Creativity is Dead

And I don’t mean just art and music. I mean accounting, car building, secretarial work, and even mowing the lawn. I mean anything that involves thought translated into meaningful action—which covers nearly everything humans do that could be called productive and purposeful. Entertaining oneself is the glaring exception. But that, in most contexts, hardly qualifies as productive or meaningful. And therein lies the problem. We cannot sustain humanity on entertainment alone. Note that I specifically said “entertaining oneself,” not merely “entertainment.” Let me explain.

Being an entertainer—creating something that entertains others—is not inhuman. Being entertained is also not a sin against humanity, as long as it remains in balance. Even entertaining yourself can be a creative act: writing in a journal, improvising a song on the guitar, tending a garden for the sheer joy of it. The danger arises when self-entertainment becomes the only thing you want. “Bread and circuses,” as the Romans put it. Instant gratification. The purpose and meaning of life shrink to satisfying the senses—appealing to the flesh with endless stimuli rather than nourishing the heart, the intellect, or the soul. Even though they seem conflated, creativity and self-entertainment are not really the same thing. There is a difference between playing a video game and writing a story about medieval warriors—although creativity is present in both.

We are material beings, of course. There is nothing wrong with sensory appeal; it is how we are driven to eat, drink, move, play, and procreate. Biology uses pleasure to ensure survival and procreation. Sex, for example, is powered in part by raw sensory reward, yet its primary purpose is to open the door to profound spiritual union. The assumption has always been one of balance: sensory satisfaction should ultimately serve deeper desires—walks in nature, playing with a dog, watching a sunset, sharing a lovingly prepared meal, or making love.

There are other drives that are not, at first glance, purely sensory: observing great art, listening to music that moves you, dancing, playing an instrument, creating jewelry, sculpture, poetry, or architecture. These activities engage the senses, but point beyond them—to beauty, meaning, transcendence. A well-crafted wooden chair, a thoughtfully designed garden, a perfectly balanced spreadsheet that reveals hidden patterns in a business—these too are creative acts. They require presence, discernment, care, and the subtle satisfaction that comes from shaping the world in small but meaningful ways. When these acts disappear, replaced by automated systems that demand nothing from us but passive consumption, we lose more than efficiency; we lose a vital piece of our humanity.

Modern science, however, often tries to reduce all of this to material and physical mechanisms. E.O. Wilson (the father of sociobiology) and Richard Dawkins (author of The Selfish Gene) are famous for this reductionist approach. Wilson argued in works like Consilience that human behaviour, culture, and even ethics can ultimately be explained through biology and evolutionary principles. Dawkins goes further, portraying organisms (including humans) as mere vehicles for “selfish” genes whose only goal is replication. In their worldview, love, art, morality, and creativity are ultimately elaborate byproducts of genetic and biochemical processes—nothing more. Whether one finds this view persuasive is a matter of personal philosophy. For me, I find this particular modern scientific pastime deeply impoverished. It strips the mystery and grandeur from human experience and leaves us with little reason to strive for anything higher than stimulus and response. It turns the soul into mere chemistry and the creative impulse into a neurological accident. Jung would have had a field day with this—calling it a profound loss of the archetypal, the numinous, and the symbolic dimension of life that has always given human existence its depth.

I am not going to blame only AI for our current loss of creativity. This trend has been building for decades. In the past, the creators of computers, robots, and early AI systems focused mainly on replacing physical labour, yet they always harboured a peculiar obsession with proving their machines could handle creative work too. I wrote a few years ago about 1960s computers that generated poetry and composed music. Transhumanism was already at work. Even then, visionaries like Alan Turing and others dreamed of machines that could rival human minds not just in calculation but in imagination. What began as academic curiosity has snowballed into today’s reality.

Today it is obvious that art—music, literature, sculpture, painting—sits squarely in AI’s crosshairs. Strangely, most people don’t seem terribly alarmed about handing our deepest forms of human expression over to machines. What really upsets them is losing paying jobs to AI. After all, “everyone knows artists don’t make money.” Tell that to Damien Hirst, whose works have sold for tens of millions, or to digital artist Beeple, who sold a single NFT for $69 million. The deeper tragedy, however, is not financial. It is existential. When AI generates paintings, writes novels, composes symphonies, and designs buildings better and faster than most humans, what becomes of the human drive to create? What happens to the soul of the artist who spends years wrestling with a single idea, pouring their lived experience, pain, and revelation into the work?

So, who are the real culprits destroying creativity and, by extension, humanity? In a broad sense, nearly everything emanating from modern science and technology—including medicine. As touched on earlier with Dawkins and Wilson, the deeper agenda of much of contemporary science appears to be the eradication of anything distinctly human. Read Yuval Noah Harari, and the picture becomes crystal clear. The bestselling author of Sapiens and Homo Deus openly describes humans as “hackable animals,” essentially biochemical algorithms whose time as the dominant species is rapidly ending. He predicts that AI and biotechnology will render most people economically and politically useless, reducing humanity to a new underclass of “useless people” while a tiny elite merges with intelligent machines. Harari’s vision is not presented as dystopia but as inevitable progress. In his worldview, free will is largely an illusion, consciousness is overrated, and the future belongs to those who control the data and the algorithms. This is not fringe thinking—it is mainstream among Silicon Valley elites and global policy influencers.

When creativity dies across all domains—not just the “arts,” but in craftsmanship, problem-solving, thoughtful labour, and daily invention—something essential to being human dies with it. We become consumers rather than creators, spectators rather than participants. Life narrows to scrolling, clicking, gaming, and binge-watching: endless self-stimulation in a digital hall of mirrors.

Until even that is no longer an option.

This is not sustainable. A civilization that no longer values or practices real creativity in its broadest sense cannot long endure. It may entertain itself brilliantly while it lasts, but it will have forgotten how to live. We will have traded the messy, difficult, deeply rewarding work of being human for the sterile comfort of being entertained—and then, eventually, replaced.

Sorry. Dr. Doom is at it again. I’m going to go have a bowl of ice cream. Maybe I’ll have a different perspective after my senses are satisfied.