The joy of creating

I sit with my acoustic guitar. I strum one chord, two, three. On the fourth I begin to pick, and an unexpectedly exotic melody slips out. I try another order of notes, a little different, a little better. I'm focused, absorbed in making sound; just me, my hands, my fingers, and the guitar. Beautiful.

The guitar is beautiful, too. Handmade in Germany in 1973, it's the acoustic my grandfather used long before I inherited it. I still have a picture of him with it, and I imagine how he felt learning music and later teaching it – how he felt when he played the same instrument I now hold.

I put the guitar away, lie in bed, and remember yesterday. A friend showed how he used AI to generate a song with just a few clicks for free. Apart from the somewhat glitchy vocals, it sounded good, convincing even. Soon anyone could create great-sounding music with little or no experience.

And that might not be as good as it sounds.

The easier creation gets, the less we enjoy it. The more we outsource our thinking, learning, and understanding to algorithms, the less we need to learn our craft and fundamentals. It might make economic sense in the short term, but removing the need for learning robs most of the joy.

Creation is more than its outcome. A large part of it is the pleasure of learning and, with that, the pleasure of understanding: seeing yourself evolve, being a bit better than yesterday, watching how clumsy your playing was half a year ago, and cherishing the progress.

Bridging the gap between my current skills and the desired outcomes first scares me, then frustrates me, but eventually satisfies me.

Link to this headingEmbrace frustration

With the rise of AI, our world may soon be filled with perfect art, music, TV series, software, and spreadsheets. Perfect outcomes. But where do we get joy when creating these perfect outcomes becomes as easy as clicking a few buttons? Where is the happy accident, the unexpectedly exotic melody?

Economically, it's already becoming harder to be an artist who spends days on an image when a sophisticated model can produce the same work with impeccable accuracy and superior speed at a fraction of the time and cost.

Like every new tool, AI promises to save time and give us freedom. This promise raises two questions:

1. Has progress saved us time?
2. What will we do with the time it frees?

Remember how email was supposed to make our lives easier, or the new time-management app promised to save us hours? These advancements merely raised the bar. They made us faster, more efficient, and more capable, only to become the baseline. As yesterday's novelty fades into today's necessity, we find ourselves chasing the next breakthrough to fill the gap.

Let's suppose, for a moment, that AI truly gives us more time and more freedom. What then? I suspect most of us don't know. We haven't stopped to imagine what we would do with that freedom. Maybe the question is frightening because it begs the next: What's stopping us from experimenting with those things right now? Do we live in a dream-like state with our some-days and what-ifs and if-onlys rather than figure out if our dreams are worth dreaming for in the first place?

The answer is simple: start. Squeeze in a couple of hours to build the bookshelf you always imagined you'd enjoy doing. Write the article you've been carrying around in your head. Climb into the attic to find the long-forgotten instrument you once dreamed of learning. Find your unexpectedly exotic melody.

Don't get me wrong: I'm as guilty as anyone. I also have vague dreams and wishes, mostly circling around woodworking and writing. Lately, though, I've made it a habit to try out things that interest me. For example, I finally bought a bit router to cut clean, 45-degree edges for a new table for my work-from-home setup. The results so far have been satisfying, and I'm already planning the next project.

I'm tempted to use AI to finish with something clever, maybe a remark on something I wrote earlier in the text. But the truth is, I want to figure something out on my own. Even if it's frustrating. Will I read this writing later and cringe? Most likely. But at the same time, that will tell me that I've made progress, that I've learned.

That the frustration came with a reward.