16 December 2025
Passion's etymology can be related to the Greek pathein (παθεῖν) 'to suffer'.
ἀπὸ τοῦ παθεῖν [τὸ πάς]χειν. Peri Pascha, Mileto of Sardis
When one undertakes a passionate work, the artist imbues his suffering into such a work. For example, take the archetype of the "mentally ill actor". When he escapes into his characters, he infuses them with the passion of a suffering soul. Or Edvard Munch's 'The Scream': Munch's pain is channelled into each stroke of the brush, leaving a tangible artifact of suffering. At a broad level, the very act of creating cannot escape showing some faint traces of the suffering of the creator. For if creation involves the use of the psyche of the creator at the most subconscious level, then whatsoever harms the psyche and whatsoever the psyche remembers per se influences the creator's work.
I had the pleasure of meeting Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's son, Ignat. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote a gruelling account of the gulag system in 'Gulag Archipelago'. That book (technically an anthology of books), though not for the faint of heart, exemplifies suffering's explicit influence on his creative works.
Ignat gave a speech at my college, and during the course of the event he gave a brief question-and-answer session. I asked him the question,
Do you believe all great art has suffering behind it?
He answered,
Yes.
And the rest of the auditorium erupted into applause. He and I were both confused. He added an addendum for the reasoning behind his thoughts, but it since has escaped me. Regardless, when we imbue something with passion, when we create, we are imbuing it also with suffering.
Through the process of creation, we aid our psyches in processing damage. Manifold are those who make songs, poems, journal entries, paintings, etc., during a moment of despair and pain and feel better afterwards. If one imbues his suffering into it, then it permits the psychic distancing of the pain. Creating a third-person representation of the view metaphorically moves the pain from interior to exterior and thus eases the intellectual (and afterwards, emotional) healing of pain.
The foremost example of this is art therapy. But to those who are in the habit of creating (for those in the pits of despair frequently are not in such a habit) individualized works of art are even more effective and personalized for psychic recovery.
We of the West have the economic means to increase one-hundredfold the proportion of artists and creatives. Everyone who wanted to be a DaVinci, a Van Gogh, a Picasso could have his own patron. Yet the reason that we see so few artists devote themselves to their craft is financial uncertainty. This is certainly the case for me. If I could guarantee a meagre salary, I would quit my job and write full time. But because the average man still struggles financially and still has to spend most of his waking hours working (and thereby not resting, which is the fuel for creativity), we are left with the substitute for creation: consumption.
Consumption has ousted creation. Consumption, of course, is far easier. Passive consumption involves minimal effort at best and with each passing day algorithms are improved to make it harder to resist, easier to start, and harder to put down. Active consumption is less common.
For clarity's sake, active consumption is anything that involves the use of an acquired skill in receiving or taking in. Thus, reading can be considered an active skill, because reading is learned; watching TV or short-form content would be passive. Listening to a radio broadcast in Morse code would be active, but listening to AM/FM radio is passive. Further, I mean not to say that we never should passively consume, but when we do passively consume we ought to do so intentionally rather than mindlessly.
Fewer people are willing to create. Those that do often are externally driven to do so. I surmise that those that do end up creating end up comparing themselves with others and are discouraged and stop. This has happened to me, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who has experienced this.
Images generated with AI are called art to some. Yet that is a betrayal of the word "art". Art comes from the Greek "techne", where we get technology. It is the application of skill. Yet there is hardly any skill beyond the use of English to "engineer" prompts into something that produces a pleasing image. Perhaps there is art, "techne", in the creation of such programs to generate images. But to conflate the passionless process of generating images to the passionful creative exercise of art is no less than heresy.
Have you noticed that once a YouTube channel reaches a certain size (let us say, 3 million subscribers) that their videos tend to approach an asymptote of sameness? The jump-cuts, the stringing along, the clickbaity titles, the sponsored content, *those thumbnails*, overexaggerated faces, hyperbolic premises.
Let me be clear: I am not saying that there is no creativity exercised in making a YouTube video. Rather, what is considered industry standard for career-style YouTube videos is becoming less about making the most creatively interesting videos and more about making same-y financially viable content.
Yet with the dawn of Web 2.0 twenty years ago, it has been claimed that there are more outlets for creativity. Making TikToks, creating YouTube videos, drawing for Instagram, selling paintings on Facebook. It is more the illusion of creativity; the average creative work disappears into the aether of invisibility after its critical nascence. For those whom the lack of the extrinsic reward of exposure matters, the undelivered promises of faux-creativity seem even more bitter than never having used the creative muscles at all.
It is better to create for yourself, then, than to create for extrinsic benefit.
Extrinsic motivation fails the creative soul. Everyone has something worth saying, something worth writing, something worth making. But it is so infrequent that the intrinsic urge to make strikes. Sadly, too, it is often drowned in the sea of external rewards.
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