If you were a chef tasked with designing recipes for economy-class airline meals, you might feel like giving up before you even started. The constraints are overwhelming: the hot items will have to be overcooked, soggy, or mushy. Everything has to fit on a cramped tray. And the budget leaves no room for indulgence. On top of that, most passengers won’t notice your efforts; many will mock the meal without a second thought. And yet, I’m often surprised by how good it tastes for something that looks like prison food—it’s clear that the chefs invested some creativity into it.
I admire people who embrace limitations instead of feeling defeated by them. Creativity cannot be evaluated in isolation from constraints. When money removes obstacles, the superficial trappings of “creativity”—like truffle shavings, caviar, or gold leaf—often mask the absence of true ingenuity.
An orchestral composition isn’t inherently more creative than a piano piece, a novel no more than a haiku, or a large sculpture no more than a small painting. Yet we’re too easily seduced by scale and cost, mistaking it for depth.
Artists, chefs, musicians, and writers all play a kind of language game, each defined by its own rules, which are but self-imposed limitations. The mother of all limitations is our mortality. Without boundaries, creativity loses meaning—just as soccer would be boring to watch if players could do anything they wanted. Similarly, nothing is solved by living forever; it only erases the urgency that gives life its shape.
The most prized audience for airline chefs is probably their peers, who understand the constraints they face. In the same way, we don’t need to impress the whole world with what we do in life. If a few others recognize and value our efforts, that is enough. Perhaps there is no deeper meaning in life.
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