I recently went to a conference where the boss of a gaming company said that playing where you get to express your creativity is one of the happiest moments humans can have (I can't remember his name but he was the boss of Akatsuki). He was talking about using your imagination in the context of gaming, but i think this holds true in other contexts as well.

Sir Ken Robinson also has a famous TED talk where he discusses schools killing our creativity. It's almost as if they're systematically trying to ruin the very thing that makes us human. I understand where they are coming from. Schools highly prioritize easy to measure things, creativity is objectively hard to measure. Also the sciences (which are also creative, mind you), are highly prioritized, like they should be, but at the expense of the arts.

Why can't we have both?

I think one key to a happy life is constant creation, constant stimulation of our creative minds.

Blogging is one way in which I do this, and I also get immense satisfaction from simply writing too. There's just something about creating something concrete. And I think for people who have been missing that creation, because they have been schooled not to be creative, that they need an excuse to be creative. It really doesn't matter what you do, as long as you're building something new (which includes editing old things too).

Along with meditation, being creative should be a core component in our school systems.