Anyone with a modern education--or at least a connection to modern society--is aware of the concept of yin and yang. The concept of yin and yang itself is predicated upon an almost instinctive tendency to label things as coming in pairs, duos, dichotomies, or other measurements of two potentially contrasting halves. Some examples are light and dark, male and female, East and West, salty and sweet, rich and poor, liberalism and conservatism, and so on. Some are antonymic by definition and others are subject to shades of interpretation. Some are things upon which this site will focus in future posts.
The one pair on which I put focus now is the act of creation and what would be its opposite. If playing a word association game, it would be reasonable to suggest "destruction" as the antonym of creation. While undoubtedly true in an abstract, dictionary sense, I believe that in our daily lives the proper counterpart to creation is not destruction. For us, destruction is not so common and often hardly dramatic: a shirt ruined in the wash, a shattered drinking glass, a knocked over tower of wooden blocks, etc. Most of the destruction we witness occurs far away and is delivered to us by the news or video websites: plane crashes, exploding warzones, Islamic State fighters destroying human heritage sites, natural disasters, and so forth. Real, life-changing, terrifying destruction.
In the past, destruction was the reasonable choice as the opposite to creation, back when wars razed whole continents, disease and poor medicine promised short lifespans and high child mortality, and when life was nasty, brutish, and short for just about everyone. Now, in a time more peaceful than ever, with a greater understanding of our world than ever, and with a standard of living higher than ever, destruction is barely a worry to the First World mind.
Instead, I believe that in this age of prosperity, consumption has replaced destruction as the antonym of creation. Central to this change is the growth and development of tools and communications which allow content of greater breadth and depth to be delivered to the masses instantaneously and often for free or a very low cost. This content is public or easily accessible to the public (either free or available through simple payment) and can be informative (news articles, tutorial sites and educational videos, etc) and/or entertaining (comedy, music and music videos, video blogs and memes, etc).
As a result, the average person has an impossible amount of content they can consume in numerous forms. Conversely, the norms of everyday society have culminated in the common experience of working a 40-hour, five-day week in a position that likely focuses little on creating--particularly creating the content that the individual would actually want to create. At the end of the day, people tend to contribute to something--a work project, a volunteer organization, raising their children--but hardly ever do they manage to create, particularly something from their thoughts and imagination.
Meanwhile, consumption is just that much easier. It demands nothing of the consumer except their time and attention in return for enjoyment. Creation, on the other hand, requires the creator to be active and involved, and depending on what is being created, it can demand more time and money than consuming, thereby making the decision to create more stressful than the one to consume. Why else do we we admire people known for creating--writers, actors, musicians, painters, YouTubers, influencers, and so forth? Their lives are spent creating while ours are largely spent consuming (and consuming what they create, no less).
Speaking personally now, the time I spend consuming is time I spend putting off creating things that I want to create--novels, stories, scripts, videos, and more. Since creation is a large part of self-expression, and self-expression is hardly limited to solely artistic endeavors, this journal is one thing I have set out to tackle as a part of pushing myself more towards creation than consumption by using it as an outlet for articulating in writing my beliefs and opinions, most likely those related to religious, political, and social issues and happenings.
Here we go then.
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