The Creative Crisis
On rising costs, falling imagination, and the choices creators still have
I’m standing at the pump, watching the numbers climb faster than I can pretend not to care.
$4.00
$5.13
$6.09
That little internal dialogue, don’t worry it’s fine, it’s just a few dollars more, while something in me knows it’s not just a few dollars more. Groceries doing the same quiet creep. A receipt that looks like it belongs to someone else’s life.
Turning on the 24/7 bad news cycle, the conversation is predictable. Everyone reaching for the nearest explanation. We want a cause. We want someone to point at. For a minute I grab the popcorn and buckle in for the roller coaster of outrage, blame, and debate. Talking heads, belching hot air and poisonous gas. I feel gut sick.
Then it hits if you sit with it. Really sit. You start to feel that the tension isn’t only economic. It’s human. Desperately human.
First, the real casualties most at risk in this world. Children in war-torn places who had no vote in any of it, no language for it, just the disappearance of what used to be normal. Families split in an afternoon. A kitchen still warm from breakfast and then, nothing steady again for a long time. Men and women pulled into uniforms and told to carry something they don’t understand, let alone believe in, while somewhere else decisions are made over polished tables, hands clean, voices calm, the algebra of death abstracted.
You can feel the distance between those worlds. The ones who live it. The ones who narrate it.
But then, I think, there’s another layer. It’s there if you pay attention long enough.
In a world gone mad people begin to shrink their lives to what feels manageable. Dreams get negotiated down into something more “reasonable.” The edges come off. I hear it in how we talk more and more, less about what we want, more about what we can afford to want. Less risk. Less reach. A kind of careful living that passes for wisdom but often feels like unconditional surrender.
The cost isn’t just what we’re paying at the pump or the store. It’s not only bodies and blood. Those are all ghastly and overwhelming enough. But it’s what we slowly stop believing is possible. It’s the imagination going quiet. The part of a person that used to reach, now learning to stay put.
And once that part goes dim, everything else follows it. All the casualties on the other spreadsheets emerge from that loss.
This isn’t the first time a culture has felt that contraction.
I went down a rabbit hole recently (think late nights and way too much coffee) reading about the later years of the Roman Republic, sliding toward empire. Oh, I don’t mean the marble loving, orgy enjoying, decadence of Kardashians meets Jersey Shore. I mean power consolidating. Violence being the language people learned, overtly and otherwise. But also, fewer people taking real risks. More energy spent maintaining position than imagining anything new. It’s what happens when people hunker down and hide out, just trying to survive the movements of larger levers than they can understand.
You see this same sort of pattern emerge centuries later in the Middle Ages. Plague. Famine. Wars and rumors of wars. Death tolls mounting. Rack-em-up and bring-em down monarchies. It makes this era almost look peaceful in comparison. And what is happening creatively for the European civilization? Have you considered that? Certainly imagination didn’t disappear. But what form does it take? Monks bent over desks, copying texts by hand. Preserving what had been said. Keeping knowledge alive, yes, but not adding much to it. Not expanding it. The work became repetition. Careful. And largely confined to what already existed. They weren’t innovating. They were preserving. Cautiously.
There’s something familiar in that, isn’t there?
Scroll long enough and you can feel it. The same ideas circling. The same formats and formulas. It’s all the same language (and I’m not even talking about the reliance on AI redundancy). It’s the same characters and plot lines and story arcs. Sequels and second acts that are completely unnecessary. (In the most recent episode of The Creators Podcast I actually talk about this, and casually ask if we really need to see another adaptation of The Three Musketeers or Robin Hood, to say nothing of X-Men or Star Wars). And don’t get me wrong. They’re pretty great. People are still creative. People are still following their passions. No, this isn’t because people have run out of imagination, but because the conditions quietly reward what’s already been proven.
And maybe that’s the part that doesn’t get talked about when we’re staring at a gas pump.
When pressure rises, imagination often contracts. Out of survival.
People start preserving instead of creating. Repeating instead of risking. Holding the line instead of stepping into something that might not work. We move from a creative culture, to a caretaker culture.
That’s where we are. It’s subtle, but it’s there.
And if you’re a creator…you feel this in a different way.
You feel it in the hesitation before you begin. In the second-guessing that wasn’t there before. In the question that slinks in, is this even worth it right now?
Because when the world tightens, creating can start to feel almost irresponsible. Indulgent, even. There are bills. There is uncertainty. There are louder, more “practical” concerns pressing in on all sides. So the work gets pushed. Delayed. Edited before it even exists. You start reaching for what’s safe. What’s already been validated. What might land. You become…careful.
And careful is where things go to die.
A slow diminishing of what once was. The voice softens. The bizarre, electric parts of you, the ones that don’t quite make sense yet, those are the first to go. You start making things that resemble life and the current condition of the world, instead of creating towards the world as you wish it to be. You lose possibility.
I was on the phone not long ago with a creator I’ve worked with for a while. A real one. Not a dabbler. Not playing at it. Someone who had been in the thick of it, showing up, making things, risking being seen.
And they said it, “I think I’m done.”
Just…done.
They’d started sending out applications again. Old roles. Old industries. Work they already knew how to do. A return to something that made sense on paper. Reliable.
“It’s time to get serious,” they said.
And I knew exactly what they meant. We talked about the last few years. How strange they were. How, for a moment, the world cracked open. The pandemic handed many people something unexpected, a kind of permission slip. They left jobs. Started things. Took risks they’d been circling for years. There was fear, sure. But there was also this flicker of maybe I don’t have to live the way I’ve been living.
And now…
You can feel the recoil. Those same individuals buttoning things back up. Reaching for stability like it’s the only thing that matters. Clutching at certainty like Aunt Gladice’s pearls. Returning to structures that may have never really fit, but at least they’re familiar.
My friend wasn’t wrong. It does make sense.
But I could hear the underneath of it.
Fatigue.
The kind that comes from holding tension too long. From trying to make something real in a world that doesn’t always reward it. From not knowing if it’s going anywhere.
And this is the moment that decides things. Not the beginning. Not the burst of inspiration.
This one. When it’s quiet. When it’s unclear. When the world is subtly asking you to fold back into something smaller.
That’s where most people step out.
And again, I get it.
But I also know what happens if you stay out too long. You get your life back in order. The paycheck stabilizes. The days make sense again. And something else goes missing. The part of you that was trying to come alive hiding out in the shrubbery until it’s safe to peak its head back out.
Now here’s the hard truth: creativity has never really thrived in certainty.
It has always come from people who were willing to stand inside the tension of not knowing. Who were willing to make something anyway. Even when it didn’t make sense on paper. Even when no one was watching. Even when the world felt like it was closing in instead of opening up.
That is rebellion.
A person deciding, I will not shrink with this. I will not hand over my imagination to the conditions around me. I will not become a caretaker of what already exists when something in me is still trying to come alive. And that doesn’t mean quitting your job or blowing up your life. It means you keep making.
You write the thing that doesn’t have a clear outcome. You follow the idea that doesn’t immediately translate. You synthesize and bring together things that have NO BUSINESS being brought together until something completely new shines forth. You let what you’re carrying, grief, confusion, anger, love, have somewhere to go.
Because if you don’t give it somewhere to go, it doesn’t disappear. It settles in the body. Shows up as fatigue. Distance. Restlessness. That low-grade fever of something’s off that never quite leaves.
This is why creativity matters right now.
Not as content. Not as productivity. Not as marketing. As survival.
As a way of staying in motion when everything around you is asking you to freeze.
For some of you…this isn’t theoretical.
You’re carrying something right now. A loss. A rupture. A version of your life that didn’t hold. And it’s not tidy or clean or neat. It’s not resolved. It doesn’t fit into a morning routine or a productivity system. It lingers. It leaks into everything.
So many people try to move past that. But grief doesn’t move that way. It stays until it’s moved. And if it’s not given a place to go, it hardens. Becomes the very contraction we’ve been talking about. The place where imagination goes dim.
That’s why I built The Art of Grief.
It starts April 6.
To give you a way to stay in relationship with what’s changing in you through making. Through writing. Through creating something. A place where grief becomes motion again.
If you step into this, here’s what you’ll find:
Weekly teachings. Not theory for theory’s sake. Grounded reflections you can actually work with, each one opening a new way of relating to what you’re carrying.
Assignments and prompts. Places to put your hands. To write, shape, move something that’s been sitting still.
Bi-monthly group gatherings. A kind of village circle. Real people. Real voices. Space to speak, listen, and not do this alone.
Mentorship opportunities. For those who want to go deeper. More direct. More personal. A place to be met inside your own process.
This container is built on years of my work as a trained psychotherapist, skills trainer, creativity coach, and consultant to women and men, as well as a devoted son who sat in the final moments with his own parents as they took their last breath. This work isn’t theoretical for me. It comes from sitting in rooms where people have lost everything that once made sense. From watching what happens when grief is avoided… and what becomes possible when it’s given shape.
I’ve seen how quickly a person can go numb when there’s nowhere for their experience to land. And I’ve seen the opposite too. What happens when someone picks up a pen, a brush, a voice and begins, slowly, imperfectly, to move what’s inside of them into the world. Something shifts. That’s certainly been my own story.
This container is built from that place.
As a way of working with what’s real using creativity as a kind of bridge between what has been lost and what is still trying to live.
If this calls to you, there’s still time to enroll! I’d be honored to take this journey with you.
Some of you are stalled right now. I know it. You’ve told me.
Whelp…actually, that’s good.
Not good in the way people say it to make you feel better. Good in the sense that something real is close to the surface. Stalling isn’t the absence of creativity. It’s often the moment right before something real shows up, and you’re not quite sure you want to meet it yet. Believe me, I’ve been there enough times to know exactly what this is…
So don’t try to solve it. Instead, I encourage you to:
Lower the bar instead.
Write one page you’ll never show anyone. This isn’t going to be your best thinking. It’s not finished or or your best representation of self. It’s just the raw material. So put it out there. The sentence you’ve been editing out. The thing that feels slightly embarrassing to admit. Or take ten minutes and follow one thread of curiosity. The one that makes no sense NOT the important one. The one that won’t monetize. The one that feels like a waste of time.
That’s usually the door. Truly!
Let your hands move before your mind agrees. This is the trick most people forget. Creativity doesn’t begin with clarity. It begins with courage to make contact. Pen to paper. Fingers to keys. Voice into air.
And if everything feels heavy…GREAT! Use that.
Write the heaviness. Draw it. Speak it out loud into your phone like you’re leaving a message no one will hear. Give it shape, even if it’s ugly and unfinished. Because once it has shape, it’s no longer stuck inside you.
And then? What after that? Well, candidly, I’d put it away. That’s enough for today. You don’t need a plan (people get SO bogged down in the planning and preparation stage…remind me to tell you sometime of the man I knew who walked around a sealed business plan of what he would someday put in motion, if only he could…alright, you’ve twisted my arm—the punchline is, he never did it…he was always just in the planning stage…)
Nope…that’s NOT what you need today. You need a place to put what’s alive in you. Start there. I promise you…
I remember a winter morning years ago, waking up early before anyone had stirred, the coffee going cold beside me, a page only half filled. And no one was waiting for these words. No one who would know if I stopped right there and closed the journal and decided to be done with the whole business. I sat there anyway. Plucked out a few more lines. Most of them felt awkward. But I kept going.
I always tell creators, that’s the place. That’s the hour.
Not the launch. Not the moment when someone looks at you and tells you to keep going because this is worthy. Before all that. Before anyone is even looking. People think creativity should arrive with recognition. It doesn’t. It composts in obscurity. In repetition. In showing up to something that gives you nothing back for a very long while.
It’s awkward work. Unglamorous. You circle the drain from five angles. You doubt your taste and voice and right to be doing any of it. All that is standard issue.
And still, there you are. Again the next day. And the next.
And something does change, but it’s not the world turning towards you. Your ear starts to hear clearer. Your hand strengthens. You begin to recognize the difference between a living sentence and a dull dead one. You start to trust that if you stay with it long enough, something will answer you back. Oh, probably not loudly. Not in a way you can monetize or announce. But in a way that you can feel.
And by then, something else has happened. Something that is much harder to undo. You’ve built a relationship with your self. With the work. You’ve stopped inner abandonment. You’ve crafted a place that you can go to, anytime and under any circumstance.
You didn’t wait to be chosen. You chose it.
But here’s the other thing I’ve learned… You can do this alone for a while. You can sit in the quiet mornings. You can wrestle the page. You can build that relationship with your own voice, your own rhythm, your own strange way of seeing.
And you should.
But eventually, if you stay out there too long, something else starts to appear. Isolation.
The kind that makes you question everything. The kind that distorts your sense of what’s good, what’s working, what’s even worth continuing. The kind that makes you sort of weird. Filled with inner mythology and projection and personalization and paranoia. The kind that keeps you small. Because the world we’re living in right now? It runs on separation.
Everyone in their own lane. Their own feed. Their own carefully managed version of things. We call it connection, but most of it is just proximity without presence.
And creativity…doesn’t thrive there for long. It needs witness. Conversation. Other people who are also in it. That’s part of how we push back against all of this. Not just by making. But by making together.
We've been doing The Creators Collective for almost three years now. It’s the community I built as a way to push back against despair in the aftermath of my own father’s death. Not as another place to consume ideas, but as a space where you actually show up and create. Where you bring the rough drafts. The half-formed thoughts. The thing you’re not sure about yet and you put it in the room.
We’ve been reshaping it into something even more alive. Weekly craft workshops where we get into the mechanics of making. Studio sessions where you sit down and do the work alongside other people doing the same. Salons and open mics where the work gets spoken, shared, heard. Less performance. More participation.
And right now, there’s a short window to step in at the Founders rate before it shifts.
And this month… We’re stepping into Johnny Cash and what I’m calling Sacred Rebellion.
Johnny was a man who didn’t wait to become a cleaned up version of himself. Who didn’t sanitize the contradictions in his life before he made something out of them. Faith and failure in the same breath. Desire and devotion in the same line. He didn’t become safe. He became courageous.
That’s the invitation. To stay in contact with what’s real and make from there, alongside people who are doing the same. You don’t have to do this alone anymore. And you don’t have to wait until things calm down out there. They probably won’t. But something in you can create yourself alive anyway.
I hope you’ll join us.
And if you’ve made it this far…thank you.
I know what it takes to stay with something. To not click away. To sit inside an idea long enough for it to actually land. That alone tells me something about you. You’re not a surface dweller of life. You’re interested in the deep end of things.
There’s a little more I want to share…what I’ve been reading lately, what’s been shaping my thinking, the books and voices I keep returning to in a world that feels like it’s speeding up and thinning out at the same time. The kinds of things that don’t just inform you but TRANSFORM you.
I’m putting that in a second section for subscribers. If you want in, you know where to find it. It’s worth it.