HOW IT GETS TO
MEAN SOMETHING

The quality of what comes out of a mind is largely informed by what went in, and not just the quantity of it but the care taken in the getting of it. This is not a controversial position. It is, however, one that requires a certain kind of person to act on, because acting on it takes longer and costs more effort and involves a degree of deliberate seeking that the current situation has made increasingly optional. The current situation would prefer you to receive. The person who makes anything worth experiencing has always preferred to go and find.

The secondhand bookshop is where this argument is most visible. Not because it is romantic or nostalgic or any of the things people reach for when they talk about physical books, but because of what the objects in it are actually carrying. A secondhand book has been somewhere. It has imperfections that are evidence of a life lived alongside another person. It smells, depending on its age and its history, of somewhere specific that you will never visit but can faintly sense. It holds, in its physical presence, an energy that transferred from whoever read it last into the thing itself, and transfers again from the thing into whoever picks it up next. What you end up producing after a life spent among objects like this is something with more depth than anything assembled from Pinterest boards and algorithm-surfaced references, because the inputs were alive and the outputs carry that aliveness forward.

The list goes on. Vinyl records that hold a smell and a story inside them about what it took to make the music. The conditions, the arguments, the specific moment the thing became itself. Physical DVDs and VHS tapes bought in a store where someone recommended them based on their own experience of watching them, which is a different and warmer transaction than a streaming platform serving you something because of what you watched last Tuesday. These objects are a reminder of why you loved the thing in the first place. They hold the conversation between you and whoever made it, and between you and whoever else has loved it, and that conversation is part of what you bring to everything you subsequently make. We surround ourselves with these things because they are pieces of who we are and who we are still in the process of becoming.

The explosion of AI has, if anything, made the running in the opposite direction feel more urgent rather than less. Not because the tools are without value, that argument belongs to someone older and less curious. But because the proliferation of the generated and the optimised and the frictionlessly assembled has made the other thing more visible by contrast. Alan Watts speeches. Seamus Heaney poetry. Paintings that came from pain. These things exist because they could not have existed any other way, because a specific person, in a specific condition, with a specific history of accumulated experience, made something that only they could make. That is what genuine inputs produce. Not content. Not output. Something that makes the person who encounters it feel, briefly and undeniably, what it is to be alive.

Which is, in the end, the only thing worth making.