Jack Murray - BlogRediscovering imagination1967 words (approx 10 min)

I lost my creativity.

Perhaps it’s better described as my imagination.

And it's kind of sad, because as a kid I spent most of my time doing creative and imagination-driven things.

I loved drawing - not for the craft - but for what I could create from nothing. A friend and I in Grade 4 even created our own whole Pokemon region, with our own hand drawn cards and all.

I loved video games - not for the gameplay - but for the awe and wonder in uncovering new things and getting a grasp on the world that someone had dreamed up. The worlds of Jak and Daxter, Ratchet and Clank, and Sly Cooper being big parts of my growing up.

I loved science - not necessarily for the scientific method itself - but for the interesting answers and seemingly magical, otherworldliness that could be found on the other side of finding things out. Space, prehistoric creatures, and wildlife were so fascinating to 12 year old me.

I loved creativity and imagination.

Creativity for creativity's sake.

The idea of creativity for 'work' didn't really exist. Actually, I was extremely disconnected from the realities of ‘work’. I was a bit naive in that way.

I always struggled to answer the question “what do you want to be when you grow up?”.

I never had any answer. Like, nothing. I couldn't really comprehend it. In the end I'd brush it off with some interest that crossed my mind at the time, or what would simply get them to go away.

When asked for my Grade 6 primary school yearbook what I wanted to be, I said I don’t know.

“We have to put something in here”, they said, “We can’t just put ‘I don’t know’”.

That was annoying to me.

I ended up cynically saying, “fine, put professional BMX rider then”.

Ironic, coming from the big scaredy cat of his friends that would rarely even go off a jump a couple of feet tall.

BMX rider is etched into that yearbook, unchangeable now.

The truth is I was a smart kid, a goody-two-shoes. I was one of those lazy ones though, that’d do the homework or assignment at the absolute last minute and somehow end up with good grades.

But somehow I never had conviction around any 'job' idea.

I just never had any that I could see myself doing for life. Nor did I really care at the time. Though, looking back it was more a feeling of kicking the can down the road.

“I’ll figure it out later, I’ve got time”, I said to myself.

I was more concerned with making fun things that didn’t have any commercial value whatsoever, either conjured from my head or engaging and expanding the world someone else created.

Creation for creation’s sake, completely innocent of commercial reality.

I never figured it out later though, and I still haven't at 29.

It wasn’t until I was in Grade 9 that - thinking back on it - my imagination started to show signs of fading away. Reflecting on it a lot, it’s probably well timed with getting my first job, but it definitely wasn’t completely gone then.

I worked at a butcher shop on weekends and weeknights, and that’s where I began to see the realities of ‘work’. The shop was at the bottom floor of a busy shopping centre, and the apprentice butchers would regularly work six days a week from before the sun came up and when they left the sun would already be down. No daylight on most days, working hard.

Most of them I swear smoked just so they could get the breaks that came with smoking.

I know my imagination wasn’t completely lost from then on though, because I would spend almost all of the money I earned there on video games, Warhammer figurines and paints, and Photoshop and video editing software.

In my final grade of high school, I got really into Dante’s Inferno, Homer’s Iliad, Greek mythology, William Blake, and various other religious texts. History, too. As one of my final grade projects, in complete nerd-mode I taught myself how to write sonnets in iambic pentameter and created a suite of poems centred around the flaws of humanity. I was super proud of how it turned out.

I didn’t really do it strategically for the grades. I did it because I was following curious obsession. When I would write, it was a mix between being lost in my own imagination and completing an interesting puzzle at the same time.

I finished high school with great grades.

But I still didn’t know the answer to the question of what I want to do next. Knowing I should probably go to university, I ended up taking the course with the highest grade requirements I could.

A Bachelor of Commerce (Economics) and Bachelor of Laws degree.

I know what you’re thinking. And I now think it too.

If you could pick any course in a university that would systematically drain someone of their imagination and creativity like a vampire… this would be a top contender for best pick.

Weirdly, it sucked me in at first though. There was new knowledge in these spaces that I’d never heard of or really been exposed to. There was intriguing ethical and social questions posed. There were interesting mental models to get sucked into with a rich history of how they’d been tried and succeeded or failed across the world and throughout time.

Not by any explicit choice, I think over the course of these five years is when my imagination actually faded away. It slipped away without me even noticing.

This is when I lost my imagination and a lot of real creativity.

I stopped writing or making stuff for just making stuff’s sake.

I stopped following creative and imaginative story interests.

I even pretty much stopped playing video games entirely, just the rare big hit game everyone was talking about.

Sadly, I actually can’t really name a single notable ‘creative’ project I made since.

Sure, there's the tech products I've help build with teams, but nothing that was mostly me and nothing super creative that I'm super proud of.

My imagination had somehow slipped through my fingers and faded away. What was once a huge bonfire of intrigue and fascination became almost invisible.

But I didn’t realise any of this at the time. Any imaginative and creative interests I had seemed to just get substituted with other more logical or rational or reality-bound things.

While I stopped writing creatively, I started writing legal drafts and contracts for a law firm I worked at, and working on legal ethics assignments.

While I stopped following weird creative story interests, I started engaging in non-fiction interests. Anything from biographies to science to human physiology to geography to business stories.

And while I pretty much stopped playing video games, I started a stock trading account and made progressing in fitness a game of self-development.

One by one, each thing just seemed to be slyly shuffled out and substituted without me really knowing it. Followed by some travel and more than another seven years working in law and then technology, my metamorphosis into a logical, rational person was complete.

My creativity was strictly the ‘useful’ kind.

To be honest, it wasn’t until only a few weeks ago that I realised I’d even lost something.

While working, I’d squirrelled away a couple of years worth of expenses for myself with a view to go and start my own startup. It seemed like the next logical progression of my career. I still believe it is. I made that leap a few months ago.

Admittedly though, it wasn’t the only reason I wanted to make the leap. Something wasn’t feeling right, and I knew it but couldn’t articulate it. Coincidently I also happened across a book called The Pathless Path by Paul Millerd. It wasn’t a perfect book, but his story really resonated with what I was noticing. He articulated really well this idea of falling into the ‘default path’. The idea of completely innocently and completely unintentionally ending up doing something that isn’t really ‘you’.

I realised this was me.

It made leaving my job an even more interesting experiment.

Could I recapture some part of me that I at some point somewhere lost without knowing it?

Leaving your job makes you question all sorts of things. It makes you pretty existential. It makes you reflect a lot.

The quitting was the easy part, the following months of contemplation… the very hard part.

After just a few months of properly not working for a ‘default path’ job, something weird happened and clicked. I was still uncomfortable and uncertain, but I felt myself as more outside looking in than inside trying to get out. I could suddenly see the default paths people were following - not in any kind of judgemental way (many of them extremely happy people living their lives) - but in a way I simply couldn’t have just a few months ago.

My tectonic plates of my worldview began a big shift over the course of just the last few months - jobless by choice, wandering and exploring.

And weirdly, I’ve noticed a little candle, still lit, and its flame began to grow.

My imagination and creativity.

When completely unforced, my interests started coalescing around imaginative and creative things.

It started with reading some new manga and anime (Japanese comics and animations), an interest that I’d loved growing up in high school. I figured ‘why not’. I can’t explain it, I just felt like it. Then some video games.

Then a lot of writing. Some journaling, some reflections, some more non-fiction more 'work-y' type stuff, for now. But all stuff that I actually wanted to write.

Then designing and coding some fun projects. From an app that documents a recipe from every country in the world to tick off, to some really minimalistic websites like the one you’re reading with his blog on it.

Most recently, I’ve had more scientific curiosity. Like my recent trip to a zoo with my wife for her birthday, and I felt some of that child-like joy seeing a few animals I’d never even known existed.

I can feel an imaginative pull building momentum.

I can feel myself starting to rediscover lost creativity and imagination.

I can feel my curiosity building for discovering new and different things.

Don’t get me wrong, this is in no way me saying I’ve grasped it now and I’ve found some creative pursuit. Far from it. I’m still in the hard part I think. The uncertain fog. It’s quite existential, really. Day by day is very different, and I can feel the pull of the ‘default path’ demanding me back often. I definitely can’t see the other side just yet. Is there even an ‘other side’?

But now, sitting on the outside and looking in and back, I know enough now to know I should keep exploring. I’ll rediscover remnants of my creativity and imagination I lost along the way here. I’ll protect and foster the parts that bring me joy. I make some stuff just because I want to see it in the world.

I don’t think there’s any going back.

Funnily, I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. But ‘growing up’ shouldn’t mean leaving your imagination behind. Maybe ‘growing up’ is overrated in many ways.

This experiment of a journey out on my own so far has been a success if only for this realisation.

Maybe lifelong experimentation is something.

I'm now 100 days into this 'don't work a default path job' experiment, yet I still have a long way to go.