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Looking for Signs

If you want to be more creative, try being more human

Jason McBride
5 min read4 days ago
Illustration by Jason McBride

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?”

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Jason McBride
Jason McBride

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