The process of creation is absolutely beautiful.
Creators have been around for a while, and fortunately, always will be.
I personally, love to create because nothing in the world, and I mean nothing, is better than putting your hard-earned money, work, and time into something nice, and being able to say “I made that” and take the credit for it.
Creations are a result of mixing ideas and action, but a good creation takes a very well-rounded idea and a good action plan.
Anybody can create something, but not everybody can create something significant.
Creation is a form of art. It expresses and applies human skill and imagination, typically in a visual form.
the way we experience life better, by creating tools that make daily tasks easier, more effective, less burdensome, or more automatic. Once, long ago, these things had a very real and tangible effect on survival. Another reason involves evolutionary games that involve increasing reproductive desireability.
In birds one can find many hints about the latter. The bower bird may be the most conspicuous in terms of birds that make things. A male bower bird can spend many hours creating a special site to attract a mate. Evidently, female bower birds are very interested in the architectural, construction, and decorating abilities of male birds. Perhaps they use these abilities as a proxy for a prospective mate’s devotion and abilities in supporting a family. I suspect that something like this happens in certain human populations.
It is certainly true that toolmaking activities have imparted to certain human populations huge evolutionary advantages. Rifles and railroads, supported by a long list of supporting technologies such as writing, law, animal husbandry, and so on, made it possible for the English to overwhelm native populations throughout most of North America in the eighteenth and ninteenth centuries. So the making of tools really made a huge difference. (Read Jared Diamond’ Guns Germs Steel.) But even the most primitive of human tribes have tools that they have created for things like hunting, fishing, transport, and agriculture.
From an evolutionary point of view, humans make things because animals copy behavior from their ancestors. And many of our successful ancestors owed some measure of their evolutionary success to tools and, therefore, to toolmakers. Many more owed some measure of success to their skill as artisans of one sort or another, wielding tools more artfully to create things that evoke greater aesthetic pleasures. People who possessed and wielded tools well and gained some incremental success over those who did not.
We see the same thing at work today where people become famous, popular, and sexually attractive for their exceptional abilities at sports or music. Sometimes, for exceptional abilities in literature, visual arts, architecture, science, business, or law.
Why do people create things?
Because people like art, and art is beautiful.