Fiat Creativity — a clinical lens from my forthcoming book, applied to current news on this hub.
What this lens is
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Most people believe creativity is about expressing the truth of who you are. As a couples therapist watching people navigate the modern attention economy, I look at how we create today and I see a survival strategy. I call this Fiat Creativity.
Fiat creativity is what happens when your expression is shaped entirely by the pressure to be seen. In a fiat system, the ground is unstable and value is inflated out of thin air. When you try to create on that melting terrain, your nervous system learns to prioritize performance over presence. You stop creating from the truth in your body and start creating from anticipation. You ask yourself if what you are making will be welcomed, if it will be safe, and if it will generate a response. The attention economy extracts the actual value of your humanity, and in return, you get the metrics.
I see the devastating clinical results of this dynamic in my office every single week. A brilliant artist or a successful founder sits on my couch completely hollowed out. On the outside, they look incredibly competent. On the inside, they are experiencing the profound disappearance of their true self. They have not written a song, designed a product, or published a single word without calculating its reach in half a decade. They have learned to edit their instincts before a thought even fully forms. They soften their edges to fit invisible ceilings and inflate a persona to protect their sense of belonging.
If you recognize your own exhaustion in this pattern, you are not alone. You know exactly what fiat creativity feels like. It is the immediate, visceral shame loop that activates in your chest whenever a project or post underperforms. It is the quiet panic that tells you your worth is tied entirely to the response of an algorithm that does not love you back. It is the deep dissociation from your own voice required to simply keep producing content for the machine. You think you have a creative block or a discipline problem, but you are actually experiencing a massive attachment wound. You have made your expression conditional on the approval of an environment that is completely indifferent to your survival.
You cannot reclaim your voice until you understand the system that is extracting it. Explore the essays below to see exactly how fiat creativity is showing up in our culture, our technology, and your own nervous system.
Get the chapters as they are written
Fiat Creativity is one of the lenses in my forthcoming book, Proof of Work: From Fiat Life to Thriving in the AI Age, with Greenleaf in 2027. The waitlist is my Substack, where the chapters are being written in public.
Essays applying this lens to current events
Essays applying this lens to current news will appear here as they publish.
Read more about the book · About Figs
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Figs O'Sullivan
Founder · EFT couples therapist
“What I would tell you at 10pm, if I could.”