Diarrhea

One of the things I terribly miss about working in advertising is diarrhea—of ideas.   

In the creative and accounts departments, all you had to do was to begin your statement with “What if?” and you get a torrent of ideas that surge faster than you could write them down.

It was as though everyone had in his brain disc a grace-rich mine from where he extracts out-of-the-box ideas 24/7.

Why do I miss this so?

Today I teach college students part-time and I often conduct creative writing workshops. Brainstorming is a part of the curriculum/program.

In advertising, brainstorming was (I write in the past tense because I don’t know the state of advertising today) a noisy, garrulous affair. It takes gargantuan guts to say, “Enough!” 

Where I am today, brainstorming is mostly a quiet, stare-at-nowhere, scroll- down-the-phone, google-the-topic, unexciting non-event. Except for a few exceptions, millennials in brainstorming sessions seem to have an ellipse on their foreheads that denotes, Nothing is forthcoming. It's a serious case of constipation, and it makes my heart (or tummy) bleed.

I pray that I may not lose my sanity, snap, and suffer from anemia.

Have ideas suddenly flown out of the window and left us forever? Have they gone into a dark, deep covered pit where they can no longer be found?

Plato said, “Thinking is the talking of the soul with self.”  Is it possible that the young people in this generation, these digital natives, have lost their soul? And self?

Just having fits of nostalgia.