Every very few weeks I stand in front of a room of accomplished adults and ask them to play. Actually play. Get messy with their hands, draw impossible portraits, and build ridiculous ideas to get them back into their natural creative states.
There’s always a pause. Someone nervously checks their phone or suddenly needs a bathroom break. Then, about 10 minutes in, the energy shifts and something cracks open. An embodied remembrance is reawakened and the creative sense of self returns. For these moments, people come home to that naturally creative way of being human, that for so many feels like — and may in fact be — lifetimes ago. By the end of our session they’ll tell me it’s the most alive they’ve felt at work in months.
That crack is what this newsletter is about.
We are living through a time of overwhelm — a polycrisis of climate, politics, technology, and spirit. So many of us are searching for meaning, for grounded hope, for ways to stay human in an age of acceleration. Beneath the noise, there’s a quiet longing: to remember that we can still create, still contribute, still imagine our way forward with purpose.
A lot of people I love and admire are quietly exhausted.
And I keep coming back both to our innate human capacity and to the medicine of the soul. Making stuff is medicine. Real, measurable medicine. Art lowers cortisol. Purpose predicts how long you live. And play? Play rewires your brain for the exact skills AI can’t touch.
The research finally caught up to what artists always knew. There’s a whole field now, neuroaesthetics, proving that creative practice changes your body, your brain, and how well (and maybe how long) you live.
Meanwhile the longevity world is obsessed with the body and mostly ignoring the creative life. Cold plunges, protein targets, sleep scores. These help too. But what actually makes those extra years worth living? That’s the part I want to write about.
When we were 5, 98% of us tested as creative geniuses. By adulthood it’s 2%. We didn’t lose it. We buried it under systems that reward conformity, productivity, and certainty. Creativity is your birthright, and this is the path back.
I’ve spent 17 years teaching this at Stanford’s d.school, in courses on play, psychedelics, purpose, and design. This is where I finally write it down.
1. Who this is for
This is for you if your creativity got buried somewhere under a career and lately you feel the itch. If you want ideas at work that surprise people. If you’re just starting a creative life, or restarting one after decades. Or if you suspect there’s more aliveness available than you’re currently getting.
The newsletter is the doorway. The community is the point, and I’m looking for possibilitarians.
A possibilitarian meets a broken thing and imagines a better one, then builds it. There are more of us than you’d think, and I want us in the same room. That room is the comments. It’s where this gets good and where the community gets built, where you share what you tried, what you made, and what cracked open. Come say hi.
2. Try this before you close the tab
Here’s your first possibilitarian move, and the promise you can hold me to: every post will hand you one small thing to actually do.
Look around the room you’re in and find one thing that bugs you. The drawer that sticks. The cable nest. The mug that never feels right in your hand. Don’t fix it. Spend 3 minutes imagining three better versions, and make one of them gloriously impossible. Impossible is allowed. Impossible is the whole point.
Then tell me in the comments which one you’d build. That’s it. That’s the muscle.
3. The specifics
It’s free. The science, the stories, the practices, and the full archive, all in your inbox.
No rigid schedule. I write when I have something worth your time, with the authentic cadence of a full creative life, which tends to land most weeks. The one thing you can count on every time: a practice to try.
Lest we get too serious about serious design work (this one actually saves lives), a playful mindset keeps the creative juices flowing. Plus it's just more fun that way. Thanks to Patrick Beaudouin for the fun snap.
So if any of this made you lean forward or sparked that inner knowing, subscribe. Then go find your sticky drawer, and meet me in the comments.
See you in there.
Elysa