The danger with misdirected potential is that it inevitably finds a home in the absurd—unearned bathos, misdirected obsession, even petty grandiosity.
Psychologist Marie-Louise von Franz, a close associate of Carl Jung, writes on the reality of wasted creative energy in Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales (1974):
People who have a creative side and do not live it out are most disagreeable clients. They make a mountain out of a molehill, fuss about unnecessary things, are too passionately in love with somebody who is not worth so much attention, and so on. There is a kind of floating charge of energy in them which is not attached to its right object and therefore tends to apply exaggerated dynamism to the wrong situation.
Idea for Impact: Unspent creativity doesn’t stay idle—it mutates. If you don’t give it purpose, it will attach itself to nonsense and turn you into a zealot for the trivial.
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