When We Stop Creating

I used to feel proud to be part of humanity.

It felt good, because human beings had done wonderful things. We created majestic works of art, wrote magnificent books, sang joyous songs. We built cathedrals and pagodas, carved temples out of stone, and raised cities from the ground. We eliminated smallpox, split the atom, and stood on the moon.

Of course, we have also done terrible things. Atrocities, wars, cruelty beyond measure. But you cannot deny the Sistine Chapel, Saint Peter’s Basilica, the Taj Mahal, Angkor Wat, Machu Picchu. You cannot deny the poetry of Emily Dickinson and Yeats, the novels of Dostoevsky, the music of Bach, Beethoven, Gershwin. The songs of Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen. Humanity has proven itself capable of staggering beauty.

Growing up, I felt part of that story. When I read the books, visited the sites, sang the songs, I felt I belonged to a lineage of creators. It seemed to me that I was part of a species with limitless creative potential, because of what we had already achieved. Surely there was so much more ahead of us. And maybe—just maybe—I could play some small part in it.

Lately, though, another thought troubles me: What happens when we stop creating? What happens when the machines do it for us—the image-making, the music-writing, the story-spinning, the thinking itself? What happens to humanity’s sense of itself when we outsource the very acts that once defined our spirit and soul? 

In the film The Social Dilemma, technology critic Tristan Harris speaks of a paradigm shift. For the first time, he says, we have invented a technology that is not merely a 'tool'. From the wheel to the printing press, from the telephone to the personal computer, technologies have historically been designed to help us accomplish tasks more efficiently. They extended human agency. The printing press spread ideas. The telephone allowed voices to carry across distance. These were tools that worked for us.

But social media—and now machine learning systems—work on us. They use us as much as we use them. Algorithms learn our preferences and in turn shape our thoughts, desires, and behaviors to serve commercial or political ends. The more we rely on them, the more they influence us.

In some sense, this is not entirely new. Newspapers, television, and radio were always used to persuade and to sell. But the intimacy of today’s technologies is unprecedented. Our phones are not just media channels; they are companions, advisors, decision-makers. They mediate every aspect of life: work, shopping, travel, communication, entertainment.

And now, increasingly, they mediate creativity itself, which is troubling to me. 

Art is not just another domain of human activity. It is where we meet our own soul. Through stories, music, paintings, films, poems, we connect to one another and to the depths of our humanity. Art is not decoration. It is recognition: the proof that someone else has felt what I feel, seen what I see, longed as I long.

What happens when machines make the films we watch, the music we listen to, the stories we read? What happens when the mirror of human experience is replaced by the reflection of aggregated data scraped from the internet and optimized for engagement, but untethered from lived life?

I fear that as we outsource creativity to machines, we risk losing our faith in ourselves. We risk ceasing to believe in the potential that human beings are capable of. If beauty no longer carries the weight of human struggle, love, or imagination behind it, then it will not connect us to one another in the same way. It may dazzle us, but it will not bond us.

And without that bond—without that sense of belonging to a lineage of creators—we become disconnected, apathetic, and lonely. Just as great art once elevated our sense of humanity, machine-made art may begin to flatten it. If we consume only the reflections of algorithms, we will become their reflection: soulless, mechanical, cut off from our own depth.

The danger, then, is not simply that machines will replace us. It is that we will forget who we are and care less about each other. The moment we stop creating for ourselves, we risk losing the very thing that once made it feel so good to be a member of the human race.