Estimated Reading Time: 7 Minutes
On the metaphysics of a productive life, I wonder: how deeply have I come to define my own worth from the things I make and the pace at which I make them? For years I have presented myself to acquaintances, to lovers, to doctors and strangers, as an individual who creates, as though output alone could stand in for all there was of me.
It is the peculiar magic of making things—a kind of transfiguration where a visceral experience is transmuted into artifact—that first drew me in. I came of age enchanted with the idea of art and craft as conduit, writing as witchcraft, and technology as fire starter.
Somewhere in the intervening years, this enchantment ossified less as a mystical insistence on industry, on discipline, on staying perpetually busy and burdened with worthy projects. As though creativity alone could stand in for purpose. As though constantly creating could keep at bay those questions of adequacy and future that hover always at the margins, threatening to suffocate me when I am at rest and unencumbered.
I have built my life around service and work, but as time passes I find that these do not necessarily mean intimacy the moment they turn into habit. Making can remain a source of meaning while the language of service—of “producing” and “output”—grows too small to contain all that a creative life can be.
There are parts of this magic that exist beyond the realm of what is made and what is sold—as in the realm of what is felt. There is a grace to be found in the space between finishing one project and beginning the next. There is worth to be uncovered, not in the pace of production, but in the life that happens in the margins, in the pauses, and in the silence.
At times, I find myself haunted by the suspicion that my impulse towards making—towards crafting experience into product and story—has led me astray. That in my fixation on leaving behind some permanent trace of having been—some ripple that might linger after I am gone—I miss the point entirely and misapprehend the here and now in favor of imagining how the here and now might someday be remembered.
I have come to fear that an inordinate amount of this fleeting life of mine has been spent crafting with language an immortality of sorts, meticulously arranging into words a narrative of how things came to pass as I judge they ought to be remembered, rather than wholly inhabiting each moment as it unravels before me.
We reveal ourselves through the stories we choose to tell—and tell ourselves—about our lives. The temptation is constant to replace the vagaries of lived experience with the tidier progression of plotted points, the security of hindsight, the seductive allure of finding meaning—or imagining we have found meaning—in the gradual unfolding of our days.
However, such stories are brittle. The past is obdurate, will not be ordered, and refuses to assume the shape of the stories we craft around it; stories on which we come to depend to navigate our own lives. We retell the stories not because they are true, but because we desperately wish them to be true; these fables that retroactively justify our choices and cloak our blunders and reassure us that there was—there must have been—an underlying purpose that will emerge if only we keep shaping the narrative, rearranging the shards into a whole until all the jagged edges smoothen.
We yearn to believe our lives possess a tidy coherence of stories rather than the elusive strangeness of lived moments that vanish as soon as they arise; which is why I despise legibility. Nonetheless, I cling to this impulse towards permanence, towards making something that lasts, though I know I will never be there to see who might wander the halls of my own remembered life and what they might make of the traces left behind.
Better perhaps to relinquish the desire for self-curation and accept experience in its own terms. To live as a participant rather than as a partial and interested observer, recording life as it unfurls at first and secondhand point of view altogether, and ready to be surprised by joy and wonder and mystery as they arise, rather than only when they seem ripe for harvesting into product and prose.
. . .
There is a strain of bright-eyed utopianism that runs through the creator economy and the tech industry like a fault line, underscored by the prevailing notion that the right algorithm or interface or network design might not just reap profit, but reform society at its foundations. Change the world entirely through the application of technology and entrepreneurial verve, they assert.
For all the hubris attending this vision, there is also a sort of hopeless romanticism to which I cannot help but feel some affinity. A drive to throw oneself against the crashing waves of what is in the name of what might be. Not so far from the impulse that once drew me to youth-led protests and political campaigns, winning against corporate giants to keep Negros renewable from their fossil fuel plants, with voices raised in a vision of justice still unrealized at the face of the climate crisis. The relentless desire to interrogate the world as it is in order to glimpse what it might become persists.
Nonetheless, some of my peers in university and beyond imagine themselves as distant, a breed altogether new, as though the ambition to make real the imagined and the dogged devotion to solving intractable problems for the common good were the domain of technologists alone. When the truth is there are models for this manner of thinking and being already in our midst. We need not reinvent the wheel but study the strategies of those who have come before us. Those who have made change not through sheer vision but by nurturing communities, of fundraising and lobbying, and moving hearts inch by inch toward a more just and equitable future. These are the community organizers and grassroots activists Silicon Valley is so quick to dismiss.
Imagine what might be possible if technology’s brightest minds were to adopt the more radical optimism of a community organizer, grounded not just in fevered possibility but in political realities; driven not just by a lust to disrupt but by the patience and empathy to bring others along; ready to do not just the work of imagining new worlds, but the far more difficult work of building them step by step on common ground. There is hope to be found at this intersection, and a sort of pragmatic magic in recognizing we all desire the future to be somehow other than the present, and that we travel there together, or not at all.
Creation is, at its heart, a counterrevolutionary act, a rejection of what has come before in the name of what might yet be. To make something where once there was nothing is to defy the void, to interrogate the blankness of the page until it yields some new idea brought trembling into being. Still, we imagine creation ex nihilo, as though genius itself were sufficient.
The truth is every thought we think and everything we make emerges from a history we did not choose, but endeavor to advance. Every creative act begins in emulation and ends in remedy: we see what has come before and what has gone wrong, what might be stripped away, what can be built upon. The work of making is always a work of evolution—an adaptation of ideas to new ends; so, to create is also to defy oneself, to cast off habits of mind for the more perilous waters of unknowing from which all new things emerge.
Real creation means questioning what we have accepted as inevitable, as beyond our power to change. It means peering into the margins and silences to glimpse what might lurk there waiting to be found, defying our own assumptions in pursuit of understanding what is yet to materialize. When a new vision is conjured at last into view, creation demands we have the courage to follow where it leads—away from safety and certainty, and into terrains undreamt and unmapped. Here is away from what we have known before towards a future that belongs to no one, brought newly into this world by the work of our own defiant imaginations.
All this requires a kind of ridiculous hope, a belief in possibility against all odds. When a new idea emerges to crack the world open once again, we must have faith that the light that pours in can illuminate our ways forward, not just for ourselves, but for all who still dream of worlds not yet born but waiting, even now, to be imagined into being.
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