The First Post

It's overcast today.

Here I am, sitting at work looking out the window wondering why I'm starting this blog in the first place.

Yesterday I supervised my 3 year old son as he painted a picture. The picture in question was, as you can imagine, just a bunch of water colored blobs on a page. For a while he mixed the colors, practiced holding a paintbrush, and named each color in wonder as he put them on the paper. When he was finished working on his own, he handed me a paintbrush. I helped him fill in the gaps and smooth out the colors while he continued to add more paint to the page.

Once we were done I put it on the counter to let it dry, after which my wife cut it in a square and put it in a picture frame. The end result, I think, actually looks pretty good, but that isn't the point. My son was so excited to paint something, more excited I think than he usually is to watch TV or go to the park. His eyes widened and his face lit up when we asked him if he wanted to paint. He now looks at his picture in the frame, points at it, and happily calls it his painting.

While supervising him in all this I saw this innocent kind of whimsy and joy you get from simply creating art. We painted a picture together, not because we were trying to profit off of it, and not because it was our job, but because it was fun. We created a piece of artwork simply for the sake of creating art.

I haven't done that in a while.

In highschool I really loved English, and even thought about becoming an English teacher for a bit. I don't remember everything I learned in Mr. Rees' classroom, but I do remember looking forward to his class every day. He taught me to view the world analytically, how to build a compelling argument, and that there are real life, morally ambiguous events that don't have easy answers. We would write every morning we came to his class, not for a grade, but for the sake of putting words to paper.

That's what I want to recreate with this blog. I need to rediscover the joy and sense of accomplishment you get from creating art, not through any kind of AI, but through actually writing. I think the point of creating something is less in the end result and more in the process itself, a point which can easily be forgotten in this day in age. Why do the hard work of expressing yourself when you can have a Large Language Model do all the talking for you? Sure, it's a lot easier to do that, but creating art inherently takes work.

It's a challenging kind of work, it's a creative kind of work, and it's a different kind of work, but it's the kind of work we should all be doing, because maybe hedonism isn't all that it's cracked up to be.