August 29 Friday post

In this week’s podcast episode, I look at the fact that Donald Trump is unwell, and consider the passing of prior dictators to see what’s likely to happen once he’s gone—and how that might shape what you choose to do today. You can watch the episode on YouTube or listen to it via Apple, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts. If you want to read it instead, or if you’d like to explore links to people and events mentioned in the episode, you can find them in this week’s Tuesday post.

Today I want to offer a few quick thoughts on the value of making things. You might recall that I posted a photo of figs a couple weeks ago in the Friday post. Each of the last two weekends has involved boiling jam from all those figs. Another canning session will happen this weekend, too, and probably next weekend as well.

By the time I chop and cook the fruit then reduce it and pour it into sterilized jars, each session takes at least four or five hours. I would have preferred the fruit ripen at a more convenient time in my schedule. But there’s value to accepting the gifts the world gives you when they come.

I don’t have freezer space for the 40 or so quarts of figs I’ll likely pick by mid-September. If I don’t pick them, their bottoms split as they ferment. The bees find them—sometimes enormous hornet-looking ones that are alarming to have flying around the yard acting territorial. Eventually, flies will arrive to feast on the rotten fruit, by which time the front-yard scene has devolved into a hellscape.

But as positive motivation, there’s also the fact that I like figs! So when our two trees begin to deliver their bounty, I don’t let it go to waste.

There’s value, too, in making something yourself, in transforming the raw materials of the world. In the case of jam, I’ll enjoy it all year and will give it to friends. It’s easy to feel the beauty of it when I’m done, because I have dozens of jars of something delicious and practical.

But by creating anything, whether it’s edible or not, whether it has an audience or not, I firmly believe that humans do magic. As a skeptical person who’s distrustful of inspirational lectures, I’m more than willing to admit that this advice from me may be useful only to myself. But if you’re feeling overwhelmed in the inanity of our political moment, doing something tied up in the seasons, in the larger cycles of life, or in making things can remind you of your own place in the world and your ability to act. It’s a good antidote to feelings of isolation and powerlessness.

And this kind of action is the opposite of the myth of generative AI. The thing salesmen of AI promise is that it will elevate the prompt-writers, turning them into creators. But that’s the very thing it can’t do. No transformation takes place, only theft of others’ art and predictive completion. There is no context or historical moment to act as a sieve through which an idea is pressed in some new way, there is no actual process of recognition or reduction in which an idea is consciously bound into a work by a creator.

My point isn’t that art can’t be found in automated processes. But the human has to breathe a concept into it, a meaning, through actual making. A mass-produced print or t-shirt can still have artistic elements, but it’s understood to be a sliver of an original idea, one that still carries meaning in multiplicity. Fans of generative AI seem to believe the opposite—that each of their countless, automated, derivative creations represents something new, and is a whole original work on its own. But they’re just shadows of shadows cast in the digital record by some prior artist’s vision.

All of which is to say that the days we live in can feel both empty and filled with digital garbage. My version of saying “touch grass” is to suggest that, to the degree that your life allows you, it’s worth occasionally being accountable to and reconnecting to the larger world that runs on its own time. It’s worth attending to the processes that began before us and will continue after we’re gone, creating things that no one else can or will. No matter how unexceptional your contributions might seem to you, you’re filling the universe with ideas and objects that exist only because you made something.

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