are deemed creative. But being a creative is something else entirely. Being a creative means that you have a specific set of personality traits, and that you have a creative drive that propels you through life compelled to do your particular creative thing.
And that word creative, as a noun, has recently begun to be used in a fairly casual—and often incorrect—way in business to refer to those who do something related to design rather than something related to, say, accounting or law, or whatever the particular business might be.
But just because someone has training in design or marketing doesn’t mean that they are a creative. It simply means that they’ve been trained to do something considered creative, something requiring some creativity, usually something related to one of the arts.
Creativity refers to the accessing of our imagination to produce something novel. Creatives have more than the ability to do something creative; they have the creative drive. In fact, you might say the creative drive has them.
Creatives are much studied and seldom understood. That’s because being a creative is a calling that we’re born with, not a choice; it’s certainly not a decision. And it’s not a skill, like being a good conversationalist, that we can choose to change or improve on. It is something that exists within us, and it comes from a place similar to the place from which courage and heroism arise within us.
Again, there’s a distinction between being a creative and doing something creative. People are generally born creative (or not); it is not a choice. Also, people often think of creative people as those who are in the creative arts, but there are creative people in almost every field—science, technology, and anywhere there are innovative ideas, even in government.
The US is different from Europe in that, as a country, it does not support its creative artists. There also seems to be on the part of some of our citizens almost a disdain for those in the creative arts, as though they are superfluous. For that reason, life as a creative is quite difficult for most creative artists and thinkers in this country in a way that those in other countries might find surprising.
Regarding what causes the difference in attitude here as opposed to Europe, in the US there seems to be a lack of appreciation or understanding for what creatives offer to our shared experience as humans. Europeans and others are much wiser in their view of creative arts and creative people, understanding that the arts enrich our lives and support our growth and well-being as human beings. In addition, the artist—and creatives— support our civilization by bringing alternate viewpoints to important issues of society, giving us visionary dreams for the future, and propelling progress. They also leave a record of not only what we did, but what we felt, during the time in which we live.
There is often a misperception by non-creatives of why creatives do what they do and live the way they live. I began an interview series I call the EGMP Creative Artists Interviews because I want to give creatives a chance to describe what living their lives is like for them on a daily basis, what it feels like to be a creative, and what compels them to pursue their art, sometimes in spite of great obstacles. I think they don’t often get to express that.
I want to give those who perhaps do not understand or appreciate creatives a chance to see them from a different perspective in the hope that they might come to appreciate the creative’s role in enriching our culture and making our existence bearable and fulfilling—or at least to feel a little more compassionate towards them. Being creative is not better than not being creative (everyone has something to offer!), but neither is it something to be shunned or viewed with disrespect.
Most of all, I want to give creative artists a voice to speak of their personal relation to their creativity and how living their lives is necessarily intertwined with it.
Work is beginning on that two-part EGMP Creative Artists Interviews series again. I look forward to sharing the interviews with you!
And if you’d like to be a part of the project and be considered to be interviewed, and/or to interview me, drop me a line at egreco@elenagreco.com. Questions are submitted in advance, each video interview will be under five minutes, and the only tech requirements are a good lighting setup and access to Zoom.