Writing in the In-Between: Creativity in a Hyperconnected World
As I reflect on my creative process over the last couple of years, I realise that it does not begin with technology. It has been a journey of creating, learning, and persistence. And a lot of writing. It begins with something far older, quieter, and more human than any tool. It begins with a feeling, a question, an idea, a moment of noticing, or a small internal spark that asks to be followed.
The Human Spark
That spark often arrives when I am walking, sitting in a café, staring out of a window, driving, or letting my mind drift without any particular agenda. It comes through daydreaming, through sensory moments, through the kind of thinking that is not linear but associative, emotional, and embodied. Sometimes it arrives as an image. Sometimes as a phrase. Sometimes as a vague sense that something is trying to form.
This kind of thinking is not inefficient. It is generative. It is the mind making connections beneath the surface, integrating experience, memory, emotion, and meaning. It is the same mode of cognition that has always given rise to stories, art, philosophy, and insight.
This part of creativity is deeply human. It cannot be optimised, rushed, or forced. It asks for presence rather than productivity, and for trust rather than control.
This way of understanding creativity brings to mind Elizabeth Gilbert’s idea in Big Magic, where she speaks about ideas as living things that visit us, hover nearby, and sometimes move on if we do not make space for them. Whether one takes this literally or metaphorically, there is something profoundly freeing in the suggestion. Creativity, in this view, is not something we manufacture on demand, but something we enter into a relationship with. Our task is not to dominate it, but to notice it, welcome it, express it, and give it somewhere to land.
As I write this, I am knee-deep in the final edits and crafting of my book. The idea originally wandered into my life many years ago, and now I find myself in the stage where wandering becomes shaping, where the intuitive becomes deliberate, and where the rawness of first ideas meets the discipline of craft. For me, it is slow, sometimes painstaking work, but it is also deeply alive. This is where I feel most clearly the difference between having ideas and making meaning.
What modern life has changed is not the nature of this spark, but the conditions in which it appears, and the ways we learn to catch it.
Wandering and Gathering
I often gather these early thoughts through voice notes, scribbled pages in a journal, fragments saved for later, or half-articulated ideas recorded before they disappear. These are not finished thoughts. They are not meant to be. They are traces of something still becoming.
In cyberpsychology, we often talk about technology as a cognitive scaffold. Meaning it is something that can support our thinking without replacing it. It can hold what we cannot hold in our working memory. It can preserve what might otherwise dissolve. It can create continuity across time.
But it does not generate meaning for us. It only stores what we have already begun.
This is the wandering stage of creativity. The porous stage. The stage where curiosity and exploration matter more than clarity. It is where the mind moves laterally rather than logically, and where insight often arrives sideways rather than head-on.
Later on, the stages of creativity bring a very different mode of being.
Shaping and Devotion
When I sit down to write, I do not drift. I usually work in long, hyperfocused stretches. I shape. I trim. I edit. I refine. I return to the same piece of writing again and again, not because it is broken, but because it is alive and asking to be understood more fully.
Why This Matters
There is a growing belief that this kind of deep focus is becoming rare, but I do not believe it is obsolete. It is the state in which synthesis happens. It is where fragments become form. It is where intuition becomes language.
This is the devotion stage. The craft stage. The stage where meaning is not merely sensed, but made.
These two modes are not in conflict.
They are partners.
One gathers, and the other shapes.
One wanders, and the other commits.
One listens, and the other decides and expresses.
Modern tools can support this process, but they are not its source. They do not create the spark. They simply give it somewhere to land.
A voice note does not think for me. It holds my thinking.
A notebook does not imagine for me. It receives my imagining.
A document does not write for me. It gives me a place to return.
These distinctions matter more than we might realise.
There is a growing narrative that modern creativity is fragmented, distracted, and diminished. There may be some truth in this, but it is not the whole story.
What we are really learning is how to live inside a fast, hyperconnected world while still pacing our thinking, protecting depth in a culture that rewards speed, and honouring the difference between gathering ideas and shaping them.
The danger is not that we use tools. The danger is that we forget where creativity actually comes from.
It does not come from platforms.
It does not come from systems.
It does not come from optimisation.
It comes from attention.
From human curiosity.
From noticing what moves us.
From trusting what keeps returning.
From a cyberpsychological point of view, this matters deeply.
When we outsource too much of our inner life to external systems, we risk weakening our relationship with our own thinking. When we treat creativity as an output rather than a relationship, we flatten it into something mechanical.
But creativity is not mechanical. It is relational.
It is a relationship with our own questions.
A relationship with our own inner life.
A relationship with the slower, imperfect way meaning takes shape when we allow it space and time.
This is not about doing more. It is about listening more deeply.
And perhaps the real work now is not to escape modern life, but to learn how to live inside it without abandoning what makes us human. To use our tools without outsourcing our thinking. To let technology assist without letting it define.
Because the spark was always ours.
And it still is.
YUMMIE TAKEAWAY
Your ideas are not meant to be rushed. They are meant to be noticed, welcomed, and shaped at your own pace.
This article is part of my ongoing exploration of modern life, wellbeing and human connection. I explore these themes through my writing, research, talks, workshops, events and collaborations with organisations.
