Hi ~loghead and friends!

There are a lot of great ideas in this thread.
Y'all are very interesting creative people and I love it.

I am going to zoom in on one particular thing that ~loghead asked about.

	"So, if one wanted to DO that (express oneself, or find a way to get
	the satisfaction from/gratification with what one would get from art
	expression), how would one do that?"

The second part about "finding a way to get the satisfaction / gratification"
is what I really want to speak to here. I think that, somewhat surprisingly,
you can get that satisfaction from just about anything if you do it the right
way. You can experience profound satisfaction from any challenging activity. It
can be writing, painting, mopping the floor, washing the dishes, meeting new
people, rolling cigarettes, whatever. The magic of getting that satisfaction is
all about picking something, spending a lot of time on it, and balancing the
challenge and your level of skill.

     ^
     |
   C | Scary /      /            
   h |      /      /      
   a | :S  /      /
   l |    /   w  /
   l |   /   o  /
   e |  /   l  /
   n | /   F  /   :(
   g |/      /
   e |      /  Boring 
     |     /     
     +-------------->
          Skill
	
If you're working on *anything* then you have some amount of skill and it
presents some amount of challenge.  If the challenge is much less than your
skill, it is boring/wasteful.  If the challence is much greather than your
skill, then it is scary/frustrating.  In the middle, where your skill level
meets the challenge of the task, you get a wonderful "flow".  It feels like
time melts away, you spend forever at it, you're in "the zone".

Of course, after a while, you'll drift in to the anxious/bored state and you
need to re-adjust. So -- How do you get that satisfaction/gratification of
doing that is not "ART"?  Follow the "Flow" line and adjust your path whenever
you hit the Scary/Boring wall.

People do classical art like compose choral musics, research mathematics, paint
pictures, dance, climb mountains, meditate, etc because they offer particularly
well-understood skill/challenge landscapes. You can spend your whole life
getting better at these things and there will always be someone else to guide
you, there will be more resources, there will be new and exciting challenges.
That doesn't mean that non-classical art is bad or should be avoided, but the
skill/challenge landscape is less obvious. You might quickly become the world's
most experience person at something and have no one to guide you nor obvious
challenges to pursue.

I'm happy to chat about this more, or share specific examples of this in my
life, if you'd like to chat more about it. If you have questions, ask!

Giving credit where it is due:

This diagram and the whole notion of "flow" is due to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
He pioneered the investigation of "positive psychology" and "flow". He was a
legit academic psychologist, and has a lot of neat things to say. Check him
out.