The joy of creating

I sit down to play guitar. I play one chord, followed by another. After the fourth chord, I start strumming for a while before moving on to pick notes, accidentally creating a melody. The melody sounds exotic, not something I was expecting. Or was I even expecting anything? Regardless, I try another angle, a new order of notes. It sounds a bit different, a bit better. I'm focused, immersing myself in my ability to produce sounds. Just me, my hands, my fingers, and the guitar. Beautiful.

The guitar is beautiful, too. Handmade in Germany in 1973, it's an acoustic guitar my grandfather used to play before I inherited it some decades later. I still have a picture of him holding the guitar, and I find myself thinking about how he felt when he learned (and later taught) music and its theory, how he felt when he played the guitar I'm now holding in my hands.

I strike another chord, an A minor. Immediately, instinctively, my fingers go on and start picking the first notes of Classical Gas, a beautiful instrumental song written and performed by Mason Williams in 1968.

I put the guitar away, lie in bed, and think about yesterday (not the song, mind you). A friend had shown how he used artificial intelligence, or AI, to generate a song with just a few clicks for free. While there were some funny glitches in the vocals (Finnish is still not easy for the AI models, I suppose), it sounded good. More than that, it sounded convincing. So much so that soon anyone can 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. While it might make economic sense in the short term, removing the need for learning and understanding deprives us of most of the joy.

Creation is more than its outcome. A significant part of creation is the joy of learning and, consequently, understanding. To see yourself evolve, to be a bit better than you were yesterday, to be able to watch back how clumsy one's guitar playing was half a year ago, to cherish the progress. Bridging the gap between my current skills and the desired outcome is extremely satisfying. The process initially scares me, then frustrates me, but eventually brings deep satisfaction.

Don't avoid frustration, embrace it.

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?

Economically, it's already becoming more difficult to be, say, a painter, spending days and days drawing beautiful images, when a sophisticated AI model will do the same work with impeccable accuracy and superior speed at a fraction of the time – and cost.

I suspect any new tool comes with the same promises as the earlier ones: Save time and give us more freedom. This poses two questions: Has the progress saved us time, and what do we plan to do if we have more time?

Do you remember how email was supposed to make our lives easier? And how your favourite time management software promised to save you a ton of time? Instead, these technological advancements merely raised the expectancy bar. They made us more efficient, faster, and more capable, but sooner than you realise that advantage is taken for granted. As yesterday's novelty fades into today's necessity, we're back to square one, looking for another technological advancement to fill in the gap we created.

Let's assume for a moment that AI, unlike any previous advancement, gives us more time and freedom. Then, it's only fair to ask what we plan to do with the added freedom and time. My gut feeling is that most of us don't know. We haven't really stopped to think about what we would do if we could do whatever we wanted, and if we have the time. Maybe that's because the question scares us and usually comes with the follow-up question: What's preventing us from pursuing those activities right now? Do we rather live in a dream-like state with our what-ifs and whens and if-onlys than figure out if our dreams are worth dreaming in for in the first place?

The simple solution is to start spending time with the acts we think we might enjoy doing if we had that extra time. Squeeze in a couple of hours here and there to build the bookshelf you've always imagined you'd enjoy doing, write the article you've secretly planned for.

Don't get me wrong: I'm as guilty as anyone. I also have some vague dreams and wishes, mostly circling around woodworking and writing. But recently, armed with the thoughts you've just read, I've tried to make it a habit to try out the things I have an interest in. For example, I finally bought a bit router to create nice, 45-degree edges to a new table for my work-from-home setup. So far, the results have been satisfying, and I'm already planning a new project.

I'm tempted to use AI to finish with something clever, maybe a remark to something I wrote earlier in the text. But the truth is, I want to figure out something on my own, however frustrating that might be. Will I read this writing later only to cringe at some parts of it? Most certainly. 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.