Ethan Hawke on Creativity

I've seen clips of this video before but I've never watched the whole thing. It's only 9 minutes long so I recommend you give this a watch during a coffee break or something.

This part in particular hits me hard:

Most people don't spend a lot of time thinking about poetry, they have a life to live and they're not really concerned with Allen Ginsberg's poems or anybody's poems. Until... their father dies, you go to a funeral, you lose a child, somebody breaks your heart, they don't love you any more and all of a sudden you're desperate for making sense out of this life and "has anybody felt this bad before, how did they come out of this cloud?"

Or the inverse, something great. You meet somebody and your heart explodes, you love them so much you can't even see straight ... and that's when art's not a luxury, it's sustenance

At a time when the relevance of creative people is being somewhat called into question with the dawn of AI-generated content, this is what people need to remember.

Whatever kind of day you've had, good or bad, most people end the day curled up with either a book or watching something on TV. When you consider just how many people are involved in creating a book, movie, TV show, comic, cartoon... whatever, it sheds a light on just how vital art is to humanity.

Art's not a luxury.