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> No creative impulse, just worries about chores/bills/obligation

I think that's critical in many people's lives and I've felt it starting to creep in my, but I think I'm keeping it at bay. Based on personal experience, when you settle down and/or start family, chores/bills/obligations start creeping up on you massively. It's very easy to get sucked into a mindset that if you start falling behind on those, your life will start falling apart. In reality, a lot of those can be postponed with only minor downsides. Yes, you can live in a slightly dirtier/less organized house. Yes, the lawn can be slightly less maintained. Yes, you can probably postpone that car service another week. Just sit down, forget about the world [not] falling apart and enjoy your hobbies. Write some side-project code, start a hardware tinkering project that you're unlikely to finish. Disassemble a failing kitchen appliance to see if you can fix it. Those things bring way more to your life than the apparent utility!

Even though you're happy in every day life, it sounds like you could benefit from some therapy to help you unpack those painful memories. Moving past that might help your creativity flow.

When my creative juices feel depleted, I give myself permission to do nothing. Take a long walk, play a game, watch a movie, but don't make anything. I usually find that relieving the pressure of feeling like I should be more productive actually makes me more productive.

I’ve been there, more than once. I seriously doubt the creative impulse can be eradicated, it is just hiding.

The way I’ve gotten past this is to commit to messing around, or trying to make some small thing, at a specific time on a schedule.

(Every morning, whatever you have)

Make no rules about what is “valid” to work on, and give yourself permission to quit after a certain amount of time if you still aren’t feeling it that day.

The creativity will return as a result of doing. And it may take a form that surprises you, and wasn’t what you set out to focus on, because currently you don’t know yourself well enough to know what you are even interested in.

One day, during one of those periods, I sat down at my regularly scheduled time and I produced computer music for about 60 minutes, listened back to what I made and was absolutely disgusted by how mediocre it was.

I stood up to walk out of my studio and on a lark picked up my trusty 6 string bass. I then wrote this entire song in one pass:

Spotify

https://open.spotify.com/track/2erc0IdvaDh6xnprg8gthS?si=xX0...

Apple Music

https://music.apple.com/us/album/sometimes-you-need-sun-feat...

It just came out fully formed.

Relax, play, mess around, do little fun or interesting things. Let your mind wander. But sit down at your scheduled time.

Inspiration will return.

The creative impulse can be shy, when it's not all consuming. We forget that we need to play, without the expectation of a result.

The highest creative states are sometimes called "formless functioning". This is when you are fully immersed in creating, and the ego just dissolves. It's hard to be creative when you're standing over your own shoulder criticising your lack of creativity.

So I would be gentle with yourself. Play, do things you enjoy just because you enjoy them. The creative impulse will stir.

> No creative impulse, just worries about chores/bills/obligation and painful memories...

and later:

> Does anyone know a way to truly rekindle the creative spark after it's completely died?

Take an unreasonably keen interest in your chores/bills/obligations. Do you need to cook dinner? Research the hell out of it to understand the underlying principles. Experiment with your techniques, take notes, and perfect. Learn the history of what you're doing. Do you need to do car maintenance? Really understand what it is you're doing and why. Do you need to manage finances? Become an expert in double-entry accounting. Actually watch how-to videos on it and maybe engage in an online discussion or two about it.

It's easy to ignore the mundane things we're all faced to do. It's also remarkable how interesting anything - no matter how seemingly unremarkable - can be if viewed from the right perspective and taken to sufficient extremes.

If you were to take this approach, I suspect you might find some interests you never knew you had. It's possible you can't make headway on your old interests because you yourself have changed. Those old interests don't in fact interest you in the same way anymore, but you haven't recognized that yet.

Sympathies. If it's any consolation, Janacek wrote his string quartets in his 80s.

Go to Burning Man. I spent a month on site at a regional burn; in the month since then, I've published two personal projects and been much more productive at work. I never found that spark on return from "normal" holidays.

Your honesty was refreshing compared to others who jumped straight to hate, because there was no story about them as 17 year old inventors (so clearly he does not deserve it either).

But a magic bullet to rekindle the creative spark?

There is none.

Give it a rest and it will come back, or not.

Try something new, preferably somewhere else.

> Give it a rest and it will come back, or not.

I don't think this is right.

I think instead GP can pick up the brush over and over again and make things happen with or without the creative spark. The point is to get inspired by one's own creation, not to create ex nihilo.

When you pick up the brush with disgust, after a while you will feel only disgust with the whole art and never create anything inspired and beautiful again.

It's not gone, just rusted. The oil to fix that is simply spending time in a creative space. Keep making time for yourself to build something. Even if you sit at a bench for 2 hours and do nothing (I bet you won't) it's moving you more in the direction of creativity again than any amount of time on a computer or doing chores will bring you.

Thank you everyone, I'm blown away by your responses, which are too numerous to address individually :-)

After sleeping on it, I think what's going on with me has to do with midlife changes in perception. For example, a young artist might dabble in oil painting and not think about things like the carcinogenic effects of paint thinner or the sustainability of pigments. But at my age, I see opportunity costs in everything I do, which stifles my creativity. Even if the risk is simply the time cost of doing something and missing out on the chance to do nothing and rest.

My struggle seems to parallel the larger crisis humanity is facing in how we have to still go to work as the world burns. Like to save the world, we have to stop thinking about it for a time and do what we can with what we have. And this tough love concept applies to our individual realities. Somehow I have to suspend disbelief long enough to get ahead of my hangups. It's a bit like switching from technology back to magic. Or from science to religion. I know it works because I've felt the love and oneness of being in the zone for extended periods over much of my life. But so much of my psyche is grounded in survival now that reconnecting with my inner child feels decadent. Yet I must do it or the rest of my life is forfeit.

The only conclusion I can come to is that my belief system is sabotaging my goals so I must change myself before I can change the world. A bit pithy perhaps, but hopefully helpful to anyone in the same boat who happens to read this.

I don't know the answer to your problem. I've gone through periods of "lack of creativity" in my own life, usually when there's too many "life experiences" happening around me and my day job is spilling over in the number of hours it needs.

I will say that WFH has helped immensely, at 6PM-ish I turn off the VM that is my day job computer and flip over to whatever it is I want to be working on, or go in to my workshop. I have designated areas in my home office for - this is where I write, this is where I do electronics, this is where I write code, this is where do my day job, this is where I do woodworking. That compartmentalization prevents other activities from spilling over. Limited social media hours, just like limited TV hours, is also another boon.

I write a lot of what I call "lab notes" about my thought processes as I work through ideas, example here https://github.com/justinlloyd/retro-chores for a current project, take lots of pictures of things as I research, and see where it leads me.

I also abandon a lot of things too, when I am no longer feeling the spark. I'd rather have a hundred abandoned creative projects than a few that I feel guilty about not working on, or not feeling the urge to work on.

Part of the resistance to the creative process is the current demand from the market that version 1.0 of something has to be 'near perfect'.

In the old days (80s and 90s), a software startup could release their first version that did something truly unique even if it was still really rough around the edges. People would buy the first version with the expectation that a good portion of the revenue would be used for R&D which would make version 2.0 way better. You could boot-strap some really great projects that way.

It seems that today, a new product never stands a chance unless it has great funding up front with all the kinks worked out and tons of bells and whistles built-in before ever being introduced to the public.

I created a new kind of data management system that manages unstructured data (i.e. files) completely different than conventional file systems. It also does some amazing work with structured data using Key-Value stores to make really fast relational tables.

When I demonstrate how it can do something like file lookups thousands of times faster than file systems or how it can do a query against a big table 10x faster than Postgres; you would think that would capture people's attention and make them want to investigate it further.

Instead, most just point out what your little startup project is still missing when compared to 40-year old projects that are on version 15. They say, "Get back to us once you have A,B,C,D,... features working, tested, and perfected". When you lack the resources to do that, it can be soul crushing.

I'll try to give a more practical approach to complement other answers. I believe creativity (in specific field and broadly) is a skill like any other that you need to cultivate and practice. It's also much about problem solving, identifying needs, connecting ideas, and learning (i.e. having a good pool of knowledge), than apparent. The more of each of those you have, the better you become at innovating and creating in your field.

When you go into the world, you need to go asking yourself "What could we improve here? What could we change here?". If you're in a creative (artistic) field, it's a good idea to survey the work of others and develop "taste" -- i.e. your own perceptions of what's good material, and what things could be improved.

I'd suggest a few things:

(1) Develop a space. Decide what you want to create, and give yourself a dedicated space for it: 30 minutes a day, a few times a week, you name it. I'm pretty sure with the space you will star making things, whatever you like.

(2) Learn supporting skills and knowledge. Each field has necessary skills to really be able to create -- software skills, hardware skills, math, writing, drawing, art theory, etc.

(3) Survey what's out there. If you're a game developer, play games and develop your own ideas, what is my dream game like? What defines a good game? What's missing out there? What can I actually make with my means? You'll be able to feed back into your creations. If you're an engineer, the world is waiting to be improved upon as well :)

> I can't self-start anymore or do work that isn't demanded of me externally

I've had similar feelings in the past. For me, the way out is to flip it around: I'm not neglecting my personal project out of a lack of willpower or motivation, I've lost interest in my personal project and it's no longer rewarding enough to be worth my time! The solution is to find something new to do, not run yourself into the ground trying to see it through.

It's not a job: you don't have to deliver something for your time. Focus on what interests and excites you, not what will get internet points or make money. If you want to allocate part of your free time towards making money, treat that like a second job and not as free time.

Also, a career culminating in a permanent fellowship with an inter-dimensional time traveling think tank in your early twenties is an unrealistic standard for achievement.

I was the same way only maybe not as productive as you. From a young age until some point I was always thinking always inventing.

I recall thinking if it was possible to not think since I was constantly thinking. I was well-known among my friends in pre-Internet times as knowing a lot of obscure facts. I was always reading anything from science journals to history mainly to get ideas for inventions.

One thing I have been toying with is a long fast. People say for them it reset their brain and they could think more clearly. And by long I mean days like a 7 day or more fast. At my age it would probably kill me.

He has an amazing lab and access to a lot of expensive resources. There should be maker labs like this for pre-college kids all over the place, that are free.

I recently created a Scanner Daybook from the ideas presented by the late Barbara Sher in one of her books. It's freed me to explore ideas on paper with no obligation to create the works I describe. The funny thing is that it strokes my mind and I actually get a lot of the projects done. I tend to work in an MVP fashion and create very simple things, however.

> creative spark

The harder you want it, the more elusive it is.

I've done a bunch of projects that I'm proud of (on a very minor scale, mostly 0 use outside of satisfying my own curiosity), but if you ask me now on the spot I would have no idea what is the next interesting personal project that I'll find really creative and fun.

When it comes it comes.

Find a way to challenge yourself. Maybe find some "off-the-shelf" projects to build that don't require creativity, but maybe do require some new skills or new technology you haven't used before.

> Does anyone know a way to truly rekindle the creative spark after it's completely died?

I don't know about a "way" but falling in love definitely kicks things back in gear. Go and get yourself a muse.

For me, falling in love became a distraction, sadly.

You have to ask yourself what's my goal? And what's my reward function? Very different for everyone.

I'd suggest hanging out with some other creatives, of whatever flavour interests you. It's hard to light the fire all by yourself!

Try going internet free for two weeks?

Maybe try magic mushrooms?

Therapy, therapy, therapy :)