Creativity had a lighter

There were whole websites, project canvases and brainstorming sessions in the apps I used every day. There were also sheets of paper covered in pencil diagrams, connections and paths. A project could be very developed and still be hard for me to put in front of someone.

When I returned to a project, I would find another screen to refine, a connection to make or something that still needed explaining. I understood the whole thing. For someone else to see it, I had to walk them through every turn.

I had done plenty of work. What I struggled with was deciding which version was ready to put out into the world.

Anybody who has made things while smoking knows the feeling. The music opens up, associations run, a phrase seems to have waited twenty years and, for a few minutes, the project already exists — with a budget, a poster and a retrospective interview. That is not a lie. The subjective experience is real.

Whether the work happened is a different question.

For a long time, cannabis and creative work were mixed together in my life. I wrote, imagined campaigns, started books and designed worlds. Some good things emerged. It would be absurd to credit every success to abstinence and every idea to smoke. It would also be convenient to give the joint authority over everything I made while it was present.

The lighter attended many meetings. That is not why I was a creative director.

This relationship carries old countercultural prestige. Music, cinema, literature, design: the artist alters consciousness to find a door others cannot see. History contains real doors and magnificent work. It also contains many people staring at a doorknob for three hours.

The interesting question is not whether cannabis creates or destroys creativity. That is too broad and too dull. At least four things need separating: having an idea, feeling that it is extraordinary, judging it accurately and sitting down the next day to make it real.

The idea could fly.
The file was still called “final_2_this_time”.

The trailer and the movie

Some studies place a wedge between sensation and result. People who had used cannabis rated their own ideas and those of others as more creative, while independent evaluators found no equivalent improvement. The idea may genuinely feel better; perhaps the inner critic simply decided to award five stars that night.

Other studies find no clear improvement and suggest that part of the association may come from the person: curiosity, imagination and openness to novelty. Having many books at home does not prove the bookcase wrote them. Laboratory tasks are limited too; they cannot settle how art is made or how far one life might go.

Culture sometimes confused company with cause.

And yet something may be happening. Changes in attention, mood or appreciation can produce combinations you might not permit in another state. Some survive the morning. Others were a lamp made from a paddle and an economic theory about beach bars.

Inspiration alone doesn’t leave ink

Client projects had a deadline and someone waiting. On my own projects, I could keep adding layers. The possibility of making them a little better let me postpone finding out whether people understood them.

Choosing, discarding, revising and accepting that someone may not see what you see are part of the work too. Sometimes that was where the difficulty lay, after I had already done a great deal.

Cannabis can be part of a creative life. The question is what role it plays. It can be an interruption, a ritual, a way to loosen judgement, a source of association, a reward or a sign that the day is over. If it appears before every sentence, it also becomes a doorman: creativity begins to believe it needs permission to enter.

Then the fear is not losing the joint. It is losing the door.

That is why some people initially feel that they have no ideas, or that everything is flat, when they take a break. Changes in sleep, irritability, habit, expectation and the absence of a well-rehearsed ritual may all be present. This does not prove that creativity has gone. It may simply have arrived without stage lights.

The opposite happens too: somebody smokes, works and delivers. Nobody needs their work erased to support an argument. The adult view is to avoid turning a personal exception into universal law, or an average result into a compulsory biography.

I do not want to erase the nights of music, the conversations or the ideas that arrived with smoke. Some were good. Others tried to sell me an attic with no lift. They are all part of the story.

An idea can spend twenty-four hours without smoke. If it still asks you to make it in the morning, perhaps it was an idea and not just a doorway with excellent lighting. It is worth remembering who stayed to build it.

The joint may have lit the room.
The work still needed somebody to pay the electricity bill.