It was this week a year ago that Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. filed the largest bankruptcy in the US history becoming the first of many crashes of the Great Recession. Although I was troubled by the event, I remember being more disturbed by my nonchalance to the fact that Lehman was $613 billion in debt. It was such an astonishing amount of money that it was barely believable. My comprehension was further confused by having grown up in the Age of Hyper-Capitalism – a period when having a million dollars became “not that much”.

This assertion would likely confirm the beliefs of those individuals who claim that the recession was a good wake up call for Generation Y. To those same people I would acknowledge that the recession has certainly re-adjusted our expectations and our perceived sense of entitlement but the real wake-up call is just how messed up a world our generation is inheriting. For this very reason, many of us have said that the recession was needed – a valid albeit insensitive belief to those that are suffering.

Many have suffered and many still will so despite economic growth here in Canada, the recession’s impact is not over. The recovery could potentially be equally as painful. Part of me feels premature, therefore, to speak to the death of the recession and assert whether or not Creativity Killed the Recession.

Given this community’s identity, it would be nice to say yes and provide a packaged response why. But this would be dangerously dishonest. The reason for this is that the recession was merely the exclamation point to realizing that capitalism is not a self-sufficient system and has largely been without a conscious for some time. Our way of life, in short, needs immense change and creativity will do lots to enact this but neither quickly nor on its own.

Creativity is a scary word for many people, victim of the innate reluctance towards change, let alone a form of it which is not incremental but defined by being dramatically different. The recession has been, however, perfect by producing the proper climate for ideas to come from the margins to the mainstream.  The fact that economic growth does not automatically translate into social or human growth, for example, was not understood so clearly until relative recently. Dismantling a society driven by the pursuit of money rather than the pursuit of happiness, however, will take time.

We are really only at the beginning for creativity. In retrospect, its not as important whether it killed the recession but rather by what it can do to re-build our planet.