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Creating Identity Through Materialism |
As a teenager, we all sought out things with which to underpin and form our identity. The right brands that conveyed our personal values of tribe or wealth were important factors before forking over hard-earned cash from our after-school jobs or Christmas presents.
But creating identity this way through materialism is a bit like a drug: Every drop of the stuff gives us a rush of comfort, excitement or belonging before subsiding. Soon enough, those $200 Nikes aren't enough and we instead long for the $350 sneakers. Before you know it, our movement up the salary ladder unlocks funds that make $1,200 Balenciagas the new norm; a never-ending cycle of pseudo "comfort creation".
Eventually, we might move past this identity creation through materialism, but oddly enough, I'm starting to think this is happening much earlier: today, we're inundated by identity-centric brands at a much younger age today, leaving us tired and burnt out before we can dream of affording more expensive goods (or of other more important things for that matter). Even for those who aren't "addicts" in the strictest sense, we might nonetheless be suffering from the same commercialized attachment to personal identity, uniqueness and expression through ownership. It's a difficult emotional weight to lift off our shoudlers, but divesting ourselves of this burden is within our capability.
Committing to an identity based on values and beliefs — especially when there is no material representation of it in this world — means a lot of discomforting introspection, but going through that offers a much longer-term fulfilment and sense of empowerment you won't find in any collection of "authentic" purpose-built clutter.
- Eugene |
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The Darker Side: Malevolent Creativity |
The Analysis |
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We commonly think of creativity as a purely positive, enabling quality, but can it be used in a way that’s explicitly harmful? We unpack the idea of malevolent creativity and how it manifests in today’s world.
What is Malevolent Creativity?
To understand what malevolent creativity is, it helps to set out a few terms:
- Malevolence: the intent to harm people
- Imagination: involves generating sensory experiences (though not strictly “seeing”) in varying degrees of vividness that aren’t real,
- Creativity: the ability to produce original ideas out of other ones using that very imagination.
Taken together, malevolent creativity relies on the imagination to come up with new ideas that are explicitly meant to harm people when executed. In a paper on the subject, researchers David H Cropley, James C. Kaufman, and Arthur Cropley describe it as: “Such creativity is deemed necessary by some society, group, or individual to fulfill goals they regard as desirable, but has serious negative consequences for some other group, these negative consequences being fully intended by the first group.”
For the consequences of malevolent creativity in our media-saturated world, read the rest of this Analysis on MAEKAN.com.
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From the Archives
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Evergreen stories from MAEKAN's archives.
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There's More Than Just Cloth and Thread — Samuel Ross of A-COLD-WALL*
Samuel Ross was never just about being a skilled artist in just one medium. His passion for realizing good, considered ideas through graphics, film, design and fashion have followed him through his tumultuous youth all the way to a celebrated career in the creative world.
Most importantly, his tenacity has allowed the underlying voice behind his talent to transcend mediums and comment on the class system.
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For Your A-10-Tion |
The best links from across the Internet. |
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