So the big buzz right now is AI generated text and its consequences. Mainly that it more or less commodifies the act of writing, “empowering” anyone to reach some minimum standard of quality.

Lots of writers are shitting their pants right now. The bots can write an entire essay in minutes when it takes few months. Yikes. Even if the essays or novels or whatever else don’t quite match the quality of a human crafted piece of writing, the sheer quantity gives AI and its users a competitive edge. Sadly, we live in a world of quantity and not quality.

I think there’s a lot of truth to this in the short term. But I feel less threatened by AI generated text when I zoom out and think about the long-term consequences.

For one, AI generated text makes you lazy. It isn’t just the manual process of coming up with sentences, it is a shortcut around thought itself. Writing is just an extension of thinking. It might feel like you are publishing more than ever, and had a higher quality, but sooner or later, your voice will become more quiet, and the voice of the AI will be the only thing you can hear. You will have muted your own thinking not just with words on the page, but in your mind. Your fucking mind! Because you’ll no longer be able to think, you’ll only know how to Ask ChatGPT to write a hot take on the latest Sabrina Carpenter drama, but you’ll be incapable of coming up with a hot take yourself.

And if all you do is write prompts to ChatGPT, someone with more time and energy will beat you at that game.

It is not a game worth playing.

So I think in many ways, the future of writing is going to be predicated on leaning into our own crazy little personal styles. Our quirks and idiosyncrasies as writers. As obsessive over-thinkers.

I cannot speak for everyone, but when I get hooked on a rider, I become almost obsessive about it. I absorb every word they’ve ever written, and think deeply about how their thought process got them to say such wonderful or important things. Being a faithful reader means internalizing the thoughts of your favorite writers.

I think that whether we consciously acknowledge it or not, this is what most of us writers do with our favorites.

And I cannot imagine a scenario where someone feels this way about AI generated text. Don’t get me wrong, it comes pretty close to the real thing here and there if you meticulously prompted the right way. But it cannot produce those results consistently. Not least because the person doing the prompting will be too lazy to know the difference anyway.

AI is a cynical shortcut to having a finished product. But it is not a replacement for great writing because it is not a replacement for thinking. Only you can think. That is your advantage. And I invite you, my friend, to do more of that.

If you enjoyed this silly little brain dump, you’ll like this slightly more polished essay a lot more:

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The most dominant form of entertainment today is video. Not just the short form brain rot everyone loves complaining about, but also YouTube videos, Netflix specials, biopics, movies, and so on.

Like most people, I grew up loving video. It was the thing that I wanted to do with my life. Two decades later, and I’m starting to have second thoughts.

The Myth of the Wagnerian Masterpiece

Richard Wagner was a German playwright who was undoubtedly one of the most powerful creative forces of his day. He wasn’t just a playwright though, he dabbled across basically every creative art form. Gesamtkunstwerk he called it—the coming together of every great artistic form: music, mythology, performance, poetry, costumes, architecture, and more.

The first time I heard about the idea, I immediately made the connection to video. Video is arguably an even better medium than the theater stage because there’s also post production editing, which is an additional art form unto itself.

The creative lineage fueled a journey that went nowhere. And after wasting most of my life not just chasing video but mythologizing it, I’ve discovered a dark truth:

Video might not be so good.

Are there any true Wagnerian masterpieces our culture has produced? A true creative explosion? Coming together of all creative forms to not just push the boundaries of what is possible on the screen, but possible in our imaginations?

I’m not so sure.

And even if such a thing were possible, we seem to have created financial and cultural circumstances as to make their actualization an impossibility.

I won’t do the whole capitalism is behind this rant because I’m sure you understand it intuitively: in order for a video to be profitable, it must appeal to a wide audience, and must therefore lack nuance that could be alienating to said audience.

Even the most thoughtful and talented video creator is still dependent on the dazzle. The speed. The spectacle. It’s like covering a healthy meal in a coat of sugar. Yeah, you’ll still get the nutritional benefits of eating the meal, but that’s probably a little too much sugar for someone to have in one sitting.

But more often than not, we don’t have those thoughtful artisans creating video, you get a captain steering a ship, or worse, cynical shortcuts.

On Creative Decision-Making

Creativity is just decision-making

What colors to use. What to say and how to say it. How long to linger on a single shot and how to use music to emphasize emotion.

But when it comes to video, there is such a vast multitude of decisions that need to be made that it becomes overwhelming, even for simple concepts. If you’ve never done video yourself, you would be amazed at how complicated even the simple stuff becomes.

Yes, it means video presents a significantly wider range of possibility, but I think it is that wide range of possibility that is just too much for the human mind. Which is why individuals cannot make movies, they need production studios, and entire teams of animators and actors and people who specialize in just a single component to video.

Sadly, I don’t think it’s possible to be a true artisan of the craft because there are simply too many decisions, too many skills, too much information to navigate as a single human being.

Even the great filmmakers, Ari Aster, Hayao Miyazaki, or Tim Burton, must delegate such a huge amount of work to others that it’s debatable whether you can really call their films theirs.

Like sure, they steered the ship, but that one emotional scene may have been written by an intern or that one animation sequence that moved you was workshopped by everyone in the Writers' room.

To attribute the totality of the work to an individual is to repeat the mistake of great man theory historians.

And then this problem gets even worse when you get down to internet video where videos are often created by a single individual or a skeleton crew. The decisions are often not made thoughtfully.

Video creators are forced to make shortcuts.

It’s the only way to survive.

If there’s a shortcut you can take, but don’t, you end up never finishing the video that you were working on. Coupled with the volatility of financial feasibility, and you’ve got an art form that is functionally impossible to thrive under.

And even if you manage to successfully take shortcuts, identifying the minimum viable video to retain your audience, you’ll still find yourself burnt out and exhausted.

I was a full-time YouTube creator for about two years and I worked 16 hours a day every single day. I worked until my body screamed at me that I had to eat something or go to sleep.

It’s the kind of blessing that becomes a curse much faster than it has any right to. I’ve reflected quite a bit as to why I failed—ultimately realizing that, simply put, it was impossible to succeed. At least without outsourcing most of the actual work (which I was unwilling to do).

But it’s not just exhausting for video creation, I also don’t think video is great for viewers either.

The Viewers

To return to Gesamtkunstwerk, video should be the creative explosion that moves you in a way that no individual medium of art could do so on its own.

But is that really what’s happening with even the best video?

It seems more likely that these other additions of art—like music and entertaining visuals and so on—serve more as creative crutches than they do enhancements. Little dopamine hits that get you to pay attention to something you would otherwise not pay attention to.

With video, it goes in one eyeball and out the other.

How many times have you sat down to watch something and even though you spend 10 or 15 or even 50 hours watching it, you walk away without remembering anything?

It’s happened to me more than I care to admit.

It’s almost as if we are there for the spectacle instead of the substance.

Would you ever actually sit down and read a biography of Elvis Presley? Yeah, me either. But why is it that we sit down and spend hours watching the biopic?

The story is an excuse for the spectacle.

And just like most things we watch, we will immediately stop thinking about it the second that it’s not on the screen.

I know there’s a whole culture dedicated to film reviews and so on, but let’s be honest here: 99.9% of audience members of videos of any kind will almost instantly forget about it within days.

With a book, you might write in the margins or re-read a chapter because it really moves you. There is not really an equivalent in video. No one is watching those MrBeast videos with a pen and paper jotting down ideas they have—they’re just sitting there… watching. And I really don’t think it’s a stretch to imagine that something similar is happening with most forms of video most of the time.

If you don’t care enough to read the book, is this really something you care about?

But it’s not just that you’re wasting your life paying attention to something you don’t actually care about, but there are very real consequences to your brain.

The Brainfood, Brainrot Spectrum

The way that I imagine forms of culture is as a spectrum. And I’m sure it goes without saying that short form video is at the brain rot end of the spectrum, the lowest common denominator. Stimulating, shallow, and spending enough time with it literally harms your attention span.

Obviously movies are nowhere near as intellectually stunting as short form video, but it still isn’t quite the same as reading a book.

When you think about reading, it’s not so much that you’re consuming it the way that you would a video, but moreso that you are co-creating the story in your head with the author. Engaging deeply with ideas, reading between the lines, anticipating what will happen next.

I’ve made a concerted effort in my personal life to start avoiding video as much as possible, and start reading. I have noticed a significant difference in how I feel.

With reading, there’s so much more going on inside.

This might sound silly, but when I feel like my brain has really tapped into something, I like to call it the galaxy brain feeling. It’s a sensation where I can literally feel my brain making all these different connections.

When I read a good book, the galaxy brain feeling happens every single time. It’s consistent. It shows up like Clockwork. I can literally feel the contours of my world of view expanding. It’s fucking amazing.

I’ve never really had the same feeling with video.

My hunch is that video is overwhelmingly a dumping ground of all of this external stimuli that is ultimately unimportant. And it would be much more beneficial as an audience member to appreciate the music or the pictures or the story for its own sake. Because if it’s not worth enjoying for its own sake, it shouldn’t be worth enjoying being stitched together like some kind of Frankenstein-like beast of hyper-stimulation.

Did you like this silly little brain dump?

I’d bet you enjoy my real essays ever more

Read Some Damn Essays

As you may know, I’m a fan of the political left. Partly because they’re more fun to be around but I think most importantly because the general train of thought that characterizes most leftists tends to be closer to the truth.

Not truth with a capital T, not truth in its totality. But generally speaking, closer to accurately depicting reality—not as we would like to see it—but as it actually is.

But there is one undercurrent of leftist thought that doesn’t really vibe with me which is this idea that rich people are evil, perpetuators of these barbaric systems that are responsible for suffering of all kinds from exploitation to genocide and everything in between.

There is an argument to be made. And I can respect those who make it. But this is where I would respectfully invite my beloved comrades to consider an alternative possibility: the rich are victims too.

If you are sociologically or anthropologically inclined, you’ve without a doubt made an observation, consciously or not, that most people are, for the most part, byproducts of their environment.

Social environment. Financial environment. Ideological environment.

All the environments.

We live in a culture that emphasizes things like individualism and personal choice but if we are being realistic, we can semi-accurately predict pretty much everything about your life by just looking at your ZIP Code. We can make an educated guess as to your intelligence, the kinds of things you might do and say and believe because at the end of the day, human beings are like a sponge. We absorb and respond to the world’s around us.

Obviously, there is nuance here, but I think the idea generally holds true. You are your environment, which means the kinds of people you surround yourself with, the things you pay attention to and think about, and the world that you imagine yourself living inside of.

To borrow an idea from John Vervaeke, there is an agent arena relationship where the arena that you participate in is significant in this sense that it gives you a sense of purpose direction, and even autonomy. For the rich, they run in circles where the only arena that matters is business

The reason rich people never feel content, no matter how much money they make is not because they are evil or greedy, but because they’ve spent so much of their lives inside of this arena—where money is an end unto itself—that they simply cannot imagine anything else.

They are the people who took it the most seriously.

Sadly, I am poor. But I have rubbed shoulders with people who are wealthy and they do not lead lifestyles that I would ever want. Don’t get me wrong, it often looks nice. Living anywhere you want, having a second home, renting an entire island for your wedding and so on. But these pleasures come at the cost of ruthless and constant self criticism and insecurity.

The reason they were able to achieve financial success to such an extent is because they’ve essentially molded their entire sense of self into something that can make money. It’s almost like they are self exploiters.

One of the wealthiest people I know literally had a mental breakdown because their entire life was just nonstop, high-intensity work.

And if we take a step back, we need to seriously ask ourselves why anyone would do that to themselves? Why can’t they just take a break and relax? Why don’t they just take that pile of money and retire for a few years or chill tf out, you know?

The problem is that this would mean stepping outside of the only arena that gives their life meaning. This is where their primary sense of self is derived from.

It would be similar to someone who takes their religion very seriously, and then asking them to stop going to church.

Who is the agent outside of the arena that gives his entire life meaning?

But I also think there’s a huge component of social isolation that comes from financial success. I’ve experienced this at a personal level because I was born into destitute poverty. But after winning a few little lotteries in life, I was able to luck out and achieve a modest middle class lifestyle. I’m still deeply in debt and have to keep working jobs I hate for the rest of my life, but I have enough disposable income that I can occasionally splurge on something nice like an exercise bike so I can hopefully cycle off this winter bod :(

People treat me different now. Idk how to explain it exactly, as it is all quite new to me. But there’s been a vibe shift. I’m no longer a “fellow poor” in the eyes of friends & family—which really sucks. My reclusive nature has been amplified to the extent that I’m basically a hermit.

And I can only imagine how much more alienating and isolating this would be if it were a significant amount of money. What if it was enough to pay off all my debt, or turn me into a millionaire?

I can only imagine that it must be horrible having everyone in your life seeing you as “the rich person.”

When you couple this with the fact that the rich tend to spend most of their time working, you end up with a situation where the people with money are almost always completely alone. The people in their lives are always employees or business associates or have some other kind of functional utility behind the relationship.

There are no real relationships.

How fucking horrible would that be? No one to be yourself with. No one that you could ever really trust because they might just be scheming to find ways to get your money. How would you ever know?

So you’ve got these rich people who are completely isolated. They have no real friends, and often times they’ve spent so much of their lives at work they don’t have happy families either. Surprise surprise.

They are entirely alone, and the only thing that gives their life meaning is business and working and money.

Is that not incredibly sad? Can one really be expected to wipe away their tears with money when they are functionally deprived of some of the most important parts of life?

My friend, this is the lived experience of the rich.

Sure, they can buy anything they would ever need, but as the old saying goes, the most important things in life cannot be bought. And those are exactly the kinds of things these folks need but sadly, can never get.

Did you like this silly little brain dump?

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