I’m used to understanding the concept of atrophy in a biological context, where it has to do with something wasting away—usually a muscle, in its most popular usage. The Oxford English Dictionary calls it the “wasting away of the body, or any part of it, through imperfect nourishment”.
This week I heard someone use the term creative atrophy to describe a decline in creativity over time.
I appreciate this idea, and am tempted to offer two provocations in response.
First, this view seems to approach creativity from a primarily psychological standpoint. There are other ways to understand creativity that play a little further outside the psychological realm, and which have less to do with it being a trait and more to do with it being a practice (and therefore, somewhat mundane to everyday life).
Second, in the biological context the counterpart to atrophy is hypertrophy, which has to do with growth. Surely this is worth emphasising as well? If we are designing creative interventions, it might serve well as a less scarcity-oriented metaphor.
Interestingly, the OED offers a few figurative interpretations of atrophy from centuries gone by. I like this one, from Thomas Carlyle’s On Heroes (1841): “For the Scepticism..is..a chronic atrophy and disease of the whole soul” (v. 282).