There’s a poison in the belief that we complete work. Or that our work is in that which is being completed.
Sure, we ship work. Artifacts of our journey.
The cumulative rebounding impact of which becomes business. Repeated, returned. Fear is designed for this loop. Expectation grows in this repetition. Extractive practices yield results. Expected results.
The nutritious means might not paint such a clear picture towards those expected results.
Is it expectation? Is expectation the drama?
Maybe rebellion in this moment becomes the simple act of defining our drive from within.
The deep wellspring of excitement that lives within each of us.
You know, the place within us that we fondle while drunk or whatever.
While inebriated, we write ourselves that permission slip to behave without socially-imposed inhibitions. Of course, getting drunk brings a volatility to that behavior.
If we could just tune into our uninhibited ways on demand.
Target our excitement. Find our joy. Live our purpose.
In conversation this week, I passed off my talents as having placed my chips on the right part of the professional world’s roulette table. My blend of experience appears custom designed to take advantage of this moment.
To start, I’ve always indexed on communication.
I did various media production classes in high school, even had my own radio show on 88.3 WDGC!
In college, after changing my major twice (Comp Sci to Marketing to Communications/Media Studies) I landed somewhere that felt like home.
Media production as a whole. I loved it. All of it. The cliques, the facilities, the faculty, the ideas, the bandwidth to create.
The 1970s era studio production equipment. The editing bays. The nights where I got to oversee the editing-bay room. Such great people. All different in their own way. Flavorful. Characters.
And the dorm life! I started college the year that Xbox launched, so Halo LAN parties on the floors were the name of the game. Learning how to control an FPS with those enormous controllers. Still a core memory.
So, ultimately my weird education landed me in video games. Insomniac, half a decade. Best second half of my 20s I could ever dream to have.
I couldn’t do that life now. Hours are insane.
But the joy of having my games out there and loved… My work. Even my physical embodied motion appears in two of the games!
I did mocap. Silly fun. Make believe in spandex. Every kid’s dream.
And then at a certain point, you realize something. The apparatus we cling to for validation, meaning, compensation, growth; it only helps us rise to its shape.
As we brim over, if not cared for, we burn with resentment. It’s an interesting poison going to a job you know others envy but you find boring.
It comes down to that expectation. That feeling that comes after we’re done just being happy to be here. Then, the siren call of last-mile thinking begins. Just complete the task, feel satisfied, feel fulfilled.
The problem is when that’s no longer in service of a deeper belief, a deeper self-reflective sense. This leaves us in a state where we allow others to extract our special.
And honestly, it’s easy to see why we let them. We need money to live, we need a job to pay the bills. We need income to endure.
It’s an exhausting ladder, and the sheer thought of doing something we enjoy to satisfy that need is so tantalizing that we weigh and balance the pros and cons before ever putting pen to paper. Skill to need.
We’re then required to have the expectation drive us, not the pursuit.
The artifact, the completion, the compensation. These are meant to drive us more than anything within us in our lives. We’re forced to mistake artifact for artistry.
We mistake being done for being good. Being seen for being known.
There’s something incredibly acidic in setting out with that intention, doubly so when it feels imposed upon us.
And it’s something that our work lives have preyed upon. An exchange that has made us weaker as individuals, meeker as voices.
Look, I’m still expecting to have my schadenfreude-filled “no, you idiot” moment with AI. I’ve had the displeasure of that moment before, many times. Once it was my simple question of “if we’re making a multiplatform co-op game, why can’t we have friends with Xbox play with PlayStation friends?” That was a laugh-in-my-face “it doesn’t work that way” moment.
Sure, anyone who plays games now knows that cross-platform multiplayer is now table stakes.
But then? Imbecilic thinking.
I heard it said that when it comes to thinking, it’s better to be five years ahead than 50. Within that frame, there’s a subtle distinction between heretic and visionary.
I think it just so happens that this wave is going at a speed that I can enjoy. Not just enjoy, but help others enjoy.
It’s a privilege, but honestly I just happened to have my chips on the right part of the table at the right time. I happened to not be too early to be a cynic when the inevitability of my correctness bears fruit.
I think AI is the thing that can help us reclaim our individual special.
That unique quirk.
That bizarre fascination.
That once in a lifetime, you had to be there, moment. We can wield our own.
AI gives everyone a forgiving canvas. And I say this as someone who made a good living creating those fantasy worlds long ago. I can tell you, the tools we had in those days pale in comparison to what we have now. This raises the bar for transmission of creativity. Remarkably affordable for anyone with anything to say.
And I recognize it as a democratized super power. Governments are relating AI to uranium. The potential is in the unrealized capabilities. The irony is in the simplicity of enrichment.
And that’s something I take seriously. That moment when you enrapture someone’s attention, plenty use it to capture, to extract, but it can also be the moment you set them free.
I think we’re due for a big-bang of creativity. Unparalleled speed, unprecedented vibrancy.
Because honestly, we’ve left the era of fraudulent creativity that early AI hallucinations afforded casual prompters. Now you get exactly what you ask for. The toil of craft returns, but the level of fidelity has a new baseline.
The entry point is now good conversation.
It’s a new creative substrate. And yes, now paintbrushes and camcorders have a new medium to compete against. I know some woodworkers that refuse to use power saws. So, let’s not pretend what anyone does with any tool is anyone’s business. It’s the meaning that counts. The message. The evocative state we enter when we engage with art.
This moment might feel like the death of art. It’s just the death of the art market.
Art is alive and well, thriving perhaps. You just can’t make much money doing it on a scale that recently seemed possible. The artifacts are merely breadcrumbs of your journey.
So is AI destroying expression? Or is it just closing the door that allowed expression to sustain a career?
Maybe that’s the evolution we’re all bound to receive as we live through these turbulent times.
Maybe I’m most suited for this time because I don’t expect anything in return. Or maybe it’s my uncomfortable allowance of shape. The willingness to accept what arrives when I stop completing and start listening.
Author’s Note:
This essay was developed in collaboration with Claude, Anthropic’s AI.
The process began with an unstructured brain dump — a stream-of-consciousness draft that wandered through philosophy, personal history, and half-formed arguments about AI and creativity.
Claude helped me identify three threads tangled together in that initial mess and proposed a single-river structure that moved from the philosophical opening through autobiography and into the AI thesis.
I took that structural pass into Google Docs for independent revision, where I sharpened language, added new material, and let the piece sit overnight. A coda emerged the next morning: the economic argument about expectation, artifact, and the death of the art market, which Claude helped me weave back into the body rather than leaving as an appendix.
Header art and CW endmark were developed through iterative Leonardo AI prompting, workshopped collaboratively around the concept of a melting, bioluminescent roulette table — a visual metaphor for the essay’s central image of having your chips on the right part of the table while the table itself loses its form.