Creative Insights

I want to be forever young

Are you creatively young or creatively old? I've decided that I want to be forever young.

4 minute read
I want to be forever young

As I have been writing and reflecting about our current moment and what’s coming for the creative community, I’ve been thinking on the idea of change and how change can reveal the kinds of creative instincts we have. In particularly I’ve been wondering, am I creatively old or creatively young?

LL Cool J and Gustavo Dudamel
LL Cool J and Gustavo Dudamel. Getty Images

The creatively old are masters of a craft. Think of musicians who specialize in classical music. Classical music conductors are creatively old. Their interest is in finding deeper understanding of music imagined centuries prior and refining how it is expressed to contemporary listeners. Their primary creative interest is in using their wisdom and experience to refine familiar expressions.

The creatively young use past expressions primarily as inspiration to create new kinds of expression. Think of early hip hop. Those producers and artists sampled their parents’ jazz and soul, chopped it up, read poetry over it, and created an entirely new genre of music. The creatively young have a creative instinct that is expressed through curiosity and radical discovery.

Let’s look at film directors. James Cameron is creatively young. Throughout his entire career, he has been at the forefront of how stories can be expressed through film. We can see it with how he repurposed the Steadicam to incorporate it into the film itself in Aliens, using it both in front of the camera as a prop and behind the camera as a tool. Decades later with Avatar, he took CGI to the next level, expressing a world that would be impossible to visualize practically.

Inception
Inception. Warner Bros.

Christopher Nolan is creatively old. He only shoots on film and even the most elaborate set pieces in his films are hand crafted, reminiscent of how giant sets for film were built on sound stages in the 1920s and 1930s. He blew up real bombs for Oppenheimer and for Inception, he and his team figured out how to film a character in a rotating room - by actually rotating the room. The effect is that his work has an extra texture of realism to it.

Whether creatively old or young, neither is inherently better than the other. James Cameron and Christopher Nolan are both two of the most successful directors in filmmaking history.

But we are in an era of change and change creates more opportunities for the creatively young. This is the instinct to imagine entirely new pathways of artistic expression. Advancements using AI technology and robotics will inspire new kinds of creative expression. Things we haven’t yet imagined.

Even in this era of change, being creatively old is not inherently a demerit. Much of how AI is used for creativity today is in creatively old ways. It is being used to make creative expression more efficient, saving the amount of time it takes to edit a photo or do a composite in a video. It can help to produce double the amount of content with the same or smaller budget.

That is all practical and useful, but what excites me is what we’ll be getting from the creatively young who are driven more by curiosity than efficiency. For the creatively young, there has never been a better time to go on a creative expedition. There has never been a better time to build something new. There has never been a better time to act on an artistic curiosity. As we move through the many changes today in how creativity is expressed, ask yourself - are you approaching it as a creatively old or a creatively young person?

In my recent posts, I’ve explored different facets of this moment. From the technical possibilities of open-weight models to the structural challenges creative people are facing, each post touches on different ways to think about what's coming. I invite you to read them and explore which of the changes resonate most with you.