As long as we've revered creators, we've imagined them as romantic figures sitting alone in a shadowy room—creating stunning works of art, solving complex scientific quandaries, and basically being brilliant all by themselves. Their minds alone are the source of genius, and we all stand in awe of their creations.

The idea of the lone genius arose during the Enlightenment, which emphasized one’s mind and ability to think as the center of the universe. This framework, coupled with the rise of copyright law creating “legal owners” of works of art, minted the Shakespeares of the world as individual innovators. Ever since then, we’ve seen individuals receive accolades for their work as sole contributors to their work. Nearly every invention, work of art, or scientific discovery is attributed to a sole individual, ignoring the work and efforts of the many who contribute to it.

In reality, the idea of a lone genius is a myth. Even as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby, he did so with help from a rich circle of writers and artists in Paris, including Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Matisse. We remember Einstein as the person who formulated the theory of relativity, but even though he was able to elucidate the theory of relativity, he only did so with the Swiss engineer Michele Besso as his sounding board.

Despite the inaccuracy of the notion, belief in the lone genius has only become more common and appealing, in part due to the emergence of certain ideas. In the last few decades, without realizing it, the Western world largely embraced an ideology that imbued itself into every little crevice of our lives. Many have never even heard of it, yet it has become systematized for years, shaping our current reality.

That ideology is called neoliberalism and it’s the prevailing political ideology of our time, with the central tenet being that every aspect is a market and we are all simply participants in the market. If everything in life is a market, then competition is the main way that we participate in it—competing for jobs, dates, and more recently, attention. 

The ideology rose to prominence in the 1980s as President Ronald Reagan in the US and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the UK spearheaded campaigns of deregulation, tax cuts for the wealthy, the privatization of major parts of the government, and the suppression of unions. Thatcher notably described her perspective (and defined the neoliberal view) by saying that there is no such thing as a society, only individuals and people. Through their efforts and those of the leaders who succeeded them, the Western world has become increasingly competitive. If everything boils down to individuals, then everything comes down to individual choices, where our problems are our own faults, and we are meant to resolve them on our own, often through consumption. And if someone is successful, they must be a lone genius—someone whose own skills and effort are the sources of their success, rather than other external factors.

For better or worse, the neoliberal ideology has given rise to the creator economy as we know it today. Policies eroded the social safety net and eventually led to the 2008 financial crisis through deregulation of the financial sector, setting the stage for the rise of the influencer. Given the poor job market, many young millennials had to pivot into social media for work, which was seen as an empowering and democratizing force at the time. Social media was a perfect complement for the neoliberal ideology, a means to quantify attention and influence into metrics to measure the most successful people in the market.

Considering the neoliberal origins of the creator economy, it’s no wonder that many creators push individualism and isolation, especially when it can benefit their own place in the market. In her newsletter internet princess, culture writer Rayne Fisher-Quan explores this, writing, “when I see the brightly-coloured Instagram posts encouraging me to cut off my friends and focus on myself, I can’t help but notice a convenient side effect of isolation: it forces us to rely on paid relationships in order to grow.” This is a self-fulfilling loop for influencers trying to sell a lifestyle—“buy my product and you’ll be better,” even when most growth occurs by connecting with others. 

Many creators, including myself, fall into the trap of seeing other creators as competition. We’re competing in the attention economy where there are only so many eyeballs and so many people who can read or listen to or watch our work. Why would we want to give an advantage to our competition?

For the first few years of my writing career, I wrote as a solitary, unpaid creator with no specific audience in mind beyond my friends and family. I didn’t have much belief in my skills, but I assumed that consistency would lead to gradual improvement and eventual success in my writing career. And for a little while, it seemed to work pretty well, as my newsletter gained a few subscribers over the years even though I wasn’t sure if I was actually getting any better as a writer. However, during the height of the pandemic in 2020, after feeling a little bit too much like an individual and a little too isolated, I decided to find a writing group. 

When I formed my group from a Slack server created for a writing challenge, I expected something rather transactional, where we would read each other’s work and offer lists of comments and criticisms. Instead, it felt like we each were finding ways to deepen our love for the craft of writing. We found joy in each other’s consonance and characters and conflicts. Yes, we gave feedback and encouragement and suggestions, but we also bonded over our art, letting one another in on the oft-solitary process of figuring out our thoughts and our stories. We pushed each other, taught each other, and ultimately shaped one another and our individual work. For the first time, I was able to understand how my work compared to others’, where my strengths were and where my peers excelled and we were able to come together to improve each others’ weaknesses.

It was through this writing group that I gained the confidence to write poetry and share it with the world. From them, I learned about the process of pitching stories. I pitched stories to them before I pitched them to editors, learned how to sell a story to an editor. It was because of them that I was able to start getting paid to write for the first time. It was thanks to their camaraderie that I maintained and even deepened my love for the craft. It was through this group that I learned why every book has an acknowledgments page, and that to be featured on such a page is among the greatest achievements possible for a creator. A page that says these people inspired this book, these people saved this book, these people shaped this book. 

I implore creators to reject the ideas of the lone genius, to cast off the neoliberal ideology of being an individual in a market. We are creators, but we are also human beings—a social species that experiences loneliness like a disease and thrives through our connection to others. We were never meant to do things alone, and both as creators and people, we are so much better together.