GRAIN

Or, Why unlimited possibility kills creativity

We live inside a particularly quiet cultural myth: that creativity needs freedom, endless freedom, nothing restrained, nothing directed.

Cultural myths keep us within bounds we don’t routinely question.

This one is a noble ideal for artists, yet counterproductive.

Who has unbounded freedom? It seems a paradox to our foundational lives with families, or economic necessity among other things.

Bounds and unlimited freedom are opposites and we must choose one or the other. Says the myth.

That is only one hurdle the myth creates for would be creatives, let’s look further and how this myth positions us once we decide to be creative.

Does unlimited possibility liberate us?

It doesn’t, it overwhelms us. The real tyranny isn't limitation, rather it’s infinite choice.

When Freedom Stops Feeling Like Freedom

Possibility looks like expansion, but on the inside, too much choice can quickly turn into a burden. Life is saturated with alternatives, careers, identities, creative paths, projects that multiply faster than we can commit to. We're told we can be anything, which quietly becomes a pressure to live up to every unrealised option.

Our productive minds weren't built for endless crossroads, they were shaped by scarcity. Decision-making sharpens through obstacles; unlimited options dilute it.

A blank page doesn't offer freedom, but weighs on us as a responsibility. With infinite openings, there must be the right beginning, and everything else could possibly be better, and we perhaps learn to ‘just start’. Only to find that, a single, unattached start seems more often than not like mere nonsense. Unless we can conjure a belief that anything we do is creative because we are ‘free’. But we know it is fake.

The Two Traps of the Creative Mind

When faced with too much freedom, most people fall into one of two patterns. I know both well. They are two sides of my own temperament.

1. The Endless Preparer

This version of me loves tools, systems, setups, tutorials, the comforting illusion of readiness. The right software. The right notebook. The perfect structure. Everything is almost in place, waiting for the moment when I finally begin.

Preparation feels productive, but its real purpose is avoidance. It hides the fear beneath it: If I fully understand the entire project, I can avoid failing when I start. But creativity never arrives with full clarity. You only understand the work by making the work.

1. The Perpetual Explorer

The other version starts easily. Ideas arrive in bright flashes. The beginning is always exciting, charged, alive. And then the middle arrives: the fog, the resistance, the part where the idea demands commitment instead of momentum.

So I pivot to something more interesting. Or combine ideas. Or wait for "better clarity."

Exploration feels like progress, but it's drift disguised as creativity. It avoids the grief of choosing one path and killing the rest.

Both patterns quarantine the same vulnerability: If I make something real, it can be judged. If it can be judged, it can fail. And if it fails, I might too. I will lose the hope in my potential. And I stay scared.

The Brain's Creative Paradox

The patterns protect us. But they also reveal something about how creativity actually works, something we often misunderstand.

The archetype of the uninhibited genius, the person who "lets ideas flow” is a dominant one. But the brain works differently. Creativity requires selective inhibition: blocking predictable ideas, suppressing obvious associations, pushing past first impulses. Even the need to make money can provide impetus that may seem counter-creative, but is it?

At the same time, creativity requires reduced inhibition: allowing the unusual, the strange, the cross-wired, the unexpected.

Creativity is a paradox: distance the familiar, focus on the new, and strange. Too much control and nothing new enters. Too little control and you cycle through the familiar. It is why constraints often increase originality. Boundaries kill the obvious route and force new ones.

Creativity isn't pure freedom. It is disciplined openness, structured wildness. It is hard to hold that paradox without effort. So we choose a side and call it philosophy. In fact we’ve just constructed a belief.

Architecture or Atmosphere

These worldviews sit at opposite ends of the creative spectrum. On one end is Margaret Boden, whose thinking feels almost architectural. For her, creativity isn't mystical or emotional; it's structural. Novelty only appears inside a system with boundaries, rules, and constraints in what she calls a "conceptual space." To Boden, the creative act is navigation: exploring a map until you reach its edges, and then breaking the rules that built the map in the first place. Without constraints, there is nothing to deviate from, no expectation to violate, no surprise to register.

Structure isn't the enemy of creativity. It is the precondition for it.

At the other extreme is Rick Rubin, who sees creativity as something closer to weather than architecture. He believes the artist's job is not to construct but to attune. Creativity arrives when you lower your resistance, widen your sensitivity, and allow something unexpected to pass through. You don't force ideas; you notice them. You don't engineer breakthroughs; you make space for them.

Openness, not effort, is what makes the work come alive.

One worldview says: Build the container. The other says: Dissolve it.

One sees creativity as disciplined rule-breaking inside a system. The other sees it as radical receptivity, a loosening, a surrender, a willingness to let the unconscious speak without interference.

And both are correct, it takes effort to hold two opposing ideas and not committing too soon to one and then find you get stuck on the one side. If I get too committed to one idea I lose the wildness. On the other hand drifting becomes a devotion to freedom that loses the form, in fact it loses a sense of integrity. I was a swinger and at times still need to come back to the tension of holding out until much later until, by not forcing it, felt like it came from a different place.

The creative life doesn't ask you to choose a side. It asks you to tolerate the tension.

Holding Both

Creativity isn't structure vs surrender. It's the ability to move consciously between them.

To become strong enough to hold with the arrival of what is strange. To tolerate the chaos long enough for something like a new life, or form to emerge. To shape the raw material but not killing its spirit.

That's the theory that resonated. But theory only really matters if it becomes evident in a room when someone is creating something.

I've watched choreographers create, writers write, musicians compose. I saw the silence, frustration, fears, and the breakthroughs that arrive without warning. And what strikes me every time is how human the process is. How much it lives in contradiction. As the observer, I might feel confident having seen their work manifest before me, and yet for the creator every new piece of work brings uncertainty and that shaping and relating between a form that gives a trueness of spirit.

A choreographer knows, feels, sees the grammar of the body, the physics of weight and counterweight. A writer builds within the constraints of language, pacing, structure. Bringing to life feelings through words that do not feel. A composer plays with scales, keys, harmonic rules that have existed for centuries, and finds a reason to  create something new. Remember the Beatles who broke many musical rules and invented new techniques for creating music from playing with sound itself, such as distortion and chord progressions that were not supposed to work, but did.

Their rules held as they developed musically by transcending them, and their rules became the discipline and long practiced skill in working together. That gave the shape that was never repetitive and always new.

Art is not chaos, never disparate. It relies on discipline, technique, structure to promote the freedom of its ideas, inspiration.

If you observe when a dancer catches a phrase that wasn't planned, or a writer follows a sentence into a place they didn't expect, or a musician improvise a melody that seems to emerge from somewhere else, you know there is something happening beyond the sound, movement or words. You feel it and know something new.

And so it transpires that you can't reduce the spirit, human or even just an idea to a mechanism. That you can't code it into a conceptual space. Something that feels eternal, not computational.

Call it the unconscious. Call it the divine. Call it soul. The space without words where it comes to life and moves us.

Creativity is the moment humanity is changed.

Creativity is our willingness to venture an unknown road, be exposed, risk failure, encounter judgment, be met with misunderstanding, and stay without our own two opposing thoughts until the creation is born.

The tyranny is never the blank page. It is the belief that if we just had enough freedom, enough time, enough clarity, we could make something perfect enough to stay safe.

But there is no safe in what is alive, or what is new. There is only the choice to create and to live.