Creativity

via Pinterest

Very true.  While trends and fads will fade over time, filling the colorful pages of both our memories and pop culture, creativity truly never goes out of style.  Creativity is the driving force behind innovation, the flow behind art and fashion and of course, consumerism.  Without it, consumerism would be bland.  Creativity indeed makes the world go round; brightens the monotony of our days.

These are my thoughts as I think about what consumerism means to me.  I've never been one to follow fads and trends for long, as my soul has always tended to forge my own path amid the loudness of the world around me.  But I pay my dues to the trends that creativity fosters; the very ideas turned into products that fill page after page of Etsy searches.  My own included.  This line of contemplation has made me wonder if creativity is at all an individual endeavor, or if it is really a collective endeavor with its own little niches, nooks and crannies for the individual to make one's own.

We are all inundated with visual pop culture representations via real life and online sources, its loudness visible in SEO-friendly verbiage and hipster-heavy photography.  We often forget that behind the polished branding and blatant consumeristic slant this highly stylized, appealing visual representation was once a mere, simple idea.  A creative twinkle in someone's eye.  But what separates creativity from trend is the staying power of the idea and not just the physical product itself.  A genius idea--say Einstein's Theory of Relativity, or Dickinson's poetry, or Mohnton Knitting Mill's American-made cotton tees--is one that never goes out of style.  Instead, it becomes uniquely reinterpreted over the years to fit into vast stretches of time (with its interesting time-period trends and fads).  Creativity is, to sum it up, an adaptable force to be reckoned with.