Is Messiness a Sign of Creativity?

Image by Jazmin Quaynor

We have been conditioned as humans to believe that cleanliness is the right way to go. Now, it is true in a sense. Personal hygiene is very compulsory – but when it comes to the way in which we keep our workspace, why must we keep our belongings so congested in these tiny desk spaces? It’s like we’re hiding a range of diverse possibilities when trying to come up with reasonable solutions.

Neat and tidiness has had the tendency to coincide with logic and reasoning. Tidiness mirrors strict criteria in short. It promotes conventional thinking as every possession remains stored away. Out of sight, out of mind, right? It should lead to a clear path of thinking: no distractions. But what plenty fail to realize is that it is nearly impossible to draw inspiration from a plain white room.

Messiness has been proven to induce outgoing ideas. Things are literally outside of their designated place; thus, people are able to visualize a spectrum of different ideas when working. This doesn’t necessarily suggest that you should just over turn your hamper and fling your sheets across the room in order to draw immediate inspiration. There is a connection between messiness and creativity.

Despite everything being out of place, it is (ironically) displaced in an orderly fashion. There’s this particular control, instilled by you, over said mess and it’s arranged in a way that only makes sense to you. Remaining messy by nature permits a spectrum of results to come to mind. Similar to brainstorming, thoughts composed in a messy nature still have a correlation to one established theme. The magic of compulsory messiness is that it has the ability to connect two contradictory ideas and mend them into a sensible notion.

Messiness allows one to open their mind to a range of possibilities, whereas those in a “well- kept” environment would inevitably resort to a straightforward conclusion when problem solving. The idea of untidiness grants you more control. You could clean, but you choose not to. It influences the concept of thinking outside the box, as your things remain outside of their drawers.

Disorderliness doesn’t always correlate to just sloppiness; entropy and messiness are seen as similar. Disorganization, while seeming as an unacceptable working space, is also able to bring forth an array of distinctive ideas when kept in a particular manner. This shows that creativity is at the influence of eccentric thinking and is a result of little to no limitations; parallel to an untamed room.