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Writer's block and procrastination may be important signals, not character flaws.

Resistance shows up hardest exactly when the work matters most.

AI never experiences this, and that absence of humanity is a sign, not an advantage.

I’ve watched four YouTube videos, done a load of laundry, and scored some amazing deals online, getting ready to write this post. Or I might say, avoiding writing this post.

So, I put it off for longer than necessary. The idea was formed and the cartoon got drawn weeks ago, but for writing, I felt too restless to sit, and too uncomfortable confronting this very issue that so many creative people face every single day.

These days, it can be really tempting to use AI to just skip not so much the work but the creative heebie-jeebies, the acute discomfort and restlessness, the overwhelming reluctance to just... start already.

Now, I’ll be honest and say I will happily—even gleefully—offload impossibly tedious or repetitive admin work like writing proposals and “just-the-facts-ma’am” emails to my committees to my bestie Claude. Those tasks neither require nor deserve anything special or specific to me, which is probably the main reason why I find them so crushingly boring.

But when it comes to anything remotely creative or expressive, I know in my bones that the easy, beguiling off-ramp AI offers is so dangerous. Not just because I imagine all our brains becoming atrophied and melting to goo from lack of use, but because ignoring and bypassing this discomfort is like running a 5K on a broken ankle because you found some really good painkillers, or relying on a bottle of........

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