Creativity – Hyjacked

When the United States failed to win the space race in the 1960s, the men (I say mostly men) sat back, looked at each other, and asked—what happened?

They concluded they had lost not because of lack of resources or intellect, but because they had not been able to problem-solve or think creatively enough.

This realisation sparked a movement in the U.S where unprecedented funding flowed into researching a construct called creativity.

The term was not new, as such, but the 60s awakened this “creative spirit” as young people shed post-war conservatism and discovered the world as a playground. Drugs, sex, and rock ‘n’ roll became the metaphors of liberation, where individuality and autonomy flourished, redefining what it meant to live freely and be creative.

As this cultural revolution unfolded, science too began to take note. Spearheaded by psychologists and theorists of the time, researchers sought to “extract” the components of creativity—to study, test, and measure what made someone creative. They wanted to identify the behaviours that could lead to innovation—in rocket science and beyond.

The work was invaluable and gave birth to a rigorous scientific understanding of creativity, often defined as “an original product of value.” Creativity was seen as the marriage of divergent and convergent thinking—the capacity to imagine widely, to make unexpected connections, and then to bring those imaginings into practical, culturally valued form beyond play.

Yet herein lies the vital distinction between creativity and play. Play is open-ended, free, divergent—it has no end point, no product, no requirement for usefulness. Its purpose is expression, flow, and process. It ends only when it feels right to stop. Play awakens the self in time and space—much like dreams—allowing ideas to dance together, to collide and cohere.

Play is part of creativity, but creativity, as defined in that era, demanded a product. In other words, without a product, we call it play.

By nature and nurture we are creative, yet once creativity became research, it was codified—quantified, measured, turned into data.

To be creative, we are told, is to get a job done in a way that allows newness to arise. But that newness is rarely spontaneous—it requires thousands of hours of discipline, expertise, and the fusion of skill and imagination. Creativity thus became an adult enterprise, a construct grounded in cultural value. Adults know what is valued and what is not, and so they create to meet those values.

Children, on the other hand, create freely. They do not yet know the boundaries of culture. They play into newness with ease. As Picasso once said, “It takes a lifetime to paint like a child.” Perhaps this is why the 60s were so creative—adults shed their conservatism and began to play again. Privileged baby boomers, with time and money, took risks, embraced freedom, and created in ways not possible today.

It is not possible today because we know too much. We have too many agendas. We live in an age where there is no time to play. Every creative step is recorded, analysed, monetised. Every process has become product. Creativity no longer breathes.

Instead, we have repeats—reruns of what has already been done. There is no time for originality.

We can blame neoliberalism for this suffocation. A system that demands all processes be marketed, sold, measured, and monetised defines our cultural understanding of what is worth creating. Within neoliberal logic, creativity is only valued when it can be commodified.

Creativity is no longer about freedom. We create to perpetuate the machine. Creativity has been hijacked—and we are its captives.

To be genuinely creative now, we must step away from the machine, from the incessant metrics and performance indicators. We must create to feed ourselves, not the market.

Breaking away is not easy. It can feel frightening, even isolating. Many feel they must leave their jobs, travel, or reinvent themselves to find that dormant part of their being—the part starved by productivity.

So where are we now?

The good news is that creativity as a construct remains strong. Decades of research have given us deep understanding of how it works, but this understanding no longer nourishes us. It satisfies the machine, not the soul.

Even leading theorists now admit they have reached the end of the road. They ask not value for what but value for whom? Perhaps it is time to step away, to acknowledge that creativity as an ideal has been seized by neoliberalism and no longer serves the individual.

So what does?

Here, I turn to the metaphor of the return to the wild. Rousseau wrote of this, as did Lévi-Strauss in The Savage Mind, and Dewey in his insistence on the rawness of experience. To reconnect with our creative selves, we must step away from the teat of neoliberalism and feed ourselves again.

Returning to the wild can mean many things. For some, it is literal—reconnecting with nature, walking through forests, bathing in silence. For others, it is internal—finding solitude away from machines, away from constant production.

It is in these spaces that the rawness of experience is restored. Here, we oil the machine of the self. We slow down. We listen.

This is where aesthetic theory enters the conversation. Through aesthetics, we reconnect to our sensory selves—to touch, sight, sound, smell—the living interface between inner and outer worlds. Aesthetic experience reminds us we are one-of-a-kind, blossoming slowly, like a flower in phases.

Within education, aesthetic theory is re-emerging after decades of being overshadowed by “creativity.” A quiet revolution is underway. In the newly released K–6 Arts Curriculum, the word aesthetic appears before create. This subtle reordering signifies something profound: a shift away from a purely Kantian lineage toward a more naturalistic, experiential one.

Kant elevated aesthetic sensitivity to an elite position—removing the arts from everyday life and placing them in galleries and concert halls. But a non-Kantian, naturalistic understanding of aesthetics returns art to everyone. It reminds us that to sense—to feel, to perceive—is to be human.

Through this lens, aesthetics becomes a philosophy of reconnection. It helps us see that art is not a product but a process of being alive. It invites us to look again at the world, to find meaning in everyday perception, and to restore learning as a sensory, relational act.

When we leave behind the codified, monetised notion of creativity and step into the aesthetic, we begin again. We move from quantitative science to qualitative life. We look to lived experience, to story, to curiosity—to the self as instrument.

Creativity may be hijacked, but we do not need to remain its captives. Stepping away—periodically, intentionally—and returning to the wild is the first step toward freedom.

Until next time,

Mon x