Balancing novelty and routine as a creative
I have a friend who gets existential anxiety when she gets too high.
She looks at her hands and asks herself, who am I? What am I? What does it mean to be human? And she gets afraid to die.
But then she's bored when she's doing house chores and she wants to get high again.
In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche uses the terms "Apollonian" and "Dionysian."
Apollo is the Greek god of sun, light, truth, logic, and reason. Dionysus is the Greek god of wine, festivals, dance, ecstasy, irrationality, and chaos.
Nietzsche saw the dichotomy between Apollonian and Dionysian in Greek culture, particularly in Greek plays. Of the art forms, sculpture is most Apollonian. Music is most Dionysian.
Schopenhauer said, “Mankind was apparently doomed to vacillate between the two extremities of distress and boredom."
Lately, I've been spending more of my time and energy being social.
Thursday night, I went to a party for startup founders at a "speakeasy" in the basement of an office building.
Yesterday, I played capture the flag in Golden Gate Park with friends from The Commons.
At these social events, I'm inspired by the people I talk with. They have awesome ideas. I write them down to save them for later because I want to research them, think more about them, even create projects or businesses from them.
But as I keep going to more social events, the ideas pile up and I don't get to them.
This morning, I'm at a coffee shop with my headphones on. Not talking to anyone. Just trying to get this idea down.
There are two modes, two sides of life. And the balance between them is especially important for creatives.
The Dionysian brings creativity, inspiration, and a feeling of renewed excitement. Experiences that are most Dionysian in this way are novel experiences, e.g., altered states of consciousness, traveling, meeting new people.
But after you've had a lot of these novel experiences that inspire creativity and newness in your life, the new ideas pile up and you forget about the older ones and maybe even lose them forever if you don't take time to sit down and fully flesh out the idea to create from it a work of art, a business, a change to your personal habits, etc.
Routine is the mode on the other side of novelty.
After you've been social, you need time alone to sit with your thoughts and put in focused work to materialize some of the new ideas in your head. This is the Apollonian.
Routine is the structure that allows you to have this focused alone time to work. You don't have to spend as much energy navigating the novelty, processing all the information of a new experience.
There's a graph in the book Flow that is similar to what I'm describing.
Here's a graph of my own rendering that more exactly depicts what I'm describing.
The purple line is your life. It's important to note that it's not linear. There are ups and downs of varying magnitudes.
When you have too much novelty, you get anxious. When you have too much routine, you get bored.
This is helpful because you can pay attention to your emotions and prescribe yourself more novelty or more routine based on whether you're feeling bored or anxious.
If you're getting too anxious, maybe it's time for more routine (e.g., time at your desk, going to the gym, eating healthy foods).
If you're getting too bored, maybe it's time for more novelty (e.g., altered states of consciousness, traveling, meeting new people).
As a creative, this balance results in optimized production. You're balancing between getting inspired and creating. If you're only inspired, you're not creating anything. If you're only creating, you eventually lack inspiration and don't know what else to create.