Writers Block

Writer's block is real  

But honestly 

It doesn't matter what you write 

Because the point of writing isn’t to forge some masterpiece  

It's to workshop and play around with ideas. 

The expectation that each creation is supposed to be a masterpiece is a lie.  

Creation isn’t something you accomplish; it’s something you participate in.  

And nothing kills creativity more than pressure. 

Pressuring yourself to perform and to create leads to burnout and you lose sight of the

deeper meaning that comes from intertwining with the spirit of the thing itself.

You aren't chasing the outcome; you chase the process.  

During the process, the line between you and the action is blurred. 

There is only action.  

The Taoists call it Wu-Wei, effortless action.  

Musashi taught that knowing the way broadly, you can see it in all things.  

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the psychologist, coined it as flow.  

It's a primal state of being that precedes conscious thought.

Biologically, we are wired to create.  

The Cognitive tradeoff hypothesis says that early ancestors of humans lived alongside other primates in the forests of Africa 6-7 million years ago.   

Eventually, however, our ancestors got booted. 

Without food, water, or shelter, early humans needed another tool.  

Imagination. 

Chimps and other primates have brains that are very similar to ours. But they have enlarged parietal and sensory-motor brain regions. This gives them rapid processing to immediate stimuli, 3-4x working memory than humans.  

But, 

Humans counter with a prefrontal cortex 2-3x larger relative to total brain volume.

This enlarged prefrontal cortex is what gave our ancestors foresight.

They could envision future forms.  

They could plan multi-day hunts.  

Verbal communication and language began to emerge. 

But this mechanism goes beyond survival.  

The beautiful cave paintings our ancestors made... 

Nobody forced them to create those. 

After immediate survival needs are met, the desire to create persists.  

It’s ingrained in our very genetic code.  

And every time you sit down to create, you’re honoring a lineage that’s millions of years old.  

Thats the creative process 

Writers block into an essay lol