The Secular Millennial Transcendentalists

The oppressive early June heat bore down so heavily on the asphalt parking lot, you could almost hear the quiet desperation as young men walked past the old Milk Row cemetery on their way to the market. Beyond the gravestones on the second floor of a nearby building people gathered to make something as a means of combating this ennui inspired existential despair.

Some gathered around a traditional printing press printing posters for a new book, Don't Make Art, Just Make Something by Miranda Aisling. In another corner, various musicians gathered around a keyboard with guitars, drums and a saxophone to make some music. In the center of the room, various guests make a 'something' village out of recycled materials, and the author flitted around the room, welcoming guests and signing copies of her new book.

Many of the guests knew each other from the local universities, museums, coffee shops and farm markets. It would be tempting to call them something like the secular millennial transcendentalists; steeped in an interesting mix nineteenth century transcendentalism, with the growing secularism of our age, and the digital technologies of the twenty-first century.

The Judeo-Christian tradition holds that we are created in the image of a creator. So, what does that make us, if not creators? Yet our schooling and work leads us further are further from being creators, leaving the creativity to the realm of specialized professionals called 'artists'.

Yet we don't have to buy into this division of labor that divides us from a core part of our being, this alienation from creativity which leads to the quiet desperation that Thoreau wrote about years ago, and can still be seen in the sweltering parking lots of Boston. Instead, we can just make something, anything, to keep that spark of creativity alive, to fight off the ennui inspired existential despair, and reunite us with the creative core of our being.

Don't Make Art, Just Make Something. If enough people do this, it could be a movement, a new awakening, and with the political, economic and environmental realities of today, it is something we desperately need.

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