Reflections

I was reminded a day or two ago of how much creativity I have lost in the last 8 years of my life. When I was younger (living at home, in High School), the sky was pretty much the limit. I felt like I had the tools at my disposal to do pretty much whatever I wanted to do. Generally, I did pretty much whatever I wanted to do, too. What I lacked in financial resources, I made up for in skills. I wanted an electric guitar, but couldn't afford one. What to do? I went online and to the library, found the books and parts that I needed and built a guitar for myself. It played great, but there were a few things that needed to be adjusted, so I did it. From memory, I seem to recall having all sorts of hair-brained ideas. Most of them never went to completion, as I was much to ADD (and probably not capable of seeing them through, anyhow).

Regardless, going to college and moving out into the "real world" seem to have made me less creative and unoriginal than I've ever been in my life. Its mostly due to the structure that is imposed on us by society; working 40 hours a week, primarily during daylight hours in order to fulfill some obligation that we owe our employer (oh yeah, in exchange for a paycheck, I was wondering what obligation we owed for a second). Beyond that, we owe certain people/organizations set sums of money on given days of the month, in exchange for things that we now maintain in our possession. There really is no room for creativity to blossom within a schedule. Compounding the issue is that I'm so hopelessly disorganized, that I have issues freeing myself from my work responsibilities long enough to allow creativity to occur again.

However, I think that another issue that has led to the decline of my creativity is the disappearance of my "brain trust". In high school, I generally had either my brother or my a group of close classmates who would goad me into taking on a project that I would randomly think up. I do have people who occasionally check in on my engine project, but its not really the same. I think that the concept of engine building is a bit too abstract for most people to really get a good idea of what is going on with it. Either that, or most people think that its a foolish thing to spend money on.

Regardless, I'm looking for stuff to do to spice up life a little bit, and get out of society's rut. Anyone have any suggestions?