[kingdomcome50]

I can't help but to imagine how an essay of this sort (about creativity) would look written by someone < 30yo versus written be someone > 60yo?

What I mean is that, as I have aged (and I am by no means old), the most obvious relationship between "creativity" and "age" has been the ever-raising bar that must be reached in order for me to think of something as creative.

Growing up I always thought it was so odd how indifferent my parents (and older people in general) felt towards all the newest music/movies etc., but now I realize that none of it was really new at all! It's the same stories/tropes/punchlines being regurgitated over and over. I was just young and hadn't yet had the breadth of experience to know what creativity actually looked like.

Maybe it's not that getting older makes us less creative in an absolute sense, rather, that as we get older we find it harder and harder to be creative in a relative sense? And so efforts that we may have found "worth it" at 25 no longer appeal at 65, and are therefore not even attempted (despite containing some creativity).