Most of our western civilization is built upon values that are strongly related to Judeo-Christian mythology & tradition.

From our perceptions of good and evil — later devoured, regurgitated, and reborn by Friedrich Nietzsche — metaphysics, time, history, and culture, these titanic traditions encompass an overwhelming majority of our thinking and being system.

Throughout these thousands of years of cognitive development, humans have been creating, over and over, strategies that aid them in their pursuit of meaning, superior intelligence, reason, and even happiness.

Powerful and true concepts were grouped to form systems of thought.

Such systems were glued together to create patterns of understanding.

These patterns of understanding were then used to generate new, more complex, and lots more efficient ways of thinking, behaving, and being.

Since the dawn of consciousness, our intellectual abilities and general problem-solving potential increased exponentially to date.

Everything got so complex and profound that we needed to invent the discipline of philosophy to provide us with the methodologies that would get us in the needed flow state, to generate deep insights into this new reality we’ve created.

This chain of events and correlations brought us the titanic contribution to humanity’s intellectual development of Hegel’s philosophy of Geist.

In “Phenomenology of Spirit”, Hegel puts forth the concept of Geist, a German term that would equal both mind and spirit, but intertwined.

But here’s where we have to be careful to not misread it.

This notion of mind is not aimed at describing a particular, individual, specific mind of me, you, or any other singular person.

It’s much more abstract. General. Encompassing. It has to do with what would later be called, by C.G. Jung, the “collective mind”.

Geist here refers to patterns of understanding that humanity possesses by which we make sense of the world, structure it, shape it and get meaning out of it.

Hegel’s profound contribution to the intellectual heritage of the West was that these patterns were viewed as forming a living system.

These patterns are thus an organism.

A living organism that structures, and organizes itself in an evolving manner and pushes us towards contributing to its development by engaging in experiences that enhance its being.

Now, how could we see this at play, in real-time?

Hegel’s answer was by taking a deep look into the history and culture of humanity.

By studying how humans have been making sense of the complexity and chaos of this world — think about religion, spirituality, political movements, philosophies, mythologies, etc. — we can get an insight into how this powerful machinery works.

We see that it tends to become more and more complex, generation by generation, religion after religion, mythology after mythology.

It keeps on evolving as if it’s a human being aging and maturing with time.

Well, as the case may be, at least metaphorically, it is!

Think a minute about this.

We’re talking about a living organism that has constitutive patterns by which it understands the world.

This means it has to adapt itself to the overwhelming chaos present and make sense of it in an effective, optimal way so as to survive.

And, just as we adapt to everyday challenges, with great amounts of exposure and lots of time for profound sedimentation, our cognition expands. We can grasp more complex concepts, and find better solutions to more difficult problems.

Thus, it becomes more and more intelligent.

And, just as we’ve become more and more intelligent with thousands of years of cognitive development, so did this living organism.

Here comes the mind-blowing part.

Hegel states that, at one point in history, this living organism became self-aware.

It gained enough intelligence to grasp its own existence.

It developed so much that it produced general awareness about itself and its processes.

Thus, if we take into consideration the profound impact of the Judeo-Christian spiritual tradition that deeply influenced Hegel’s project of secularizing it, we can conclude that the fact that this living organism suddenly became aware of itself as it constantly evolved and became more and more intelligent means one thing:

This is how God was born.

Or, to be exact, this is how the idea of an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent God became a living, autonomous, reality.

I am not referring to people here, in case somebody needed clarifications on that.

Right off the bat, I am going to state that I will be discussing mainly designs that we all see on giant social-media platforms dedicated to creative people and those alike, such as Behance or Dribble, be it logos, brand identities, or user interfaces that get the most likes and appreciations and why, as aesthetically appealing as they might be, their overall usefulness & functionality is lacking.

It is a must for a design to be functional. If it isn’t, it’s not a design, it’s art.

And there’s nothing wrong with making art, as it is essential for humans to digest beauty, to fulfill the soul’s need to relate to the absolute whenever they subject themselves to its call.

I recall discussing this with my beloved partner one day, to whom I owe a great deal of appreciation and respect for her design skills and expertise, for she has taught me what it means to happily marry beauty and usefulness into any product.

We tried reaching a certain conclusion when it came to what exactly made something be considered a design and not a particular aesthetic creation of some sort.

I recall it was in the early days when I barely started transitioning from marketing to UX/UI, so finding her as a mentor in whatever I tried creating or understanding when it came to designing something was probably one of the wisest things I could’ve done.

I used to think that, if a particular screen was good-looking enough, people might get over the fact that its functionality was clearly lacking, since the aesthetic composition had enough of a powerful impact on the user to absorb its criticism into appreciation and tolerance, thus making such screen be a great design, to which she replied that:

It’s not design if it only looks good and makes you feel something. That’s art. The design will solve your problems because it will think for you, while you’re also enjoying the way it looks when it does that.

I can’t think of a more accurate definition of what design is than that, to this day.

And I’ve witnessed a ton of aesthetic screens— I’ve done quite some myself — that failed miserably to meet the user’s needs, simply because the functionality was sacrificed for the sake of beauty.

I am aware that designers — I am guilty of this myself — will often try to predict that the user will categorically don’t mind not having those features that they most need, simply because the design itself looks fresh, minimalistic, and “respects every principle of design out there”.

Only when the development team comes back to the UX Designer to tell him that the users are frustrated because they can’t find those needed features will the Designer realize how the spirit of artistic license he followed throughout his creative process tricked him into thinking he knew better.

I lately started to follow my principle when it came to offering a great experience to the users:

I will sacrifice all the colors if the mechanics will suffice.

Do I not get mad while doing that? Obviously not. There are certain times when the screens look so crisp, so well put together that I just hope nobody will look for the feature that I couldn’t include because of how beautiful the screens turned out.

It’s an act of discipline to give up artistic calls for functionality reasons, but then again, if something is functional enough to meet the user’s needs, the excitement and positive feedback will make the product aesthetic by itself.

I used to enjoy lots of hours reiterating my thoughts and ideas before allowing them to mature into blog posts.

Most often I’d have to put up a great fight with myself for a good, comprehensible article.

Writing is not easy, for it’s but a material form of thinking. And none of us find thinking easy, no matter the individual level of intelligence, because it’s energy-draining and time-consuming.

Throughout these 3+ years as a UX/UI Designer & Overall creative person, I have concluded that the effectiveness of thinking and visualizing that which must be created relies heavily — yet not entirely — on personality type.

For the sake of this article, I will be primarily referring to Big5 Personality Assessment as means of academic reference, and in subsidiary to my professional experience as a UX/UI Designer.

Big Five personality traits - Wikipedia

In case we need disclaimers, I want to state that I am not a licensed psychologist, psychotherapist, psychiatrist, or anything related to such professions. I simply state facts that I have come across — that I currently regard as true — to state my points regarding the correlation between being creative & constantly desiring novelty.

Being Creative

There are lots of things to be said about creativity.

Some of them aren’t pleasant, such as experiencing frustrating difficulty in managing repetitive, conscientious tasks for a long period, due to lack of novelty.

This is one reason why you don’t want to be working in, for example, jobs that imply great levels of concreteness & conscientiousness and are rigid in their ways of working, such as accounting.

How many people that you regard as highly creative seem to be almost disgusted by such careers? Probably a few.

But most often, out of those few, 99% of them will strongly disagree when asked if they would enjoy such a job.

Why?

Because it lacks profound novelty.

People that are engaged in such jobs rarely feel the need to experience something original, new that has to do with the job itself, but general perspectives(e.g. daily activities) aren’t to be excluded.

Now, the question is, why do creative people need freshness in their lives as if their whole existence depended on it?

Is it about expressing oneself as we usually hear? Does it have something to do with different personality traits that creative people collectively share? Is it pure coincidence? Do they share a common ancestral spirit that imposes such desires on them?

I’ve been struggling to find an eloquent answer for a while now.

One particular insight that I was able to gather and that I felt to be adequate was the fact that creative people, in accordance with the Five-Factor Model, are usually incredibly Open to Experience, a personality trait that implies 6 facets:

• Active imagination (fantasy),
• Aesthetic sensitivity,
• Attentiveness to inner feelings,
• Preference for variety (adventurousness),
• Intellectual curiosity,
• Challenging authority

All these facets, taken into account, made me speculate something about the intrinsic need to experience something new that is vital for creatives’ mental health and overall well-being.

Preference for variety (adventurousness) and Intellectual Curiosity make the artists digest a great myriad of information that trains their intuition, allowing them for greater insights and inspiration.

That’s one of the many reasons that we can witness genius-level creativity generate connections between ideas so unrelated to one another that, out of the blue, when put together, they make tremendous sense and are incredibly profound.

My current hypothesis is that since creative people are so prone to accumulating diverse types of information, mainly due to a general Preference for variety (adventurousness) and Intellectual Curiosity, they intuitively get a grip on the world’s potential.

That specific insight they get into what the world infuses them with a great sense of meaning that they further pursue because of their Active Imagination i.e. engagement in deep fantasy.

These fantasies produce meaning that gives birth to a powerful motivation:

Transforming the current state of the world into its ultimate form.

It’s almost as if the state of flow the artist finds himself suddenly possessed by grants him enough meaning to actively engage in the pursuit of a new type of meaning.

This type of cycle is inescapable for creative people since their souls won’t allow them to passively observe the world, for that means losing the opportunity to create new meanings, thus the never-ending search for novelty, freshness, and originality.