Okay. I might’ve had you for a second.
I was going to write about that viscerally gross film, but hey. It’s Friday and I didn’t want to gross you out cause the weather has been nice…
So I’ll be using Cardistry as the starting point and why you need that level of creative frustration in your life.
I’ve been teaching myself one part of card magic, which is the pretty side. The side where you make the deck of cards do what you want visually and it also solves the fact that my hands never sit still.
So if you’ve got fidgety hands. Cardistry might be for you too. I’ll also pop a little video at the end to give you a little more of a look at this beautiful art form.
But back to the creative frustration.
Anything skill worth mastering is hard. It is frustrating and sometimes you get to the point where you want to put it down, walk away and never come back. But you come back to it because deep down you know when you finally get it right…
The agonising.
The frustration.
The hundreds or thousands of hours that went into it has paid off.
The result is you being able to do the thing and you feel good about it.
This is where writing and any artform, like cardistry comes from.
Except lately, there’s been a lot of bullshitting involved in my world where words matter and that’s because of our favourite little robot overlords.
You type a little prompt into ChatGPT and out it spits something that reads like you might’ve written it.
It has such horrible pattern-y bullshit, that when people read it (If they read it) they’ll know deep down something doesn’t feel right. When it doesn’t feel right…
There goes that trust.
You’re seeing it in major brands. You’re seeing it in coaches and solo artists / creatives and one thing it also shows is that they don’t really care anymore about connecting with you.
But what’s even more scary is the atrophying effects that are tied to it.
Writing is designed to be challenging. Organising your ideas into something that makes sense with a bit of your soul behind it can be hard, but rewarding.
When you start to farm out this side of it. You are inadvertently atrophying that part of your brain.
MIT are going ham with the studies atm…
Do you remember little Johnny who sat at the back of the classroom and liquid the brush out of the glue paste jar?
We’re going to turn into the modern day little Johnny’s if allow our think-y bits to be taken over by A.I.
“But Stephen, if you’re smart you’ll use it to augment your output!”
Nope. It doesn’t matter how intelligent you are. You can’t beat the biologically hardwiring of us humans who want new, easy etc. You will get lazy and soon your thinking will be done for you by these tools.
A.I. has its place for all the boring shit like automations and calculations (Unless you’re a masochist who loves that stuff… Don’t worry I’m not gonna kink shame.)
But to let is steal away and erode what makes us human…
Nope. Not a fan.
Stay human. Cause humans are awesome.
You’re awesome.
Stephen Walker