Steyn Viljoen

We create more than ever, but it weighs nothing.

AI now promises results without the reckoning, but frictionless creation leads to weightless rewards. No one dreams of merely pushing a button to generate their magnum opus. The output matters, but the intention, the struggle, the care is what makes it count — what gives it weight...

Weight is

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As a writer, I find gardens essential to the creative process; as a physician, I take my patients to gardens whenever possible. All of us have had the experience of wandering through a lush garden or a timeless desert, walking by a river or an ocean, or climbing a mountain and finding ourselves simultaneously calmed and reinvigorated, engaged in... See more

“I cannot say exactly how nature exerts its calming and organizing effects on our brains,” the poetic neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote in the dawning years of the twenty-first century, “but I have seen in my patients the restorative and healing powers of nature and gardens, even for those who are deeply disabled neurologically.”

in a world of scarcity, you want tools; in a world of abundance, you want taste.

And this is crucial to our talk here, because these abilities – to link, annotate, change, summarize, copy, and share — these are the verbs of gardening.

We reject the shallow conformity of the engineering mindset, the stifling constraints of form following function, the illusion of minimalism, and the monotony of linearity.

In their place, we rediscover artistic principles rooted in tangibility, natural forms, the unicity of objects, and the texture and materiality of the physical world.

We impose... See more