I’m always fascinated by our relationship with money because as we grow older, we realize just how important it is. It’s not only the importance of money itself, but our beliefs surrounding it and how much weight we give those beliefs.
The point of this article, however, is to explore one specific aspect of our relationship with money. One that comes with heavy expectations about what we accept. In this case, it’s the relationship between creativity and money. What I find most interesting is that we’ve inherited a narrative that doesn't serve us, and I rarely see people questioning it.
So, let's talk about it.
First, I want to get clear about what we're discussing here, because it's easy to get lost when combining money and creativity. When I talk about creativity, I'm speaking about our talent, whether that’s writing, singing, painting, drawing, dancing, or whatever way we choose to express ourselves creatively and perform.
As a society, we've come to accept that people going through hardship (a lack of money, struggle, or any negative financial experience) will produce the best work. The assumption is that when a human has a negative experience with money, it naturally leads to an excellent piece of work or project. Whatever the creative medium, the output is perceived as better because of those circumstances. Extreme negative experiences like homelessness or starvation are seen as the trifecta ingredients to produce a masterpiece. The "I got it out the mud" mindset. This is the "starving artist" propaganda. The belief that the best work is produced by people who were hungry.
I love that concept. I just find it amusing. He was hungry. She was hungry. They were hungry.
It’s as if through starvation, they’re able to pull out a masterpiece. It's an interesting concept because, technically, it’s as if we’re saying we can produce something out of nothing and not just anything, but a masterpiece. It isn't that poverty automatically equals a masterpiece. But for the creatively inclined, and for people who have produced works that others perceive to be incredible, society always points back to it, "oh, you know, this person comes from humble beginnings. They didn't have any money. They were starving, and they produced this."
There has to be an element of lack. And that element of lack elevates the work. Yes, the work is good, but it gets elevated when it’s attached to struggle, especially when the artist lacked something. Beethoven’s inability to hear. Starving, but pushing through to create. This is what elevates it in people's minds. We elevate struggle. Struggle makes a thing seem more worthy.
It’s just so interesting to me. Take a song like Hot N*gga by Bobby Shmurda. They were hungry. They needed money. They were having a negative experience with money. You could say, "Oh, they were making some money in the streets," but there was still a negative association with money because they were struggling in some way, whether it was paying bills, providing for family, or just experiencing the regular human desire to buy things to flex. And when you add that he went to jail after the song’s release, its perceived greatness elevated even further. That is quite telling.
You see it on social media all the time. When an artist drops a new song and it’s good, one of the top comments is always…"the rent was due."
Why must we be struggling in order to produce something good, worthy, or excellent? Why have we accepted this? More importantly, it’s not just why we've accepted it, but why we continue this narrative. We can credit works without attaching them to lack or struggle. We can redefine this so that we don't orchestrate situations where we put ourselves in struggle just to give our lives or art meaning.
This reminds me of Les Brown.
There's a speech of his on YouTube, it’s free, so if you haven't seen it, I highly recommend checking it out. In that speech, he talks about going door-to-door selling TVs in a neighborhood. Everyone kept saying no. At some point, the kid working with him gave up and said, "you know what? I don't need this. I'm going to go sit in the car in the AC. When you're done, we can go." At that moment, Les explained that he didn't have the luxury of giving up. He had a family to feed. He needed the money. He was hungry. So he kept knocking on doors until someone said yes.
That’s a major tactic, not just for Les Brown, but in sales generally. Begin with the lack. Incorporate the lack. It elevates the pitch. It’s so deeply embedded in our culture now that you start seeing it everywhere. We’ve glorified lack to the point where it defines whether something achieves an even higher status (whether your story becomes greater, your art becomes greater, or your song tops the charts.) There has to be an element of struggle, something that makes another human being pause, step into your shoes for a moment in their imagination, and think, "damn."
That’s what we use to elevate the work.
What we don’t realize is that a lot of people are experiencing the exact opposite, and they don't even know it. These people do not produce. It's not that they're lazy or sitting around doing nothing. It's that creatively, there's nothing. They cannot think creatively. They cannot generate ideas. For many people, survival consumes all the conditions necessary for creativity to happen in the first place. They can't even get to the point of generating an idea. A lot of people don't have (or don't think they have) a creative bone in their body because of their negative experience with money. Their current struggle, their lack, is completely obliterating their internal creative drive. Many people go around wishing and hoping they could produce a piece of art, writing, or performance, but they can’t. They tell themselves they're just "logical," "practical," or simply not creative people who "don't have time for that." I believe these people are suppressed. Their creativity is stifled because the conditions required to create are completely swallowed by the demands of survival.
It reminds me of werewolf fiction that talks about latency, the latent wolf. They can feel the wolf, but the wolf form never actually emerges. It's just like that. In fact, some people don't even feel the urge within them at all anymore. That's because the circumstances of lack, poverty, and survival are stepping on their necks…choking their ability to produce art. A lot of people are brilliantly creative and don't even know it because of these conditions. We've been conditioned to accept that struggle produces great work, that because someone was "hungry," they needed to escape their circumstances, fought the battle, and won.
So this is a call to ask yourself: which side of the fence do you lie on? Are you creative? And if you don't view yourself as a creative person, is that truly the case? Or are you deeply creative and just don't know it yet?
On the flip side, the exact opposite also happens. People who live with an abundance of resources often believe they can't produce excellent art precisely because of that abundance. They hold on to the belief that great art requires an element of lack, something they aren't naturally experiencing. So, what do they do? They manufacture artificial circumstances of lack just to create. They enter relationships they know will end badly just to produce heartbreak albums, channel the sadness, and emerge on the other side hotter, better, healed, and a badder bitch.
Because of these two extremes, we leave no room for nuance. We don't question what we believe, and when we don't question things, we act blindly. We walk into dangerous situations because we've accepted the lie that danger breeds excitement. A work that feels "more alive." We seek out thrills and dangerous moments (like driving ourselves into debt) just to heighten the experience and force a creative spark.
So, going back to our questions, where do you fall on the spectrum? And what do you believe about the opposite side?
At the end of the day, we have a very toxic relationship with both money and creativity. It’s not serving us (not in the way we wish it to) because it creates conditions where we actively put ourselves in harm's way, or where we glorify lack, which only breeds more states of lack.