Creativity Is How We Survive
Why creativity is a survival skill and how we protect it
Wherever you’re standing right now—politically, culturally, creatively—it’s hard to argue that things feel especially stable. Systems we relied on are shifting or failing. Old assurances no longer hold. Even the stories we used to tell ourselves about how things work don’t land the way they used to. When moments like this arrive, the first thing that quietly gives way isn’t infrastructure. It’s imagination.
When systems strain and stories harden, we’re told, quietly and repeatedly, that there are fewer options now. Fewer paths. Less room to experiment. Less permission to change our minds. Creativity is reframed as indulgent, impractical, or dangerous at exactly the moment it becomes most necessary.
This is why we can’t think of creativity as a luxury. It’s a necessity. It is a survival skill.
Creativity is how humans adapt when the old maps stop working. It’s how we test alternatives, imagine exits, and keep meaning intact when familiar structures fail. Without it, we don’t just lose art. We lose flexibility. We lose ourselves.
Reclaiming our reality begins by rewriting over some of the most corrosive rhetoric we’re fed as creators… especially the idea that this work isn’t “real,” that it can’t sustain us, that it should be done only on the margins of a life that matters.
The truth is simpler and more dangerous: when we are creating, we are living. The return on that investment isn’t abstract. It’s survival.
We are all creators, and creativity is fueled by curiosity.
Curiosity is the instinct that keeps asking questions when certainty evaporates.
What if I tried this?
What happens if I stop doing it the way I always have?
What else might be possible here?
In a creative apocalypse, curiosity is reconnaissance. It’s how we gather information without committing too early. It keeps us moving without panic, but our curiosity is fragile. We need to protect it and keep it balanced between our yes and no.
Yes is how creativity advances. Yes opens routes that didn’t exist before. It allows unfinished ideas to become experiments. Yes gives permission for the next chapter to exist even when the plot isn’t clear yet.
Most lives and bodies of work we admire didn’t unfold because someone followed a sanctioned path. They unfolded because someone said yes to something unproven… a side project, a strange collaboration, a question that didn’t come with guarantees. From the outside, those choices often look inefficient. From the inside, they feel necessary.
But in a hostile and extractive environment, yes alone is not enough.
No is how creativity survives. No protects our energy. No maintains tone and keeps the signal from being drowned in noise. In a creative apocalypse, no is not selfishness. It is triage.
Every unnecessary yes drains resources you may need later. Every unexamined obligation blurs the story you’re trying to tell. When we fail to use no, our creativity doesn’t just disappear. It dissipates.
This is how people burn out. Not because they stop caring, but because they care in too many directions at once. It’s something I have to relearn regularly.
When our yes and no work together, we protect our creativity with a balance that emerges not as control, but as rhythm.
Every good survival strategy involves movement and pause. Exploration and shelter. Risk and recovery. Stories work the same way. Lives do too. Without rhythm, everything becomes either frantic or inert.
Rewriting our reality isn’t about reinvention for its own sake. It’s about authorship under pressure. About noticing where curiosity is asking us to advance, and where boundaries are asking us to hold the line. We become empowered. And here’s the part that matters most:
We are not alone.
Empowerment is contagious. When one person uses their yes and no with intention, when they choose curiosity over numbness and boundaries over exhaustion, it gives others room to do the same.
This is how worlds change.
Not all at once. Not through grand declarations, but through small, deliberate acts of creative survival that ripple outward.
When we reclaim our own reality, we help keep reality itself flexible. We keep imagination alive as a shared resource, not a private indulgence. Creativity is not something we do after we survive. It is how we survive.
Once we see that clearly, it becomes impossible to pretend this is a solo endeavor. Survival never is. Creativity doesn’t just help us navigate what’s ahead. It creates pathways others can follow.
Which means the question shifts from How do I survive this? to Who am I surviving alongside?
That’s where we’re going next. February’s theme is Leave No One Behind, and it begins with a simple understanding: the future we’re trying to reach can only be reached together.
Of interest…
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Supportive words of necessity. No matter what is happening around us, we must always strive to protect our creativity. Thank you for these encouraging words.
Angela, your statement “Empowerment is contagious" rings true. When we are pursuing our dream, believing the only barrier is what we are willing to commit to, then we can't help but bump into others who share our dream. Your generosity empower thousands! I have seen it so many times.. you buying their book, offering support, being an enabler of others success and joy. Thank you for reminding us to pick ourselves up, dust off the doubt, and face our future with smiling determination.