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Looking for Signs
If you want to be more creative, try being more human
The most remarkable thing about humans is our ability to find meaning in places where there is none.
Whether finding Jesus on a stale sandwich, searching for our fates in the distant lights of the stars, or creating complex interior monologues for our non-verbal pets, being human means discovering stories.
There’s a school of thought that we should be rational and move on from our superstitions. These often well-meaning, but often also completely miserable, rationalists want us to see the world for how it really is. Of course, there is mounting evidence that the observable universe is a hologram, so I don’t know why rationalists think they know what reality is.
Rationalists have given us economics, a system of flawed predictive models that often fail because of the presumption that humans make rational, self-interested decisions.
Being hyper-rational cuts against our humanity. It’s the kind of thing that promotes artificial intelligence. A fellow poet and collaborator recently sent me a link to a story about a study where people preferred AI poetry to human-made poetry.
My first indelicate reaction to this was to exclaim out loud to only my phone, “Why the f*ck would he send me this?”
