It’s tempting, in moments of global-scale crisis—pandemics, ecological collapse, economic entropy, the general sense that things are, in some cosmic and irreversible way, falling apart—to think of creativity as something optional. The general reasoning goes like this: when society is on fire, when we are metaphorically (or literally) teetering on the precipice, is the best possible use of human effort really to, say, paint pictures or write novels or theorize about the semiotics of late capitalism?
This would be a reasonable argument, except that it’s also demonstrably wrong. Because what actually happens in moments of crisis is that creativity doesn’t vanish—it becomes the thing that keeps us going. It’s the paintings and books and ideas and technological leaps that help us process the whole absurd, often terrifying business of being alive, particularly when the world starts feeling more and more like a badly scripted dystopian film.
1. Artists as the First Responder Nobody Thinks About
Here’s a fun thought experiment: try imagining any historical period of crisis without artists. The Renaissance without da Vinci and Michelangelo. The Great Depression without Steinbeck or Dorothea Lange’s photographs. World War II without Orwell. The Civil Rights Movement without Nina Simone or James Baldwin. The COVID-19 pandemic without literally every Netflix series and novel people clung to while in lockdown.
The problem is that creativity—especially the kind produced by artists—is often seen as a kind of secondary concern, like emotional luxury goods. Which is to say, people forget that art does something fundamentally different from mere entertainment: it gives us ways of looking at a world that might otherwise seem unbearable.
This, by the way, is not just some starry-eyed humanities-major argument. The function of art in crisis is to force confrontation. Think of Goya’s The Third of May 1808, a painting that makes you feel the exact, gut-wrenching horror of execution. Or the way protest music has historically operated as both a rallying cry and an emotional processing tool. Creativity, at its best, doesn’t just mirror reality; it mutates it, forces people to think differently, to feel differently, to imagine alternatives.
2. Thinking Our Way Out of the Abyss
One of the underrated realities of global crisis (or really, just existence in general) is that the world is complicated as hell. And not just in a “too many tabs open on your browser” way but in a fundamental, chaotic systems theory kind of way, where the number of interlocking economic, environmental, political, and technological forces shaping our daily lives is functionally infinite.
This is where thinkers—philosophers, scientists, essayists, cultural critics, anyone whose primary job is to process complexity—become indispensable. It’s not just that they help break things down into digestible intellectual chunks; it’s that they offer frameworks for making sense of why the world feels like it does.
Example: Orwell, writing in 1946, basically saw where language was going—how political power relies on distorting words, how certain phrases could be used to lull people into passivity. Jump to today, and suddenly we’re all very aware that the way something is framed is often more important than the thing itself.
3. Innovators and the Practical Magic of Figuring It Out
If artists and thinkers are busy diagnosing the problem and offering ways to conceptualize it, then innovators—the engineers, designers, entrepreneurs, scientists—are the ones actually rolling up their sleeves and trying to fix things. It’s easy to think of “innovation” as just another tech-industry buzzword, but in reality, it’s the most tangible expression of creativity in action.
You want to know what happens when innovation is taken seriously? The polio vaccine. The internet. The printing press.
The COVID-19 pandemic is a case study in what happens when creative problem-solving goes into overdrive. The shift to remote work and digital learning. The literal reinvention of how medical research is conducted (i.e., the mRNA vaccine). The sheer volume of new ideas generated in response to a single crisis is proof that innovation isn’t some abstract concept—it’s survival strategy.
And yet, in a lot of ways, we’ve backed ourselves into a weird corner where creative problem-solving is treated as secondary to efficiency, to profit margins, to bureaucratic inertia. You want to see what happens when innovation is neglected? Look at climate change. The problem isn’t that we lack solutions—it’s that we’re not willing to prioritize the kind of creativity that can actually implement them.
4. What Happens When Creativity Is Starved?
This part is simple: societies that suppress creativity, whether through censorship, economic neglect, or just a generalized cultural disinterest, tend to become miserable places to live.⁸ The stagnation of thought, the erosion of artistic and intellectual life, the rise of ideological conformity—it’s all a direct result of failing to cultivate creative energy.
This is not an exaggeration. Historically, some of the bleakest periods of human existence have coincided with an outright hostility toward art, critical thinking, and innovation. Dictatorships tend to imprison poets. Repressive regimes rewrite history to eliminate thinkers who question the status quo. Societies obsessed with short-term gain often devalue the kind of innovation that solves long-term problems.
In other words, when creativity is ignored, what you get is a slow, grinding descent into mediocrity—a world where problems fester instead of getting solved, where people become numb instead of inspired, where crisis feels like a perpetual state rather than a moment that can be moved through.
5. Conclusion: Why You Should Actually Care About Any of This
So what does this all mean, practically speaking?
It means that if you’re an artist, a thinker, or an innovator—someone who creates things, who wrestles with big ideas, who solves problems—you’re doing work that is vital in a way that history will absolutely recognize, even if the present moment doesn’t. It means that societies that actively support creativity—through education, funding, freedom of expression—are the ones best equipped to handle crisis. And it means that, collectively, we have to resist the deeply ingrained assumption that creativity is a luxury, rather than the thing that makes civilization possible.
Or, put more simply: If you ever feel like art, or philosophy, or scientific curiosity, or storytelling, or technological innovation doesn’t matter, consider the alternative.
Essays, Art and Plays by Dan 
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