What You Don’t Create Will Never Exist: Neil deGrasse Tyson on Creativity

Insight

Aug 25

Every artist has moments of hesitation. Maybe you wonder if the world really needs another song, another design, another idea. With so much being released every day, it’s easy to feel like your work won’t matter. But here’s the truth: if you don’t create it, it will never exist.

Unlike other parts of life, art doesn’t wait for someone else to step in. It depends entirely on you.

Why Art Is One of a Kind

When you write a lyric, shape a sound, or paint an image, you’re making something unrepeatable. No one before you and no one after you will ever make the exact same choices. Even if someone works in your style, with the same tools, their version won’t be yours.

This is what gives art its weight. It isn’t inevitable. It isn’t replaceable. It’s a singular expression of the person who made it.

Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Perspective

Neil deGrasse Tyson illustrated this distinction by comparing discovery and creation. In science, he explained, discoveries are bound to happen. If one person doesn’t uncover a truth about the universe, someone else eventually will, because those laws already exist. But art is different. What you create will never be duplicated. Without you, it’s gone forever.

He also pointed to the language we use around mastery. Someone who is precise has “got it down to a science.” But when we say someone has “raised it to an art,” we’re talking about something different, an expression that goes beyond rules and repetition. Science reveals what’s already there. Art brings into existence what never was.

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Art as Responsibility

This means artists carry a unique responsibility. Every piece you don’t make is a gap that stays unfilled. Think of the works that shaped culture: The Beatles almost left “Yesterday” unreleased because it felt too simple. Radiohead nearly cut “Creep” from their catalog. These songs went on to define generations but they easily could have been abandoned. That’s the power and fragility of art: it exists only because someone chose to make it real.

Art as Human Connection

Tyson’s reflection also shows why art resonates so deeply. Science may explain the world, but art helps us live in it. A song can say what language alone can’t. A film can capture emotions no equation could ever measure. Art is how we connect beyond facts, through imagination and expression.

Closing Thought

Art doesn’t appear on its own. It appears because you choose to make it. And if you don’t, the world will never know what you could have brought into existence.

That’s the perspective Neil deGrasse Tyson leaves us with: your art is one of a kind, and that’s exactly why it matters.

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