I wrote a blog post entitled "Art is not optional" (https://mikelevins.github.io/posts/2021-01-04-art-is-not-optional/ https://mikelevins.github.io/posts/2021-0

I wrote a blog post entitled "Art is not optional" (https://mikelevins.github.io/posts/2021-01-04-art-is-not-optional/ https://mikelevins.github.io/posts/2021-01-04-art-is-not-opt...) that is in part about this: I don't think people usually choose to be artists. I think they mostly just are, like it or not. In terms of personality psychology, they're "creatives"--that is, people that score extremely high in trait openness. Like you, I write because I must. I don't choose to write. It just happens. I can choose whether or not to put pen to paper or finger to keyboard, but I can't choose not to create the stuff that I write. If I'm stuck somewhere with no writing utensils, I write anyway, constructing stories and lyrics and essays and explanations in my head, storing it up as best I can for when I can write it all down. It isn't even mostly in words. Most of my thoughts are visual-spatial, and only get translated into words when I have writing utensils. I make pictures, too, and songs, and software. Similarly, I don't decide to do it or choose to do it; it just happens all the time, like it or not. If I don't have any tools to work with, that doesn't make it stop. It just makes it inconvenient, and it means that a large amount of what I create is likely to be lost before I can get it transcribed. I don't lose it all. The especially memorable bits stick, which means that doing without tools for transcription has benefits. It filters out the less memorable stuff. My openness score is in something like 97th percentile, so somewhere around 97 out of every 100 randomly-chosen people score lower. Most people are not in my situation. More generally, highly-creative people are in the minority. But I think you can recognize them if you look. They're the ones who are always compulsively creating stuff. The other topic of the blog post is a claim that, not only is art not optional for artists, it's not optional for the human species, either. I don't know why art is necessary for us, but if it wasn't, then we wouldn't find it everywhere we find modern humans for all of our existence. Art seems to be older than fire, and every culture has it (so far as I know). I don't know what we need it for, and I'm not sure anyone else does, either, but apparently we need it for something.