The Impact of Modern Lifestyle on Creativity and Strategies for Improvement

1. Introduction

Keywords: Modern, lifestyle, creativity, innovation, organization, management.

Finally, after examining some of the more significant qualitative and quantitative pros and cons, we propose a strategy to improve creativity among the population in order to encourage people to look for and find other ways of creating new knowledge by using their personal skills related to new entry, brainstorming, and problem-solving in creating visions without disrupting their lifestyle using Bailey’s level above survival. We also suggest initiating a link or relationship between the individual, a key driver related to creativity, and the organizational climate, culture, and health.

This paper scrutinizes the relationship between the modern lifestyle and innovation (creativity). Unlike creativity, innovation is rooted in the work of Combust, Schumpeter, and Knight. Modified, creativity is when a person makes something valuable, which is an integral part of innovation. We apply the inverted U-shaped relationship between the modern lifestyle and creativity, apply the eight basic COI indicators, and show subindex outcomes for 12 countries so as to verify that people’s economic affiliations make an important difference within the modern world.

Just as modern lifestyle highly contributes to prolonged life expectancy, it also poses huge challenges that need to be addressed. Prolonged life expectancy is not the only contribution of the modern lifestyle; it also contributes to advances in scientific discovery and technology, economic growth, the industrial revolution, and a relationship between knowledge and job creation. These days, people are living in a world that is full of new things, innovative ideas, and faster digital communication. There are many things that are convenient and make people’s lives easier than in general. However, mainly, as a result of information overload, people are no longer surprised, shocked, or amazed enough to invent something on their own.

1.1. Background and Significance

Invention through science and the art of creation are the steps to realizing human freedom and excellence and a person's identity. Machiavelli, Kant, and Hegel believed that the ultimate value of art is to express that "representing" means to keep revealing the valuable things in the existing world and maintain the dignity of human freedom. Providing the individual with the ability to create and create an opportunity is to make them develop and make a true life filled with enthusiasm, stimulating their inner strong energy. Then, human beings can show a harmonious body in the process of creation, which is able to arouse feelings.

In a large vision analysis, the whole society is meant to serve human existence. Any activities that do not serve the individual or society's operation are futile, according to Tolstoy's theory. Individual differences are another very significant subject in psychological thinking, and the main road to the sustainable operation of human society is to respect the development of each individual's brain. There is a method so that people are not away from their own development path, that is, one must be active but cannot remain silent when they encounter the amazing things they can learn.

The current modern lifestyle influences the psychological process of human creativity. In the context of high technology and complexity, the creative quality and quantity of human beings are facing a sharp decline. With the increasingly serious impact of passive consumption, neuroscientists and psychologists express the same concern: Exposure time to electronic equipment and the virtual world is increasingly replacing the original mental space, such as thinking, observation, and focusing on reality. These are the main elements of creativity and the foundation of individual development and team collaboration.

2. Understanding Creativity

We argue that while "No Child Left Behind" identified critical thinking as a necessary skill, it did not identify creative thinking as a necessary skill or provide funding for it. It is important to note that children learn creative and critical skills by being taught by teachers who have them. One of our most important tasks as teacher educators is to work on creative and critical skills in our teacher candidates. Becoming an elementary school teacher is a creative task. Everything a teacher does from organizing the room, getting to know each student, and designing lessons and assessments, is founded in the creativity to get things done right. It is instructive to review the theories of creativity, the models of the pedagogy of instruction for creativity, and the research of creativity in the classroom setting to understand how the creative process modeling affects students and leads to educational change.

We argue that creativity is important. It is a valued quality and one often associated with success. Creativity, however, is more than an opportunity for success in a world of demands. We believe that creativity, in the form of creation, has the ability to change society and move it forward. In this chapter, we provide definitions of creativity, theories of creativity, and explanations of the elements important in the creative process. To understand creativity, we need to examine the process through which it occurs and is developed. According to the Research Center for Gifted and Talented, creativity is the generative route of developing ideas into products and services that have marketplace value. The process includes the creative thinking skills of construction and elaboration. Creativity does not occur in a vacuum; it requires critical thinking at every stage.

2.1. Definition and Importance

Creative insights are triggered by the transformation of worldviews and behavioral practices. Creative work is not random; both novices and experts generate creative work by using situated knowledge. Such insights and surprises help to shape the process of learning necessary to support a future in which we will all play a part. Thus, new strategies for cultivating creativity and innovation in individuals and organizations are essential. These strategies should reflect the nature of the uncertainties we face and the challenges associated with globalization. They must also recognize the interdependence of creative, technical, social, and organizational sense-making demands. The capture and analysis of data about prior, current, and emerging patterns of discoveries, and of patterns of assets and opportunities in the various segments of the innovation process, can help to shape future educational practices. Then the real payoff will be the insights from a national-level data analysis in the decision-making and goal-setting process.

There is not only widespread interest in studying creativity and innovation, but the demand for cultivating creative talent in educational and work settings has taken on new urgency. A search for the phrase "organizations and creativity" produced 51 references between 1999 and 2004 and 75 references for 2005 alone. The search for "organizations and innovation" produced 148 references for 1999 to 2004, and 112 references for 2005. Fundamentally, we are searching for processes that can promote creativity in the service of goals that ought to be worthwhile, rather than to greenlight every new idea. The more creative individuals, and the higher the velocity and quality of creative organizational effort, the better hope we have to address the growing number of technical, business, and social problems that confront us.

3. Factors Hindering Creativity in Modern Life

People more and more feel the pressure of schools, universities, and employers as they grow up. Such control only further intensifies dependence and fear of not meeting expectations. It is believed that a person must be constantly engaged in some activity, and sitting for three days to solve one problem is something unusual and suspicious. But it is the rest that allows you to reboot and shake up the creative potential. Not being distracted by material needs, the individual gains peace, the ability to abstract from emotions and feelings. Inner silence and alertness allow you to connect the internal resources of the mind, which are capable of combining new and old, spontaneous ideas. A modern person who has no independent choice of activity stops there. It has little incentive to take responsibility for what it does or does not do. The absence of internal motivation in games and employment activities quickly paralyzes the desire to independently learn something new and also prevents the desire to create.

Modern lifestyle is full of factors hindering creativity. Obvious barriers include various fears of making a mistake, self-doubt, and subjective beliefs about the absolute impossibility of mastering creative skills. At the same time, modern society does not teach the individual to overcome these obstacles. It is much easier to make a ready-made decision than to think through and come up with your own. The consumer-coach system is imposed on people, and those who resist it are still considered individualists and outcasts. Preparatory education is more concerned with teaching in schools that produce highly qualified specialists. There is no talk of creative development. A person must know how to quickly solve complex problems, but intensive training loads on objective knowledge at an early age are detrimental to the individual's creative growth.

3.1. Technological Distractions

The chronic distraction that results from the constant interruptions that are endemic to interactions with multiple information machine interfaces, such as computers, the internet, and smartphones, undermines thinking that requires deeper attention, such as reading, study, and contemplation. Deep thinking is affected by a cognitive resource known as working memory. School performance is deteriorating when youngsters are unable to concentrate on their studies for extended periods. Distraction has serious implications for users' creativity, problem-solving, and performance of jobs that require higher cognitive skills. Cognitive dissonance, a sign of the quality of thinking, is becoming less common with more frequent and shorter time intervals spent between interactions with media tools. Internet addiction also increases psychological problems such as emotional changes and negative behaviors. The addictive substances (stimulants) that are responsible for these rewards, dopamine and norepinephrine, are influenced by working aspect actions; the absence of medication with addictive substances results in increased demand in core aspects of the brain that these substances induce, hindering good thinking when applying the resolved 'reinforcer.'

In a recent meta-analysis of studies involving millions of students, researchers show that the highest internet and smartphone users exhibit worse academic results. Extensive literature details the destructive and unproductive nature of distraction by evoking negative emotions. Despite the fact that few studies address attentional fatigue and reduced information quality as an empirical base for the negative effects of social media on well-being, a small body of experimental studies has found that prolonged social media use is related to negative moods, such as anxiety, obsession, and emotion-related physiological stress.

The same internet technologies that have vastly increased access to knowledge and have brought people closer have had some negative effects on society, including reducing physical activity, affecting the amount and quality of people’s sleep, and undermining people’s thinking skills, especially critical thinking and creativity.

4. Psychological and Societal Pressures

In summary, one is often stressed by a job and pressure to succeed at work, fear of unemployment, loneliness, crime, or racial discrimination being some societal stress factors. Striving to gain that better level of life beyond a mere survival one, almost everybody senses that one tends to miss the time of once enjoyable reading and playing, or rotating the head to actually understand the real meaning of life. This task definitely represents a challenge for all the scholars and teachers who form our future from children to adults and for the modern way of thinking about life. It is both the job of businesses and governments to provide the right environment. They must create and promote the opportunities; they must enable groups and individuals to grow and function optimally. They must generate the motivation to do so. This is appreciated by modern cognitive psychology research studies, and it is therefore time to take cognitive psychology much more to heart.

Nowadays, mental health issues like stress, anxiety, or depression are not uncommon. The pressure to succeed at a job and simultaneously solve any personal and familial issues, that deep down people feel they cannot complain too much because there are numerous others worse and/or surviving much worse, exerts a high and prolonged level of stress on people. Such a stress level can often lead to a decrease in mental performance, and creativity is clearly a casualty of it. Striving to gain that better level of life beyond a mere surviving one, almost everybody senses that one tends to miss the time of once enjoyable reading and playing, the unwinding family Sunday, or rotating the head to actually understand the real meaning of life. Our brains rely on a rich mix of social experiences to grow and meet our cognitive and emotional needs. A society that increasingly embraces a profit-driven lifestyle with the devoted privatization of any public communal sector. However, in the end, it is severely the psychological basis of the majority of human beings and with that also the economic foundation of our Western world that is at stake.

4.1. Work-life Balance Issues

Work-life balance measures aim at saving time for personal and family matters. These measures are increasingly used in business practices by mainly young working people in Western Europe. According to the European (OQI), people in those countries show a higher priority for the activities that they undertake during their leisure time over paid work, while Russia is a country where people assign the highest value to paid work compared to leisure activities. As a result, people in EU countries with decreasing GDP per capita spend approximately four more leisure hours per week during the past nine years, whereas people in non-EU countries spend less time socializing and have a number of days off. They also have a larger volume of income as they are from well-developed countries.

Firstly, it is recognized that work-life balance measures are a part of public policy at the government level. Vanusters suggests that work-life balance is a phenomenon that is related to the current and future sustainability of both organizations and individuals. Organizations are referred to as 'employers'. The term time balancing is used. Additionally, work-life balance is at the same time an internal company policy, a private comfort issue, and a public quality concern.

5. Strategies to Enhance Creativity

But to maximize the potential of imitation, the economic agents do need to acquire and assimilate the codified invention or innovation developed at the origin. This necessity, however, does not require any physical barrier or time lag with the inventor, that is, it is not part of the location advantages. Indeed, economic agents that have direct physical access to the codified invention or innovation accumulate a better comprehension than agents located at some distance from the region of the origin.

We also need policies to raise the amount of resources devoted to creativity-producing activities in the workplace. The integration of the innovation and invention functions is also a necessary condition for the efficient rise of the new model of growth where ideas are the scarce factor of production. Like the relationship between invention and innovation, the creation occurs when economic agents have the motivation to innovate and to invent where innovation and invention processes are integrated to inform a codified or explicit technological knowledge base, in the same sector. In this approach, the interaction between the agents, technology and cultural environments, and the rest of the institutions plays a very important role in stimulating, at a very early stage, a self-sustaining virtuous cycle of economic development.

5.1. Mindfulness and Meditation Techniques

Maintaining attention, focus, and engagement while learning. This relationship between improved mindfulness, emotional regulation, attention, interpersonal abilities, and improved learning also contributes to the creation of an environment that is conducive to long-term learning gains. Some of the tools that practitioners can use in the classroom include training in mindfulness practice, mindfulness-based yoga, and implementing exercises and interactive activities such as deep breathing and muscle relaxation to prepare the students to engage in mindful learning, in addition to other core mindful practices. When we learn to concentrate and think carefully, we apply greater focus on the task at hand, and creativity occurs naturally. Consider your reception pupil who starts playing with a train set – at first, they may be limited to connecting train tracks and joining carriages. Later, further possibilities come into play – they can turn the train tracks into a rollercoaster ride or use the carriages as backpacks for fairies. This ease of choosing to play in a number of ways is creativity in action.

Mindfulness and meditation techniques have been found to improve creativity. A research study conducted by Colzato et al. showed that brief meditation activates a mental state conducive to divergent thinking, which is a fundamental aspect of creativity. Another study examined the relationship between mindfulness, working memory, and divergent thinking and found a positive correlation. It was argued that associative thinking, as practiced in meditative states, is closely maintained in working memory (without being interfered with by the presence of words or symbols which might suppress it) and is conducive to insight learning. A brain-imaging study also found that insight was associated with relaxation and that meditation practice could help cultivate these states of mind. Generally, the findings from these studies are aligned and seem to indicate a common underlying mechanism, in that the act of focusing and refocusing during meditation probably helps to regulate flexibility and impulsivity, thereby boosting performance in creative tasks.

6. Cultivating Curiosity and Exploration

One of these is providing them with a rich learning environment. We already know a lot about this. A rich learning environment is one that offers opportunities for children to explore, make choices, share, fix things that go wrong, surround themselves with the treasures of the natural world, move freely indoors and outdoors, and develop all of their gifts, not simply a few proclivities or talents. In such an environment, young children can develop their interests and talents - and creativity is fostered - at all levels. Through creating and experiencing diversity in their learning environments, adults can also help children develop some of the problem-solving and critical thinking skills necessary for creativity to flourish.

Noticing and solving problems or finding solutions to questions that have not been posed are the hallmarks of a curious and explorative mind. Some propose that curiosity can be created by the introduction of certain types of novelty or surprises. Ruth Van Recken, Kidron And Offenburg, and Mulford suggest that other ways of stimulating curiosity across cultures is through a child-focused environment in which children can become alive. This environment includes reducing the amount of television that children are exposed to, as well as increasing the challenging interactions that children have with adults and other children. Just as adults need certain basics, such as the nurturing of a child-friendly work environment and time, children have similar needs critical for creativity.