Consuming and Creating

The culture of self-realisation sometimes looks at the viewer and the reader as passive consumers of someone else’s life. But a film, a game and a book give real experience; the problem starts only when consumption crowds out any action of your own.

Constant consumption does, however, leave little room for action of your own.

Watching sport is easier than training. Watching people renovate a house is more pleasant than the renovation. You can read about writing for considerably longer than you can write.

It is worth crossing the line from time to time:

• not only listen to music, but play something;
• not only look at photographs, but take one;
• not only read recipes, but cook;
• not only discuss ideas, but test one;
• not only play games, but invent your own system.

Making something gives a different kind of attention. You start noticing decisions that used to look natural. After trying to write a scene, dialogue reads differently. After speaking in public yourself, the work of a good speaker becomes more visible.

Not every consumer has to become an author. Art has value without home production of competing works.

All the same, making something restores your right not only to choose from a ready-made menu but occasionally to walk into the kitchen.

Generative AI has made the first draft almost free. A text, an image, a melody or a program can appear before you have had time to learn anything.

So it is now especially important to distinguish: generating material, choosing among options, editing, understanding how the result is built and taking responsibility for it. All of these can be part of authorship, but they are not equal to one another.

Creating does not begin with a compulsory requirement to make every part by hand. It begins where you can explain a choice, reject a bad option and answer for the final form.

The difference in scale shows up on the first attempt. Someone who has watched a hundred renovation videos knows the sequence of steps and is sure that tiling a bathroom is a weekend’s work. The first square metre takes up the whole of Saturday, and it turns out the videos did not show the hour of wall preparation, the mixing and the clean-up, because that is boring to film. After this the same videos look different: you can see where it was edited, where it was not being done for the first time, and where the presenter is silent about the part he did not do himself.

One piece of your own experience changes your attitude to an entire category of finished material. After that you can no longer look at someone else’s work as magic. There is slightly less pleasure, and the judgements get more accurate.