[tuxxi]

while I agree with your sentiment-- that we all spend too much time ruminating on the (albeit interesting) ideas of others, rather than with our own thoughts-- I'm not sure that we ever really had "creativity" to begin with.

for the entirety of human history, we've been growing by collecting and synthesizing the wisdom of others that come before us: standing on the shoulders of giants. we are surprisingly incapable when working alone. for instance, there are numerous examples of eruopean explorers starving or dying of easily preventable causes in the Americas, in the very spaces where natives had been living for tens of thousands of years. they weren't stupid, they just didn't have the foresight, or cultural knowledge that the natives did. [0]

There's the idea that "everything is a remix" [1], popularized by Kirby Furguson. he essentially states that we don't have much (if any) original creative thought, and that most "creative" ideas are just remixes of other ideas. this goes back all the way to prehistory and especially applies to traditional myths passed down orally through generations: see the numerous flood myths prevelant in almost all societies.

what I'm getting at is that we are not inherently creative beings, we don't do especially well when coming up with completely novel ideas. what we ARE good at is learning, synthesizing, and remixing.

so I'm not entirely sure that our "moth to an interesting article" behavior online is really that bad for us, I think its more the state that we are in when we do that - skim, go 'oh that's neat' and move along.

[0] The Secret of Our Success by Joseph Henrich

[1] https://youtu.be/zd-dqUuvLk4