Get busy being creative

Elon Musk has a vision of the future where AI does all the work and his robots do the rest. Nobody needs a job any more, so we all get handed a ‘universal income’, and humanity spends its days… sunbathing, in one long, government-funded Sunday afternoon that never ends.

It sounds lovely, until you remember what actually happens to people when you take their work away.

Look at retirement stats, where a stubborn pattern keeps popping up in the research: a chunk of people who defined themselves entirely by the job, decline alarmingly fast afterward. Not because the work was keeping them physically alive, they sure as hell needed the rest… but because the job was giving them a reason to get up.

Purpose, it turns out, isn’t a luxury we enjoy once the bills are paid. It’s load-bearing. Take it away and, like those facial muscles, the whole structure sags.

So when Elon paints his picture of blissful, jobless leisure, I want to gently pop that balloon, because he’s assumed that what humans want from work is the money, and that if you just hand over the cash, everyone floats off happily into a hammock.

What we actually want, is to matter. To make something. To look at a thing that didn’t exist yesterday and think, “I did that.” Strip a person of the chance to contribute and you haven’t liberated them - you’ve quietly told them they’re surplus to requirements. Food for worms…

But thankfully, AI isn’t switching off human creativity. It’s turning the dial up.

I see it every week. People who never thought of themselves as ‘creative’ are now building things. Launching the side project that sat in a drawer for a decade. Writing that book. Designing the course. Making stuff. Not because AI did it for them (although it’s helping), but because AI cleared away the drudgery that used to stand between them, the idea and crucially, the time to do it.

The barrier to ‘having a go’ has dropped through the floor.

Which reminds me of a line in The Shawshank Redemption: “Get busy living, or get busy dying.” I think the AI age has quietly added a third option, and it might be the most human one of all.

Get busy creating.

D

PS: What would you like to create? Head over to escape925.online and take the survey to find out…