Because you can, should you?
No is the final creative act
🔌 This Memorial Day I tested my hand at generating film with AI. As a technical act. I wrote about it here. Ironically I could not shake these thoughts.
There was a time when a single fresco swallowed a lifetime. Now a phone in your palm conjures ten before you finish your coffee. We celebrate the trick. We forget the cost. The Flood The world is drenched in instant art, automated prose, and one click symphonies. Scarcity is dead. Abundance is the default setting. Yet the feeling that something precious slipped away keeps humming in the background. Why? Because motion is easy. Meaning is hard. Because creation once asked for sweat and sweat was a filter. Remove the filter and every stream overruns its banks. Taste’s Rarity When everything is possible, judgment is everything. The judgment that selects, edits, prunes. Anyone can press Generate again. Few can see which output deserves to live. Fewer still can choose silence over noise. The future belongs to the careful eye. Not the busy hand. Four Tests Before You Click Who benefits? If the answer is only “me,” pause. Does it tell a truth? A half-truth is a full impurity. Dump it. Will you sign it forever? The internet is wet cement. Your name sets fast. Have you earned the silence you’re about to break? If you fear quiet you’re not ready to speak. One honest “no” cancels launch. The Price of Effortless Wonder Friction once forged commitment. Drafts copied by hand drilled syntax into bone. Ease erases apprenticeship. We risk a generation fluent in output yet illiterate in craft. Power is now free. Wisdom is rented hour by hour and doubt by doubt. Ask yourself Do I create to reveal or to avoid? To serve or to be seen? To touch mystery or just to scroll past it? Our tools cannot answer. Only we can. “No” is the final creative act Restraint keeps the garden from turning into jungle. Editing is the art that lets beauty breathe. Silence is the space where the next true word can grow. Floods impress. Rivers shape. So, Should You? Yes: when the work helps someone breathe deeper. Yes: when it says something honest and needed. Yes: when you are willing to live with its shadow. Otherwise… let the cursor blink. Nothing bad happens when an empty page stays empty a little longer. Often something good happens inside the waiting.