AI can now produce a picture in seconds. A song in a few minutes. Vibe code an app in an hour. The output isn’t bad. Sometimes it’s remarkably good. But something is absent, and it’s difficult to name.

Content has become saturated. Our feeds are flooded with slop, competent, polished, empty. Things that arrive fully formed with no story behind them.

Meanwhile, trend cycles compress. A meme lasts days. A toy or fashion item everyone wanted last month is forgotten by the next. Things don’t hold attention like they used to, and most new things die quickly because they were never built to last.

The conversation about AI and creativity fixates on output. Can it paint, write, compose? This frames creation as a production problem to be solved. It misses what actually matters.

What’s distinct about this moment isn’t just that AI compresses output. Photography did that. Recorded music did that. What AI compresses is the acquisition of skill itself. You can now produce without ever developing a relationship to the medium. You can arrive without having traveled.

In an age of instant output and disposable trends, the story embedded in the product, the process of making it, becomes the point. Not because it produces better results. Because the pursuit itself is where meaning lives.

What I saw

This became clear to me recently. Over the past year, I traveled through Japan, England, and France. Three cultures with deep histories tied to tradition and craft. Places that have preserved not just old objects, but the infrastructure for mastery itself.

I wasn’t looking for a pattern. I kept encountering things built on a completely different logic. Gerhard Richter’s retrospective at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris. The Musée Rodin. Fortnum & Mason in London. A Chelsea match. A play in the West End. The Kutani Kosen Kiln in Kanazawa, Japan.

A pattern emerged. The things that moved me most were built on process, not output. On pursuit, not arrival.

Mastery as self-destruction

Richter’s retrospective moved me in ways I’m still trying to understand. Here was an artist who spent six decades systematically destroying his own success.

He escaped East Germany in 1961, built recognition through photo-paintings, then abandoned the style the moment it became comfortable. He pivoted to color charts and gray monochromes. As those gained traction, he moved to abstract squeegee works. When the squeegee paintings became his signature and commanded auction records, he turned to small, intimate pieces and overpainted photographs.

This isn’t restlessness or marketing. It’s a philosophical position. Richter has said he distrusts virtuosity. The moment technique becomes comfortable, he abandons it. Mastery that calcifies into formula is a kind of death.

The squeegee paintings look spontaneous but involve dozens of layers built up and scraped away over months. He photographs every stage, treating failures as data. His Birkenau series from 2014 is particularly striking. He painted realistic images based on photographs taken at Auschwitz, then progressively obscured them with squeegees until they became abstract surfaces of grey and black. The original images are buried inside the paint, invisible but present. It’s not just an abstract painting. It’s a painting that contains a struggle with memory. The process is the content.

Richter is 93. He could have optimized for output decades ago. He had the technique. Instead, he optimized for continued struggle, not arrival.

Incompleteness as statement

Richter buries the struggle under layers. Rodin leaves it visible in the stone.

A few days later, I visited the Musée Rodin. The museum is filled with figures emerging from rough, unworked marble. Hands and faces polished to smoothness while torsos remain trapped in raw stone. The Walking Man has no head or arms. The Hand of God shows figures barely emerging from rock. Fragments, partial studies, severed hands and feet exhibited as complete works.

Rodin had the technique to finish everything. He chose not to. The unfinished surface reveals the act of making. A polished sculpture hides the chisel. A rough one shows the struggle between artist and material. The viewer witnesses process, not just result.

The Gates of Hell consumed 37 years and was never “finished” in any traditional sense. Rodin was arguing that the fragment, the attempt, carries meaning the resolved object might lose. Emergence matters more than resolution.

Both artists refuse the clean output. Both understand that mastery isn’t a destination. It’s a direction. You approach but never arrive. The product isn’t proof of achievement. It’s evidence of pursuit, a testament to the journey.

From gallery to daily life

Richter and Rodin made incompleteness and reinvention into artistic positions. But the same principle operates in things people buy, watch, and use every day. The difference is subtler. You feel it more than see it.

The story of the maker gets absorbed into the object through bodily practice, through accumulated judgment, through years of repetition. The imperfections aren’t flaws. They’re signatures of the pursuit. And something in us recognizes this, even when we can’t articulate why.

In London, I kept finding this principle at work.

Fortnum & Mason has been on Piccadilly since 1707. More than three centuries of refining a single idea. They invented the Scotch egg in 1738 as portable food for travelers. They’ve held Royal Warrants for generations, now from both King Charles III and Queen Camilla. Their teas, biscuits, preserves, hampers. Not pivoting. Not disrupting. Deepening. The institution itself is the craft, an accumulation of judgment about what quality means, renewed and tested across centuries. That’s not something you can produce instantly.

I went to a Chelsea match. Ninety minutes is the output. But what you’re watching is years of training, repetition, bodily knowledge accumulated over thousands of hours. The spatial intuition that lets a player anticipate where the ball will be. The muscle memory that executes without thought. The crowd reacts to the goal. But they’re also reacting to everything that made it possible.

I saw a play in the West End. The same script, performed eight shows a week. Actors returning to the same role night after night, each performance a fresh attempt at something they'll never perfect. The craft isn't in executing the script flawlessly. It's in hearing lines you've spoken a thousand times as if you're discovering them in the moment. AI retrieves. Actors renew. Live theater is process made visible in real time. You witness the pursuit unfolding.

In Japan, I found the same reverence for craft, expressed through different materials.

I visited the Kutani Kosen Kiln in Kanazawa. Opened in 1870, now in its fifth generation. The family makes ceramics entirely by hand, from clay blending and shaping on the wheel to final coloring. The cups have a wobble in the rim, variation in the glaze, irregularities left intentionally. You hold over 150 years of accumulated knowledge. The object carries memory.

Contrast this with a mass-produced mug. One will mean nothing in two years. One will mean more in forty. Same object. Opposite relationship to time.

What endures

Trends compress. Attention fragments. Things don’t last like they used to.

But Fortnum’s has lasted more than 300 years. Kutani Kosen over 150. The things that endure are built on process, not output. They carry the accumulation of human struggle, the story of the pursuit absorbed into the object or experience. And we feel it, even when the evidence is invisible.

Slop is forgettable because nothing was risked in its making. The things that stay with us carry the residue of risk.

The danger isn’t AI itself, but confusing speed for meaning.

AI has no body. It cannot accumulate physical knowledge the way a potter’s hands learn the clay or a soccer player’s legs learn the pitch. It has no relationship to its own limitations, no experience of the gap between what it wants to make and what it can make. That gap is where meaning lives.

AI compresses the distance between intention and output. Useful for many things. Irrelevant to what we’re discussing here. The process of becoming, the years of building judgment, the failures that teach, these aren’t inefficiencies to be solved. They’re the substance.

The value shift

In an age of instant creation, human-made products and experiences will command a different kind of attention. Not because they’re scarce, but because they carry something AI cannot replicate. The emotional residue of the journey.

We recognize this subconsciously. The imperfect cup feels different in your hand. The live performance resonates differently than the recording. The institution that survived three centuries carries weight a startup cannot. These things are testaments. Evidence of pursuit.

What I’ve come to value

I notice this in my own life. The pull toward things that resist instant resolution.

Writing this Substack. Each essay is an argument with myself that I don’t know the outcome of until I’m done. The process of thinking through writing, not just transcribing thoughts I already have.

I bought a camera recently. Not for the images, but for the process. Framing each shot. Adjusting settings for the light. Editing each photo with intention. Every step is a decision, a small act of judgment that AI would collapse into nothing.

I’ve started collecting pottery from kilns I visit and paintings from artists whose work moves me. Surrounding myself with objects that carry the story of their making. Each one a reminder that someone struggled to produce it.

These aren’t nostalgic retreats. They’re responses to a real shift.

What is old becomes new

As AI takes over more of what we used to call work, I think people will feel less human. Not because AI is malicious, but because so much of our identity is tied to striving, to the long process of getting better at something. When output becomes effortless, something essential is lost.

People will respond by picking up pursuits that are always about refinement. The never-ending journey toward a perfection you never reach. Arts. Cooking. Sports. Gardening. Building things with your hands. These activities cannot be shortcut. The struggle is the point.

What people will be developing isn’t just skill. It’s the capacity to combine skills with emotion and judgment, in real time, under pressure. The painter who understands light and chemistry and grief. The actor who brings their whole life to the stage each night. The soccer player whose body synthesizes a decade of training in a single improvised moment.

AI can simulate competence in any single domain. What it cannot do is integrate. The emotion in a painting. The presence in a performance. The decision on the pitch made in a split second with the crowd roaring. None of it perfect. All of it human.

These pursuits will find renewed attention. Not because they're anti-technology, but because they offer something technology cannot provide.

The question is how we teach this. Part of it is studying history, what has lasted and why. Part of it is disconnecting from technology periodically, creating space to feel the difference. And part of it is using AI itself to accelerate skill acquisition, compressing the technical learning curve so more time can be spent on what it cannot teach. Emotion, judgment, presence.

If AI handles output, humans are freed to optimize for what was always the point. Not the result. The pursuit.

So take a break from doomscrolling. Pick up a hobby that resists shortcuts. Make something with your hands. Visit a museum. See a play. Find the mom and pop restaurant that’s been serving the same neighborhood for decades. These things are still here. They’ve been waiting. They’ve stood the test of time for a reason. Most of what’s new today will be gone tomorrow.

Thanks for reading Mixed Realities by TJ Kawamura! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Subscribe

AI can now produce a picture in seconds. A song in a few minutes. Vibe code an app in an hour. The output isn’t bad. Sometimes it’s remarkably good. But something is absent, and it’s difficult to name.

Content has become saturated. Our feeds are flooded with slop, competent, polished, empty. Things that arrive fully formed with no story behind them.

Meanwhile, trend cycles compress. A meme lasts days. A toy or fashion item everyone wanted last month is forgotten by the next. Things don’t hold attention like they used to, and most new things die quickly because they were never built to last.

The conversation about AI and creativity fixates on output. Can it paint, write, compose? This frames creation as a production problem to be solved. It misses what actually matters.

What’s distinct about this moment isn’t just that AI compresses output. Photography did that. Recorded music did that. What AI compresses is the acquisition of skill itself. You can now produce without ever developing a relationship to the medium. You can arrive without having traveled.

In an age of instant output and disposable trends, the story embedded in the product, the process of making it, becomes the point. Not because it produces better results. Because the pursuit itself is where meaning lives.

What I saw

This became clear to me recently. Over the past year, I traveled through Japan, England, and France. Three cultures with deep histories tied to tradition and craft. Places that have preserved not just old objects, but the infrastructure for mastery itself.

I wasn’t looking for a pattern. I kept encountering things built on a completely different logic. Gerhard Richter’s retrospective at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris. The Musée Rodin. Fortnum & Mason in London. A Chelsea match. A play in the West End. The Kutani Kosen Kiln in Kanazawa, Japan.

A pattern emerged. The things that moved me most were built on process, not output. On pursuit, not arrival.

Mastery as self-destruction

Richter’s retrospective moved me in ways I’m still trying to understand. Here was an artist who spent six decades systematically destroying his own success.

He escaped East Germany in 1961, built recognition through photo-paintings, then abandoned the style the moment it became comfortable. He pivoted to color charts and gray monochromes. As those gained traction, he moved to abstract squeegee works. When the squeegee paintings became his signature and commanded auction records, he turned to small, intimate pieces and overpainted photographs.

This isn’t restlessness or marketing. It’s a philosophical position. Richter has said he distrusts virtuosity. The moment technique becomes comfortable, he abandons it. Mastery that calcifies into formula is a kind of death.

The squeegee paintings look spontaneous but involve dozens of layers built up and scraped away over months. He photographs every stage, treating failures as data. His Birkenau series from 2014 is particularly striking. He painted realistic images based on photographs taken at Auschwitz, then progressively obscured them with squeegees until they became abstract surfaces of grey and black. The original images are buried inside the paint, invisible but present. It’s not just an abstract painting. It’s a painting that contains a struggle with memory. The process is the content.

Richter is 93. He could have optimized for output decades ago. He had the technique. Instead, he optimized for continued struggle, not arrival.

Incompleteness as statement

Richter buries the struggle under layers. Rodin leaves it visible in the stone.

A few days later, I visited the Musée Rodin. The museum is filled with figures emerging from rough, unworked marble. Hands and faces polished to smoothness while torsos remain trapped in raw stone. The Walking Man has no head or arms. The Hand of God shows figures barely emerging from rock. Fragments, partial studies, severed hands and feet exhibited as complete works.

Rodin had the technique to finish everything. He chose not to. The unfinished surface reveals the act of making. A polished sculpture hides the chisel. A rough one shows the struggle between artist and material. The viewer witnesses process, not just result.

The Gates of Hell consumed 37 years and was never “finished” in any traditional sense. Rodin was arguing that the fragment, the attempt, carries meaning the resolved object might lose. Emergence matters more than resolution.

Both artists refuse the clean output. Both understand that mastery isn’t a destination. It’s a direction. You approach but never arrive. The product isn’t proof of achievement. It’s evidence of pursuit, a testament to the journey.

From gallery to daily life

Richter and Rodin made incompleteness and reinvention into artistic positions. But the same principle operates in things people buy, watch, and use every day. The difference is subtler. You feel it more than see it.

The story of the maker gets absorbed into the object through bodily practice, through accumulated judgment, through years of repetition. The imperfections aren’t flaws. They’re signatures of the pursuit. And something in us recognizes this, even when we can’t articulate why.

In London, I kept finding this principle at work.

Fortnum & Mason has been on Piccadilly since 1707. More than three centuries of refining a single idea. They invented the Scotch egg in 1738 as portable food for travelers. They’ve held Royal Warrants for generations, now from both King Charles III and Queen Camilla. Their teas, biscuits, preserves, hampers. Not pivoting. Not disrupting. Deepening. The institution itself is the craft, an accumulation of judgment about what quality means, renewed and tested across centuries. That’s not something you can produce instantly.

I went to a Chelsea match. Ninety minutes is the output. But what you’re watching is years of training, repetition, bodily knowledge accumulated over thousands of hours. The spatial intuition that lets a player anticipate where the ball will be. The muscle memory that executes without thought. The crowd reacts to the goal. But they’re also reacting to everything that made it possible.

I saw a play in the West End. The same script, performed eight shows a week. Actors returning to the same role night after night, each performance a fresh attempt at something they'll never perfect. The craft isn't in executing the script flawlessly. It's in hearing lines you've spoken a thousand times as if you're discovering them in the moment. AI retrieves. Actors renew. Live theater is process made visible in real time. You witness the pursuit unfolding.

In Japan, I found the same reverence for craft, expressed through different materials.

I visited the Kutani Kosen Kiln in Kanazawa. Opened in 1870, now in its fifth generation. The family makes ceramics entirely by hand, from clay blending and shaping on the wheel to final coloring. The cups have a wobble in the rim, variation in the glaze, irregularities left intentionally. You hold over 150 years of accumulated knowledge. The object carries memory.

Contrast this with a mass-produced mug. One will mean nothing in two years. One will mean more in forty. Same object. Opposite relationship to time.

What endures

Trends compress. Attention fragments. Things don’t last like they used to.

But Fortnum’s has lasted more than 300 years. Kutani Kosen over 150. The things that endure are built on process, not output. They carry the accumulation of human struggle, the story of the pursuit absorbed into the object or experience. And we feel it, even when the evidence is invisible.

Slop is forgettable because nothing was risked in its making. The things that stay with us carry the residue of risk.

The danger isn’t AI itself, but confusing speed for meaning.

AI has no body. It cannot accumulate physical knowledge the way a potter’s hands learn the clay or a soccer player’s legs learn the pitch. It has no relationship to its own limitations, no experience of the gap between what it wants to make and what it can make. That gap is where meaning lives.

AI compresses the distance between intention and output. Useful for many things. Irrelevant to what we’re discussing here. The process of becoming, the years of building judgment, the failures that teach, these aren’t inefficiencies to be solved. They’re the substance.

The value shift

In an age of instant creation, human-made products and experiences will command a different kind of attention. Not because they’re scarce, but because they carry something AI cannot replicate. The emotional residue of the journey.

We recognize this subconsciously. The imperfect cup feels different in your hand. The live performance resonates differently than the recording. The institution that survived three centuries carries weight a startup cannot. These things are testaments. Evidence of pursuit.

What I’ve come to value

I notice this in my own life. The pull toward things that resist instant resolution.

Writing this Substack. Each essay is an argument with myself that I don’t know the outcome of until I’m done. The process of thinking through writing, not just transcribing thoughts I already have.

I bought a camera recently. Not for the images, but for the process. Framing each shot. Adjusting settings for the light. Editing each photo with intention. Every step is a decision, a small act of judgment that AI would collapse into nothing.

I’ve started collecting pottery from kilns I visit and paintings from artists whose work moves me. Surrounding myself with objects that carry the story of their making. Each one a reminder that someone struggled to produce it.

These aren’t nostalgic retreats. They’re responses to a real shift.

What is old becomes new

As AI takes over more of what we used to call work, I think people will feel less human. Not because AI is malicious, but because so much of our identity is tied to striving, to the long process of getting better at something. When output becomes effortless, something essential is lost.

People will respond by picking up pursuits that are always about refinement. The never-ending journey toward a perfection you never reach. Arts. Cooking. Sports. Gardening. Building things with your hands. These activities cannot be shortcut. The struggle is the point.

What people will be developing isn’t just skill. It’s the capacity to combine skills with emotion and judgment, in real time, under pressure. The painter who understands light and chemistry and grief. The actor who brings their whole life to the stage each night. The soccer player whose body synthesizes a decade of training in a single improvised moment.

AI can simulate competence in any single domain. What it cannot do is integrate. The emotion in a painting. The presence in a performance. The decision on the pitch made in a split second with the crowd roaring. None of it perfect. All of it human.

These pursuits will find renewed attention. Not because they're anti-technology, but because they offer something technology cannot provide.

The question is how we teach this. Part of it is studying history, what has lasted and why. Part of it is disconnecting from technology periodically, creating space to feel the difference. And part of it is using AI itself to accelerate skill acquisition, compressing the technical learning curve so more time can be spent on what it cannot teach. Emotion, judgment, presence.

If AI handles output, humans are freed to optimize for what was always the point. Not the result. The pursuit.

So take a break from doomscrolling. Pick up a hobby that resists shortcuts. Make something with your hands. Visit a museum. See a play. Find the mom and pop restaurant that’s been serving the same neighborhood for decades. These things are still here. They’ve been waiting. They’ve stood the test of time for a reason. Most of what’s new today will be gone tomorrow.

Thanks for reading Mixed Realities by TJ Kawamura! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Subscribe