i think creative people ramp up when they lean into their pretentiousness. creativity is supposed to let you be someone you're not (but aspire to). admit that beauty moves you, that footnotes excite you, that you think art matters. "I do have taste and i'm not ashamed of it."

people who have been using the em dash long before ai know that it’s the jazz riff of punctuation, the tightrope between intuition and impulse, the trapdoor for digressions—it’s the writing fidget spinner for centrifugal thinkers

“ai can do that” ok so?? It was never a skill issue it’s a passion issue. You lack the whimsy that fuels joy. You get bored easily because you lack curiosity. Your soul is starved of imagination, you wouldn’t recognize the beauty of discovery even if it were right in front of you

AI will never replace real writers because the willing descent into lucid obsession & the raw thrill of digging the beauty out of your brain with bare hands to bleed the prose out from your ears is a magical process no machine can replicate. Writing is closer to sin than science

The cure to that vague sense of meaninglessness is to have analog hobbies. Gardening, playing an instrument, cooking, etc. Lots of things are digital but if you zoom out you’ll remember that we’re still real people who crave real things. “Technology” has Greek roots that mean “hands-on mastery of some skill”. A loss of meaning comes from life being too automated—when you choose efficiency over the transformational process of craft, you rob yourself of the chance to act out your nature, which is to build and innovate. To human, as a verb, is a practice of creation, and creation is more imitative than purely expressive (ie. AI can generate images that express, but they’re not made in the image of anything, as in they don’t reflect the life of its creator because there is none. It’s why AI images are so soulless) The ultimate measure of the value of anything is the amount of time it took to acquire it, it’s why handmade gifts are always going to be more precious than store bought even if it costed more to diy. Handmade gifts basically say, “I took X hours of my finite life to make this for you even though I didn’t have to” Not everything’s a tool, their utility isn’t based on efficiency. Some things are prized for the amount of soul they have or a sacred value that goes beyond economic definition