Creations of joy vs creations of misery

This I thought of and began writing after being originally inspired by the disco-dancing at Volunteer Park.

It's been nine days since I wrote the topic, and four days since I wrote the previous line and I haven't gotten about to writing my thoughts on the matter because I feel they should encompass so much, should be this grand vision of humanity and a political philosophy describing contemporary matters. It is possible I create outrageously high expectations for myself that's impossible to meet under realistic circumstances.

And now it's been yet another week since I wrote the previous paragraph, it's time I got around to writing this, at least the first draft if nothing else. It's been something that's been ruminating in my mind for a while now, particularly when I'm watching movies or dancing or listening to music.

The thing is, any creation of artistic work is generally sold as creation of misery. It's often compared to birthing a child, in trying to explain the main and suffering and the artistic ennui suffered by the creator until their output was produced.

And there's the myth of the tortured artist. How all works of art are inspired by trauma or misery or some sort of painful experience that the creator had to go through. It's presented almost as if no art can be created without these heavy negative emotions because only they can inspire art or something.

And that's just so straight-out wrong.

The cult of misery, I'll name it, has been ascendant in the last decade, and they've infiltrated our arts, politics, culture and economic thought. The gist of their theory of the world is always this: that the world is awful, there's only suffering and it'll get worse, it's everybody fault for it, and we should all feel very bad for enjoying life, or not constantly being in pain. They seem to have taken the joke epithet, 'life is miserable, and then you die' quite literally. You are not allowed to enjoy, you're not allowed to indulge, you're not allowed to appreciate, because there's so many bad things happening and how dare you!

So there's two related but different movements, if you've been careful up to this point: the concept of the creator as a tortured miserable being, and of the consumer being in the same space. The consequences might be different, but they come from the same space: a myth of creation of misery.

But I've been thinking about it, and there's no reason why that needs to be the case. I know artists and directors and actors who absolutely enjoy their craft, who enjoy creating and who might have issues of guilt and insufficiency while creating but they're nowhere near what one would consider tortured. And quite often, their joy of creation translates to their work and on to the consumer: you can feel how happy they were to write something or sing a song, and you start feeling the same joy. Particularly if you're not in the cult of misery, you realize that the world is a beautiful place that doesn't need constant suffering to justify its existence, and that you can care for about all the important causes without being a depressed downer all the time. It's possible to create with joy, and it's possible to be joyous and indulgent consumers, and there's fundamentally no difference between that an otherwise except you feel a lot better.

Given the two options, why choose to suffer and writhe in agony? Some people feel they must. And it's okay, as long as they understand it's their choice to be miserable and in agony, and that doesn't reflect the real state of the world.