Over the past two years, I’ve written enough here on Substack to shape into a book on the Creative Lifestyle. That was the intention from the start—to gather these reflections into something enduring. A studio companion, perhaps: a book you might keep nearby, to reach for in a quiet moment when you need a little light, a little reminder. Most of it is already collected, about 400 pages strong. Now the real work begins: shaping, organizing, refining.
But even as that book begins to settle into its final form, I can feel the next one stirring.
This second volume will ask a wider question. Not just how to live a creative life, but how to build a world where such a life is supported—where creativity becomes not a luxury or a side path, but the root of a sustainable culture. It asks what kind of soil we need, as individuals and as a society, for the creative life to take root and flourish.
It is a book about emergence, about ecology, about imagination as a shared responsibility.
Art into life. Life into art. Or perhaps: life first into art, and then art—transformed—back into life.
So this note is something of a threshold: part introduction, part invocation. A call to action for those who have been walking this path and a signal toward the horizon of Book Two.
The Future Needs a New Story—and Only the Creatives Can Tell It
We are living in the disenchanted ruins of someone else's imagination. The story we inherited—of endless growth, of humans as economic units, of competition as destiny—is crumbling under the weight of its own contradictions. Climate breakdown, social unraveling, algorithmic control, spiritual vacancy: these are the symptoms of a mythos gone awry, leaving behind a trail of debris and tragedy.
Wildfires consuming forests once considered sacred. Oceans choked with plastic while entire island nations face erasure. A generation medicated for anxiety, scrolling endlessly through curated illusions. Gig workers racing against apps for pennies, while billionaires launch vanity rockets into space. Schools becoming battlegrounds. Rivers drying up. Cities priced beyond reach. And amid it all, the quiet grief of people who no longer believe their lives matter in any cosmic sense.
We are living in the collapse of a dream that mistook domination for progress and forgot the soul of the world.
And yet the real crisis is not ecological, political, or technological. It is narrative. We no longer believe in the world built for us. The antique future, once imagined with wonder, now feels like a deadline and a dead-end.
But it does not have to be this way.
We are at the end of one story. That much is clear. What remains uncertain is what comes next. And this, fellow creatives, visionaries, and cultural dreamers, is where you come in.
The world does not need another billionaire's blueprint. It does not need more data, more optimization, more slogans for sustainability slapped onto the machinery of extraction. What the world needs - what it aches for - is a new story.
A story spacious enough to hold mystery.
A story rooted in belonging, not ownership.
A story that remembers the Earth as sacred.
A story that honors human imagination as a force of nature.
This is the task before us: not to reform the dying systems, but to imagine the living ones that are sprouting up all around us as yet unnoticed.
That means fiction writers must begin to dream not just dystopias as warning, but possible worlds as something to work toward.
Artists must show what a liberated human spirit looks like.
Musicians must give rhythm to the longing for wholeness.
Poets must speak to the silence beyond profitability.
Philosophers and mythmakers must whisper the language of the sacred back into our ears.
We cannot wait for institutions or think tanks to approve this. We must begin at the grassroots of the human psyche. In our journals. In our workshops. In our collectives, our salons, our strange little corners of the internet. In the quiet spaces where beauty and hope and determination still lives, below the threshold of attention.
Let us remember: the Renaissance didn’t begin with a committee - it began with artists rediscovering their own soulful purpose.
The Age of Enlightenment began in salons, not senate chambers.
Movements begin where meaning and vision is born.
We must rewild the imagination.
We must compost the myths of conquest and consumption and grow new archetypes from the soil of lived experience.
We must cultivate the massurreality - a shared field of imaginative possibility rooted in generative vision.
And no one is more qualified for this than the ones who have always lived slightly askew of the ordinary: the creatives. The misfits. The seers. The ones who’ve spent their lives building worlds in secret.
Well, the secret is out.
The world needs you now - not to escape it, but to reshape it. To step forward not as entertainers, but as architects of a new human consciousness.
This is not a hobby. This is not an indulgence.
This is sacred work.
It is time to leave behind the story of tragedy and survival and step into the story of emergence and imagination.
And if we write it well - if we paint it, build it, dance it, sing it - it will spread.
And the future will have something to believe in again. What does that look like?
Let us begin.
NOTE
The percentage of the general population that could be classified as part of the "creative community" depends on how broadly or narrowly we define that term. Here's a breakdown across different definitions:
1. Narrow Definition:
Professional Creatives (artists, writers, musicians, designers, performers, etc.)
Estimated share: 1% to 3% of the population
This includes people who make a living through their creative work.
In the U.S., for example, the National Endowment for the Arts estimates about 2.5 million people (around 1.5% of the workforce) are employed in arts-related occupations.
2. Mid-Range Definition:
People seriously engaged in creative pursuits, even if not full-time (side-career artists, semi-professional musicians, craftspersons, art teachers, etc.)
Estimated share: 5% to 10%
These are people who identify with creative work as a core part of their life and identity, even if it’s not their primary income.
Many participate in local arts scenes, online creative platforms, or alternative economies.
3. Broad Definition:
People with a creative disposition or consistent creative practice, including hobbyists, DIY makers, creative thinkers, and others who infuse creativity into their personal or professional life.
Estimated share: 25% to 35%
Gallup research and Adobe's "State of Create" reports suggest that up to one-third of people consider themselves to be “creative,” though they may not work in a traditionally artistic field.
Additional Notes:
Creativity is latent in a much larger portion of the population, but societal structure, education, and economics suppress or under-develop it.
In a restructured society that supports creativity (e.g., with a Universal Basic Creative Income), this percentage could grow dramatically.
The "creative community" as a cultural force is often smaller in number but disproportionate in influence, especially in shaping public imagination, design, media, and cultural narrative.
Hashtags to use: #CreativeFreedomAct #CultureShiftAct #CreativeSocietyAct
web address: https://www.touchonian.com/s/creative-freedom-act
I am going to make my response as a post because it's too long. I'll call it The Art of Feeling Art.
Now *that* is a book I'd read! 😀