This evolution also brings up some fundamental human motivations, such as the desire to optimize knowledge and stability, to know our origins and destinies, our meaning, to satisfy our ontological-existential quests. The quests for truth and for stability are at once two sides of the same tapestry, sometimes in conflict with each other, and sometimes synergistic, but always interactive, playing in the same conceptual attractors. Creativity lies in exploring where and how to weave within these fractal imbrications, and these involve tensions of stability and change. Creativity, or the generation of novelty (Montuori, Combs, & Richards, 2004) requires instability. How does the tension between the need for stability and instability resolve itself? Or put another way, why does stability require instability? (See Arons in Richards, 2007.)

Basic existential positions affect all aspects of our personality, and are represented in our everyday thinking more than we may realize. They affect basic decision-making, from selecting what tires to put on your car, to what TV channel to turn to, what to write your local paper or say to your local radio show about any issue from economics, to global violence, to gay marriage, to planning the day to minimize waste of time and energy. They especially affect the extent one is willing (or eager) to accept instability and risk. Furthermore, existential and religious ideas concern many people, and there are few areas in which independent thinking and creativity are more important, and which are exercised with greater diversity of independence from social norms. Obviously, the evolution of human nature interacts with ontological issues. Everyday creativity may be an increasingly important factor in this evolution.

This evolution is seen in the context of reviewing human evolution to the present, then considers the potential changes in human nature based on trends in modern technology, and then their implications for what it means to be human, and especially whether human freedoms will be liberated or constrained.

see also:

Abraham in Richards Everyday Creativity 2007. This paper and the one whose link appears in the abstract above were adapted from this chapter.