Packaging

When people are asked what religion they follow, they may say “I was raised as Catholic, but stopped going to church.” To go with that “package” would be a bias against so-called “new-age woo-woo” when the word "spiritual" is used in this context. This follows in the same pattern of saying “I played the clarinet in grade school”, i.e. music-making in life was limited to a 30-minute required "music" class. It was simply a part of the package of institutionalized education.

What we value in life is very often the result of terrible primary and secondary curricula, neither of which did anything to make us more creative individuals in our adult lives. Similarly, our sense of spirituality is usually cultivated outside of institutions, and that makes sense as it is inherently intuitive: We were born with that proclivity just as much as creativity and needs no packaging. Some people who promote a more dogmatic (packaged) approach dismiss this as heretical, yet there is a whole industry dedicated to using creativity and innovation based on some form of "New Age" principles, not packaged in a container of dogma. It is anathema to be considered "woo-woo", but that's what you need to understand unpacked inner spirituality, which someone might get from the arts in some way.

I once overheard a colleague ridicule a musical skill--in this case a person who majored in oboe performance. To her, it was one of the stupidest things one could do in life. Spirituality (the woo-woo "Oprah" kind) is sometimes put in that same package, yet there is always a useful takeaway in service of creativity (or even life in general). We compartmentalize definitions of creativity and spirituality but they are usually one and the same. They just have different packaging which suits our current mood or is performative in some way based on self-identification. Another example is hyper-eclecticism, i.e. "I like anything that's popular, but secretly I don't care about much of it", which is synonymous with attending Christmas mass only when it's a part of the package deal of the holiday routine.