The Strange Death of Culture
Anxiety culture is killing creativity.
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My teenaged niece and nephew do not believe a word their gin-addled uncle says. When I claim wistfully that we once wrote great novels, produced great music, and created great film, they scoff as if I’m claiming the moon is made of cheese. To them, culture stopped in the year 2000.
It’s all a conspiracy. Since the 1990s, creativity has dipped its feet in concrete and ambled over Tower Bridge. This is not nostalgia talking, nor a sentimental whine about ‘how things used to be.’ It happens to be true. And this decline is visible everywhere: in education, politics, culture, art, and everyday life.
Take the most egregious word ever to pollute the English language: reimagine. Not only is this word not really a word, but it describes something grotesque.
An author has released a novel to much fanfare. The premise? A reimagination of Moby Dick from the perspective of a cross-dressing female sailor. Reader, are you still with me? Roll your eyes clockwise for ‘yes’. Call Me Ishmaelle reimagines Moby Dick. A harsher observer might call such reimagination something else entirely.
This culture of reimagination suggests one thing: we cannot create original works, so we plagiarise the greats instead. Is ‘plagiarise’ too harsh a charge? Perhaps. But where is the line between ‘reimagination’ and ‘ripping off the work of another’?
Let’s ignore the merits and demerits of reimagining great works. A cursory Google chucks up a wall of such reimaginations. It appears that we as a culture have forgotten how to create something new. Have we simply exhausted the limits of human creativity? I highly doubt it. After all, now and then, a great work of culture slips past the slop and the sludge.
According to experts, creativity has dissolved beneath wave after wave of tests and schedules and supervisions and optimisations—beginning at school and continuing into work. And yet, we seldom produce anything that feels genuinely daring or, dare I say it—alive.
But these are not isolated problems. They are features of a deeper cultural condition—a culture of anxiety that meddles relentlessly in favour of outcome over process. And that culture is the antithesis of creativity.
We could call it safetyism. A condition that, in its broadest sense, is a culture of anxiety. It seeks to protect, to manage risk, to guarantee outcomes in advance. It is obsessed with what might go wrong. Everything must be assessed, justified, and rendered safe. Creativity, however, depends on the opposite conditions. It requires discovery, percolation, waste, and the freedom to let things be. The essence of creativity lies not in optimisation but in process.
A creative culture focuses on exploration rather than results. It tolerates uncertainty and allows ideas to develop slowly, privately, and imperfectly. Many ideas must die quietly for a few to live. An anxious culture, by contrast, demands proof of value before the process has even begun. It asks what an idea will lead to before allowing it to exist. This inversion is fatal. When we prioritise outcome over exploration, the creative faculties cease.
Naturally, this anxiety culture is hostile to free speech and freedom of expression. Risky speech is treated not as a condition of thought but as a potential harm. Speech is policed, softened, hedged, or pre-emptively withdrawn. Creativity cannot survive this atmosphere. As Orwell warned, take away freedom of speech and the creative faculties dry up. The point is not merely political. Creativity requires the freedom to say foolish, premature, or unpopular things — often privately, often tentatively. A culture that fears risk in speech will inevitably fear risk in thought.
Worse still, anxiety culture replicates itself. Each thing deemed ‘unsafe’ narrows our tolerance for discomfort. The safe becomes unsafe, and the unsafe becomes unthinkable. Over time, almost everything feels risky. This is how cultures stagnate: not through overt repression, but through the internalisation of fear. When free people censor themselves, creativity dies in the womb.
The smartphone has turbocharged this culture of anxiety. By filling every empty moment, we have abolished boredom—the natural precondition of creativity. This culture fixates too upon outcome. Dating apps reduce the mess of intimacy to a clean, editable spreadsheet. You must be at least six foot to ride.
Travel to any major city and you’ll see swarms of self-same crowds, eager to prove they were somewhere rather than merely be that somewhere. They record concerts and tick off itineraries, all consumed by the deliciously ironic fear of missing out.
Look around you. If you are in public—or what used to be public before the smartphone—over half the surrounding people are likely scrolling through their phones. Adult life has become an anti-process life. We are checking email, building our brand, retweeting to curry favour, deciding which grievance to adopt. What are we not doing? Thinking.
To be blunt, we spend an average of six hours a day on our phones. This habit dissolves attention spans and erodes the capacity for deep thought—indeed, for sustained thought of any kind. Overstimulation leaves no time for ideas to mature, no silence in which problems can be solved. Smartphones fry the electrified meat between our ears, which still thinks we are roaming the plains spearing bison.
This is why boredom—or what we should really call reverie—is essential to creativity. Boredom is not emptiness. It is incubation. It is the state in which the unconscious is allowed to work. There is a reason we have our best ideas in the shower, on long walks, or just before bed. There is a reason we are told to sleep on it. In those seemingly empty moments, boredom knits together novels, symphonies, and ideas. Scrolling never will.
The daily routines of great artists and thinkers confirm this. They were routines of process over outcome: walking, thinking, doing nothing. What we now call deep work was once called work.
One of the most useful pieces of advice given to any creative person is not to talk an idea to death. Ideas need time away from noise, opinion, and premature judgement.
Our culture is the reverse. Twitter is to culture what lead pipes are to water. It is the antithesis of creativity. How many ideas are tweeted into oblivion before they have time to become anything at all? How many novels, plays, films, and symphonies have we chattered into cot death?
The results are everywhere. Risk-averse cultures do not stop producing culture; they recycle it. We reimagine novels. We reboot films. We update classics for modern audiences. Why? Because reimagining is safer than creating. Creation involves the risk of failure. Adding a few bells and whistles to a master work does not.
The political consequences follow naturally. An incurious culture produces incurious people, and incurious people produce crude politics. Black-and-white thinking flourishes where reflection has died.
Our loathsome public discourse is not an aberration. It is a symptom of a culture scrolling itself to death. Just witness the modern fetish for cancelling public figures without so much as a word from the accused. In plain English, it’s a reversion to something much uglier.
The antidote is not more content, more platforms, or more optimisation. It is a return to process. A culture that tolerates boredom. A culture that allows ideas to fail quietly, off-screen, and in peace.
Creativity does not need to be engineered or reimagined. It needs to be left the hell alone.
Holy shit, I thought you were kidding about the re-imagined Moby Dick book. But alas, that shit is real. Maybe Jonathan Haidt was onto something with his "Anxious Generation". Is this just the manifestation of that anxiety on arts, politics, and culture? O cursed spite, can your generation make this right?
My wife is a novelist and our house is filled with galleys in search of a blurb (she can barely go outside without getting a blurb request), for both prose and poetry, so I might be able to add a few more factors to what's caused our sad, drab Age of Sterility.
Most of modern Lit (at least here in America) is written by the same cohort of postcollegiate young suburban women (with the occasional young gay man thrown in), all from good schools who often come with the imprimatur of an upscale magazine or MFA program, all written in the same glib, stilted style and afflicted with a stifling solipsism, always painfully presentist even if set in earlier times, and obsessively focused on the same issues. It's usually the story of a young woman coming to terms with her sexuality and gender awareness, often both boasting of promiscuity while also regretting some of it retroactively, with some career/dating twists and turns where our protagonist learns how shitty the world is, especially men and their cruel and stupid creation called "late-stage capitalism". The theme always seems to be some variation on the most powerful word of our age: TRAUMA.
Most of these books will be pulped and maybe one in a hundred will have real life and style in it, but the vast majority arrive stillborn on the page, with no more lasting value than a blog post. I think there are two reasons for our postliterate literature: first, most of these writers don't seem particularly well-read or that interested or in love with Literature, they're not only NOT grounded in any tradition they seem completely unaware of them, and they write such flat sentences that someone who's read a few thousand more pages of novels would blush to publish. They are much more rooted in pop culture and internet trends than in any lasting works or their authors.
And, second, they all seem to have led such spoiled and sheltered lives, they have limited awareness of the tragic elements of life that made the work of our ancestors so much richer: wars, depressions, real social strife and strictures, illness and death etc, all the various setbacks and sacrifices that provide vital experience in life and depth and tension on the page. They are simply callow children, with a child's biography, worldview and desires.
We're going to need some sort of cataclysm here in the American Empire if our art and artists are going to have anything vital to say and any desire to say it with style, flair and originality. Maybe the upcoming civil war will do it? Almost anything is worth living through if it breaks up our current era of moralistic stagnation where you can't tell a novelist or musician from an HR rep or campus dean.
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