[Longform venting]

Creative pursuits have been gradually and relentless undermined in a public flogging, sentenced to a death by a thousand cuts.

Every industry, from print to film to gaming has been brutally beaten into submission by the bloody fists of Metrics named ROI.

We are all participating witnesses, standing by and watching this ceremonious execution of art with enraptured passiveness.

How many new intellectual properties have come out in recent years? How many new creative worlds and ideas have taken off recently? How many new and untrodden ideas have received the correct amount of backing to flourish?

Maybe nothing is original anymore, but new creatives aren’t even given the opportunity to try.

Instead we have relaunched, rebooted, and rehashed stories that contain no soul. They are an endless list of checkboxes that do not tread new ground, do not broaden our horizons, and do not challenge the human mind to see from a different perspective. If you consume media at all, you know exactly what I’m referring to.

The suffocation of the creative mind is the death knell of everything that made us great. Who would have ever dared to think outside the box when the ROI of doing so is so low? Who would have ever wondered what is out there in space? Moreover, who would have ever funded any of what made current our lives great if the Metrics were all that mattered?

We are sinking ever deeper into the vicious cycle of Metrics. By doing the same activities and making the same purchasing decisions, we are rewarding the Metrics machine and giving it no incentive to change its thesis: that we don’t want anything new, that we just want the comfortable old thing.

If you’re a Millennial like me, this should be a terrifying thought. Soon we will make the same mistake and slip into the same mindset that we worked so hard against in our youth. That one day, we will become “the adversary against progress.” We will comfort ourselves watching the next butchered Lord of the Rings adaptation or Star Wars entry, chasing a high we long forfeited by clinging to our crippling addiction to the familiar.

Disgusting.

Recognize this behavior by changing your actions the next time you are offered different options.

I’ll end with a snippet of one of my favorite poems.

“I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.”

– Robert Frost