It is something you hear from folks about why they use artificial intelligence. Interestingly, it is the same thing people would say before this moment when you asked them why they don’t write. As I sit here on a Sunday afternoon, writing various fictional and non-fictional stories in my notebook, as well as running multiple Claude agents to crawl and produce machine-readable artifacts for thousands of different companies—you can really feel the extraction that occurs, leaving us without ideas.
I wouldn’t just blame AI here. TV has long been eroding our creativity since mid way through the last century. The Internet just personalized it. And AI is turning up the volume. We don’t have any ideas, because we have resorted to just being consumers, and we are in the business have having ideas. We’ve outsourced our need for ideas rather than seeing ourselves as the source of ideas. I’ve walked this line my whole life. I was a TV baby for sure. I was an early Internet adopter and believer. I have suffered chronically throughout my life at not being good at anything and not having any good ideas.
In 2010 I bought a lot of books, but never really read. Then I began writing. I fell in love with writing. I learned to need writing. It would take me another decade before I would fall back in love with reading. I now see reading and writing as essential. Not just to having ideas, but living. They are related. If I don’t have ideas, it is because I don’t read enough. If I don’t have ideas it is because I don’t write. This isn’t just about a single book or single story. This is about doing it in general. Having muscles. Having a desire to read and write. Hitting the wall with reading and writing. Getting back to it. Practicing, failing, succeeding. Just showing up and doing it regularly.
As I write this I am tending to 3 separate Claude agents. One is doing research, another is taking that research and updating a website, and a third is looking through the work I’ve done this week. I do all of this for my business Naftiko to understand how my clients operate, what they need, and where the gaps are. This story lives in Kin Lane, where we don’t use AI, but straddling the two worlds reveals very clearly for me why we don’t have ideas. Like I said before, this isn’t just AI. This is a social media, Internet, and television thing. We don’t have ideas because we’ve opted to not have ideas. We made that choice. We continue to make the choice each day.
When I started API Evangelist I barely had any ideas. I took me years to get to the point where I had a sustained flow of ideas, let alone any good ideas. I have had seasons on API Evangelist where I write 3-5 blog posts a day. Too many ideas (not possible). Even some of the unpolished ones are worth it because they contributed to more polished ones down the road. I also have seen the unintended side-effect of the process when I produce ideas I barely notice, but others see as gems. After reading this, I want you to know that if you find yourself in a moment where you don’t have any ideas—you have put yourself there. Go read. Go write. You’ll be fine.
