Be careful! You might be causing more harm than you realize.

Manifesto Part 8: Create with Care

May 19, 2025

Hi,

This is the eighth piece in a series of deep dives into the Everyone's Creative Manifesto. You can read the other parts by following the linked headings here.

Collage of safety manual photos and illustrations combined into a chaotic montage. Tinted mostly yellow and black. Text reads: Manifesto Part VIII - Create with Care

Create with Care

Recognize that creativity is neither good nor evil - but that it is powerful. You are responsible for your ideas and for what you create. Remember that you can cause great harm - by accident or by choice. You need to choose not to.

How much harm can your creativity really do?

Creativity and art are often associated with progressive ideas and politics. This makes sense, because many of the most notable works of art and the communities that form around artistic practices often are progressive. Art is powerful and effective at challenging norms, disrupting the status-quo and turning society's eye in on itself to question why things are the way that they are. This can all be good and helpful, but none of this is inherent to creativity in general.

If we want to accept that everyone is creative, then we need to accept that this idea really does include everyone. That means everyone. Yes. Even them.

If we come to accept that even horrible people are creative, then it stands to reason that creativity can be used to cause harm. When you start to think about it, a lot of the most horrible things humans have done to each other are incredibly imaginative.

It can be easy to accidentally assume that you are somehow safe from using creativity in this way. You may mistakenly consider that creativity used for evil is a misuse of the creative energy and not merely a way it can be used. The truth is that creativity is powerful and wonderful and awful, and it's ultimately up to each of us to decide how we want to use that power in the things that we make.

Thanks for reading Everyone's Creative! Help me share these ideas by sending this to someone you know.

Opting Out of Causing Harm

The first way to do this is to consciously decide not to do harm with the things you create. Like how doctors take an oath to "do no harm," I believe artists and professional creative workers should do the same. Ultimately, it makes sense to me that everyone should hold themselves to this standard.

This includes avoiding direct harms like making things that hurt people, that are malicious in their intent and that you want to cause harm with. The people designing and manufacturing weaponry may have the most obvious introspection to do here, but this goes all the way down to creating something because you want someone to feel bad. That's more of an inner journey and a decision to make any time you sit down to make something.

This also includes the unforeseen, indirect harms. The collateral damage of making things without considering how they may affect others. This might be reducing the environmental impact of your work, or actively trying to learn how you may be inadvertently sharing ideas that influence other people to become more antisocial or harmful themselves. The artist who "accidentally" radicalizes someone with their words may have been able to avoid that if they had tried to anticipate what harms their ideas could inspire.

All of this is an active decision. It's a choice you can make to try to ensure that the things you make and the way you make them don't cause the world to become worse off than it was before. I believe the decision is a moral one, and one that we all have a responsibility to commit to if we believe in making the world a better place.

The Negative Effect of (Artificial) Neutrality

One of the most dangerous ways people can create is by pretending their creativity is neutral. The things that we create are steeped in our cultural moment and all of the circumstances of their creation. That means that your idea of "neutrality" represents an agreement with everything going on around you. It's an endorsement of the status-quo. It is a reinforcement of both the good and the bad in the world. It is also creating an opportunity for others to co-opt your work and fill it with meaning where you left a void.

Sitting things out isn't a moral position. Everyone is equally creative, with the same capacity for empathy and understanding. We all arrive with the same ability to make a statement and choosing not to (especially with your creativity) says something about what you think is important in the world.

This doesn't mean that everyone needs to make protest art or they're a bad person, but it does mean that you should be intentional in the things you create and reject the idea that you can make anything that is neutral. Neutrality doesn't really exist. So what matters to you? Why are you here? What are you contributing? Where do you want things to move and how do you think we should get there?

Not doing harm doesn't equal doing good (but it's a good place to start).

There's a difference between making the world a better place and simply not making it worse. A lot of what we create maintains our situation, while some people work actively on moving things in a particular direction. We can't all be revolutionaries all of the time, but you should try not to make things worse.

This is a call to action to reject complacency and to try to incrementally improve the state of things in everything that you do. Start from where we are and ask yourself what's important to you and how you can nudge things in that direction. You don't need to burn it all down to get there. In fact, that might inadvertently make things worse.

People talk about wanting to have a clean slate, a fresh start. They say things are too far gone and the only path forward is to raze everything to the ground and build anew. I think this represents an indulgence in despair and a lack of imagination. This idea isn't just dangerous... it's lazy.

Creativity is about making, building, adding on. It's about taking the things we have and doing something with them to arrive at something new. Some people want to create things that are destructive and that erode the things others have built. However, we need to remember that the net-output of your creativity matters.

Just because you made something doesn't mean you made something good. If you need to burn the world to the ground in order to make something, then you'll be hard pressed to make something good enough to make up for all of that destruction. If you need to exploit, abuse or take advantage of people to create something, then it's likely that your creation is a net-negative on society and isn't worth making in the first place.

Nobody's perfect. And you should still try anyways.

If there is a secondary mandate to this part of the manifesto it is to resist despair. Despair is the lazy, self-indulgent emotion that gives us an easy way out. It's individualism at its finest and it is a slap in the face of all the people who came before you to give you everything you have.

Things may be bad at times, but they've definitely been worse. We can maintain a trajectory towards more flourishing and prosperity for everyone, but only if we all try. You should Create with Care and understand that you will fail to be perfect at this. It's the trying that matters. Keep trying. Keep going.

I'll keep trying with you.

Love,
Simon 🐒

🔗 Links & Thinks 🧠

There are many things I could share to help you see how to create with care. I think it's important to highlight how we can do that in the smaller, incremental ways so that we come to believe that this is actually possible. Not everything needs to be a revolution. Things don't usually change overnight.

Here are some recent examples that are top of mind:

Things like

David Farrier

taking criticism and turning it into a way to spread awareness and destigmatize autism (instead of responding with anger or denial and doubling-down on his mistakes). This feels like a net-positive to me.

Or how you can debunk scam ideas by recreating them yourself to help people understand how they're actually done. Putting energy into helping people avoid being deceived can take a lot of the negative energy out of the efforts of those trying to deceive people. Also, I appreciate the compassion that is seen in this video, too, in trying to understand why someone would make a video trying to deceive people.

And while I'm linking YouTube videos, I think one way more online creators can create with care is to consider how they advertise, who they take money from, and how that can deceive their audience. This is one of those active decisions you can make when you have a bit more opportunity and reach.

I'm also interested in what comes to mind for you when you consider creating with care. Who does this well? Who's missing the mark? I'd love to hear your thoughts.