It’s about the same trap in professional life: doing the thing for years, getting more experienced, and staying stuck at the same level. You can work hard for a very long time without getting better—not because you’re lazy or untalented, but because you’re confusing practice with deliberate practice.
But what I began to notice, through all of it, was that something felt increasingly off. Not just in my own experience, but in the culture surrounding it. What once felt full of possibility had started to feel constricted. The language of freedom was still there, but beneath it was a kind of pressure that didn’t feel creative at all.
When you try to make something that solves everything, you obsess over questions of power: how to make something that is omnipotent and everlasting. But when you make something that does one thing well, the questions are much more personal: does it solve my problem? and for how long? and who for? and where will it push the space around it? I want... See more