When you were five years old, how did you spend your time?

For me, my time was almost always spent making something.

Clutching crayons or caked in paint, my hands were always stained by my favorite pastime: creating. I would spend hours outside with chalk on the sidewalk, and once I went back inside, it was right back to sketching or painting. Whenever I went to pick up a book, I’d get pastel powder or paint on the pages. My mom didn’t really trust me with library books at the time.

I didn’t think about how creative I was on a daily basis — it was just what I felt like doing, so I did it.

Twelve years later, at seventeen years old, my schedule is drastically different. Most of it is allotted to school, work, or productivity. And when I finally come home, slammed and exhausted, I pull out my phone or open my laptop, looking for something to watch, consume, or absorb.

I tell myself I just don’t have time anymore to create like I used to.

But that’s a lie.

As we get older, we are told to prioritize creativity less — instead, productivity is king — and it leaves us drained when we do finally get a bit of respite from our busy lives. We take in other people’s work constantly: hours scrolling through social media or binge watching TV and movies leave our minds saturated, but our hands idle. And it leaves me, at least, feeling strangely empty.

Collectively, we need to make a change.

Instead of devoting what little leisure we have toward watching and scrolling, we need to create things ourselves just as much as we consume. Not because consumption is inherently bad, but because creating exercises a part of our brains that modern life can easily atrophy.

Creativity is a muscle. When it goes unused, so too does the sense of fulfillment, happiness, and health it provides.

There is a massive correlation between creativity and overall well-being. The simple act of making art can decrease major stress hormones in the body like cortisol, and it increases feel-good hormones like dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and even endorphins, Harvard physician and poet Dr. Jeremy Nobel said.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that, in 2024, Americans 15 and older spent just over five hours each day on leisure. Roughly half of that time — almost three hours — was spent watching television. Other activities, like reading, exercising, or playing games, take up much smaller slices of the day. And as of February 2025, the average daily social media usage of internet users worldwide amounted to 141 minutes per day.

This attention we’re freely handing out isn’t simply a harmless way to pass the time.

Stanford University research shows that frequent social media use alters dopamine pathways, affecting reward processing, attention, and emotional regulation. Teens, whose brains are still developing, are particularly sensitive; extended time online can dull responsiveness in areas like the prefrontal cortex and amygdala, which guide decision making, emotion, and impulse control.

You might even know intuitively that algorithms are very good at capturing our attention. Every time I scroll on TikTok, I think about how bad it probably is for me, but I do it anyway because the alternative — the real world — can sometimes feel too daunting.

The private, imperfect, and often messy work of imagination is hard, while being creative with your free time inherently requires effort. It requires you to choose, whereas putting a phone in your hand takes away your choices in a lot of ways — and that can feel like a very freeing thing.

I know when a phone is in my hand, I have about three options: text, listen to music, or scroll. For me at least, there’s not much creativity in it. Then — usually when my phone dies or my free time runs out — I look up at the world and remember, I have choices to make.

It follows that we spend so much of our time passively consuming. But it’s that difficulty of choice that makes creativity so deeply necessary.

While many of us associate creativity with the arts — famous painters, filmmakers, musicians, and actors — every single person possesses creativity. Being creative is simply cognitive fitness.

Researchers at Pennsylvania State University found that creative thinking requires increased communication between brain networks that usually work separately. Making something, whether you’re drawing, writing, composing, or building, activates semantic networks linked to memory, emotional regulation, and meaning — different pathways than passive consumption uses. While scrolling lights up the pleasure centers in our brain, creating builds our cognitive architecture.

The difference matters neurologically.

“Use it or lose it” isn’t just a saying; it’s what happens when certain networks in the brain go unstimulated.

You don’t notice this distinction as much anymore because we’ve mostly eliminated the very conditions that used to spark creativity in the first place. Boredom, historically, was the engine of invention. That restless mental state, that cognitive surplus with nowhere to go, used to be the space in which ideas formed — when your mind had the silence to wander through a book, to draw, to craft, and to create.

Now, with the wealth of consumables our modern world offers — new TV, movies, streaming, and social media — we’ve practically eradicated boredom. But along the way, we also killed creativity.

We need more balance in our modern world.

So go out and create. Let it be bad. Let it be messy, joyful, and unrestricted — like you understood it had to be as a kid. Next time you have some extra time on your hands, ask yourself, what would a five year old do?