Vijayendra Mohanty

Since we have been talking to a large extent about artificial intelligence and creativity and the future of human society, I think this is something that we all need to kind of think about a little bit. That is the future of creativity and the kinds of things that are advisable for creative people in the future and inadvisable.

Bear in mind that when I say the future, what I mean is not the distant future. I mean the medium-range future, the future of a few years from now, maybe three years from now. Beyond that, the only general conclusion I can come to about AI and creative work is that AI tools are probably going to become a part of the regular creative flow of any writer or artist, and no one is even going to talk about it a great deal. Technologies like RSS, blockchain, and NFT are destined to become part of the scaffolding of the internet. I feel like something similar will happen to AI, and it will become part of our everyday workflows as much as anything else, and we won't talk about it.

Before AI becomes an integral part of our workflows, it will be something outside it. It will be something that gets pointed at and described as an alien presence. In the coming few years, we are going to have to make some choices. I recently read an article about how AI is probably not going to start creating art and writing stories anytime soon, but very probably there is going to come a time when AI-created artwork and AI-created writing are going to be on the bookshelf next to the human-written book and the human-created piece of art.

I am personally of the opinion that people are always going to prefer human-created art. But then again, I am old-fashioned. I am from the year 2024. Who knows what the future will bring? If you look at the way AI tools work, it is very simple. The AI looks at all that has been done so far, all that is being done, and then generates responses on the basis of an understanding that it has created on the basis of that. Now, bear in mind that I am using the word "understanding" a little reservedly because I am not of the opinion that AI actually understands anything. It is a generative system. It is like your predictive text on your phone, except that it is slightly more complicated than that. Instead of predicting the next word, it is predicting the next sentence, the next paragraph, and the entire meaning of the thing that it is working on. But it is still a system that is working on things that exist.

Human beings, to some extent, also do this. But human beings describe creativity as the ability to come up with new things. How far that is true, I am not sure. But we do seem to be the products of everything we have read and consumed and absorbed as creativity. People who consume literature and people who can read and people who can watch movies and documentaries and listen to podcasts—are we really being creative? I think there may be different opinions about this, but I don't think anyone will disagree with me when I say that there is a difference between stuff that is a result of pandering to trending topics and stuff that is original in that it takes a direction that other people have not previously gone in.

The AI can only generate what has already been generated. The AI can only work on things that are already in circulation. It can only build its future products on the basis of past products. What does this mean for our trending topics economy, our content creator economy, where everyone is making videos about whatever is working right now? It means that if you're a human being and you're creating your next video or writing your next book on the basis of whatever is working right now or whatever is trending in the market right now, you're probably going to be out of business. Because the AI can do it better than you and faster than you.

That was the USP that you were bringing to the table, wasn't it? What you were bringing to the table was the ability to look at what is happening and to quickly generate something that can add to that mass of content. AI can do that better than you now. AI will be able to do that even better than you in the days to come. So what is it that is going to make you stand out? What is going to make you stand out as a human creator is the ability, the willingness, and the caliber to take an original direction, to take a direction that others have not gone in before.

A lot of jobs that are on the bottom of the barrel, like SEO copywriting, for example, are gone pretty much even right now because AI can do it right now. AI is going to take a few more jobs in the days and months and years to come, which will be jobs that are predicated on the idea that if you follow whatever is happening in the market right now, you're going to do well. You may very well be someone who wants to do just that, and that is okay. But bear in mind that that particular line of work is going to be out of fashion pretty soon.

The only things that are, in my opinion, in my 2024 opinion, likely to continue to exist are things that are original, things that stand out, things that draw upon the human ability to break from tradition. It feels a little strange to say that AI is traditional, but the way AI is working right now is pretty much indistinguishable from people who only do things that have already been done. Because that is literally all AI is capable of: doing what has already been done.

Thank you for listening. I'll see you in the next one.

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Below is a transcript of a human-recorded podcast. The transcript has been formatted using AI tools while preserving the original content, including all speech patterns and informal language.

Hello, friends. This is probably, in fact, quite possibly the last episode of this podcast that I'm recording in 2024. You will be listening to this sometime in the middle of January because I, you know, schedule episodes in advance these days on account of the fact that I need to get rid of the tendency in me that has to do everything now. And I'm trying to bring more order to the way I make things and the way I work.

But, you know, new year resolutions are a dime a dozen. I think I did fairly well on the resolutions I made last year. I had promised myself that I will cook at least a full meal all by myself for my entire family and I did not do that. But I did promise myself that I will have some more discipline in my personal life as far as social media is concerned, as far as waking up and going to sleep is concerned and I did do that fairly well. I failed on occasion, but by and large, I did fairly well. And I also promised myself that I just spoke about social media. I promised myself that I will reduce my reliance on social media tools, etc. And I did that really well. I really quit Instagram and Twitter and Instagram. I'm now social media free and that I'm very happy about.

So 2024, as far as my personal, as far as the things that I can affect in my own life, I did okay, I think. But then there comes another year and you think, what other changes do I need to make? Do I need to make any changes at all? And the answer to that is usually yes, because we are never satisfied. But I was looking at the year and it is 2025. And what struck me about it is that I grew up in the 90s, where the 21st century looked like a very optimistic place to be. A great, nice period of time where a lot of problems will be gone. We were optimistic about the future, even as far back as the 60s and 70s. Science fiction used to imagine the 21st century as the promised land of some sort, where when we get there, it'll all be great. And of course, things are not great, but also things could be worse. And maybe that worse is yet to come. Maybe it is still in our future and we are not there yet, but we are heading there and we will get there. Who knows?

But what struck me about 2025 is that we are almost 25 years into the 21st century. That's one-fourth of the 21st century. That's 25% of the 21st century. That's where we are right now. There is only three fourths of the 21st century left. I was looking at our lifespans, like, you know, 70, 75, 80 years. And with some help, maybe a hundred years. I was looking at our lifespans and wondering why we pay the century so much importance. I think it's because it is the closest round number that can correspond to our, to our idea of a lifespan.

But if we lived for as long as a fruit fly does, our youngest people, our most enthusiastic hormonal teenagers, for lack of a better word, adolescents, will have been born this morning. And our most respected elders, the champions of our community, the thought leaders, the kings and the emperors, etc., will have been born last Friday. And then maybe every weekend would be a time when we wonder if we have lived our lives in a virtuous manner. Maybe every weekend would be a time for us to leave lessons for future generations. It's Saturday. I'm about to die. I hope that people who were born this morning are kind to each other, that are people who will grow up by Monday to be good, humane beings and that they will contribute meaningfully to our society and that our society will continue to live on and prosper. And by society, of course, they mean the little group of larva that is in a puddle of water by the corner of a algae-covered pond much as we do.

For us, that algae-covered pond is a planet and we have dreams of reaching out to the edge of the solar system and beyond, maybe. But for the most part, as far as reality is concerned, we are only concerned with this little rock on which we live. And it's not even like we don't think about the weekend. We do think about the weekend. Half our life, if you are an urban professional keyboard worker of some sort, then your life is spent waiting for the weekend. Even during the week when you are working, you are thinking about the weekend. You are thinking about how nice it would feel to have a day or two in a seven day week when you can do whatever you want. When you can not work, when you don't have to reply to office emails, when you don't have to give details of your work done that day to your superior and you can just spend it sitting quietly or reading or drinking or traveling.

Of course, the weekend is only two days, if that, and it is not sufficient time to do anything, really. Anything meaningful, that is. I've spoken before about how we assign value to things on the basis of how much time they take, as in letters take time to write and to send and to read so they have more value than your average WhatsApp message which isn't really limited by time and space so we use it for anything really. A letter is, a letter has more value in our eyes because it takes time and effort. Things that don't take time and effort have less value. And because we measure value through time, unless you take a proper vacation and spend the time and effort on doing something that is valuable to you, you will not be able to get that kind of value from the weekend because the weekend isn't enough time to do anything, really. Except to, I mean, the one good utility that a weekend has is recovering from the week. The week was hard and it took a lot out of you. The weekend is the time when you heal from the weak before jumping right back into the next week and suffering until the next weekend.

I was reading this report in a newspaper about film critics talking about how influencer culture is affecting them, how influencer culture is reducing the value of the film critic and I don't disagree with them because film criticism is an art form in and of itself. It's a proper discipline. It's a proper genre of quote-unquote content. But influencer culture where these days we have videos, we're reviewing movies, etc., those reviews don't really go anywhere. And you can tell the difference between a review done by someone qualified and a review done by someone who's just a fan. I mean, no disrespect to fans, fan culture has its own value, but it is not a replacement for the critic or a review done by a proper critic.

So there is something to be said in favor of what is generally described as the snobbish critic. But I was thinking about how the critic's position has also changed over time, right? Because there was a time when fewer movies used to come out. And to watch even one movie in a movie theater was a luxury. Families used to make it a special occasion. These days you can just drop into a cinema hall on the weekend by yourself even and just watch a movie and leave because you can afford it. But there was a time when maybe five movies come out and you can't afford to watch five because they're not all streaming online because there is no online. There's only the movie theater. And you have to decide which one to spend your money on. And the film critics, the reviewers job was to tell you what they thought of these movies so that you could make a decision about which one is worth your money.

These days, on account of the fact that every movie is available everywhere all the time for very cheap, although that is also something that we need to talk about at a later point because streaming itself is becoming something that is unaffordable. You cannot possibly subscribe to every streaming platform because it ends up costing you more than your TV connection did. And streaming was supposed to be the antidote ...

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the podcast.

In case you are not already kind of sort of off the school of thought that social media is bad for you because it is full of bad faith actors who are engaging in rage bait with the sole intention of generating engagement in the form of likes and shares and retweets, et cetera, so that they can maximize the revenue they make from that particular platform. Here is another problem that is going to raise its head. In fact, it has already raised its head. It's a problem that is going to get much worse in the months to come, even weeks to come. And that is bots.

This problem has already sort of started becoming apparent on BlueSky. But it is probably not even going to be something that anyone at Twitter or X flinches at, given the nature of the discourse there. You can now create bots that will interact with people completely on their own based on a certain prompt. I recently saw a video by Hank Green who was wondering what this might mean for us in the future about whether the solution to this problem is going to be whitelists or blacklists. And I have a different opinion on this, of course, I will tell you. And my opinion has to do with the fact that Twitter is not the problem. The problem is the format itself. To replace Twitter with another microblogging platform is replacing one disease with another. The very format where people post microscopic text updates and react to other microscopic text updates is not designed for a good, healthy discourse. In fact, it seems to be designed for the exact opposite.

These AI bots that I was talking about are basically, you know, automated accounts, which you can create and you can, uh, get a chat bot to generate responses to particular posts made by people. And you can have the chat bot generate responses that are of a certain variety. The one that Hank Green was talking about has to do with disagreement. So it's a bot that politely but firmly disagrees with whatever you have said. And Hank Green shows a few examples. Uh, there are also other things that it is possible to do with these bots, you know, so in discord it, the problem is the kind of problems you needed a human to create right now in the very near future, it will be possible to have tens of thousands of bought accounts that are creating that manner of problem without anyone actually having to engage or spend time on Twitter.

And there are a few nightmarish scenarios that come to mind that I will refrain from going too deeply into. But imagine what this means. Right now, you are having fights with people on Twitter and you are at least aware that these are human beings, maybe opportunistic human beings, but still human beings who are doing these things. In the near future, you might spend a day fighting with 20 accounts on a microblogging platform and come to the realization later in the day or unfortunately maybe later in the week that none of them were actual people. This is so bizarre, I'm kind of finding myself lacking words to describe it.

Can you imagine a future where in order to deal with these bots, you create bots of your own and then don't engage with anyone on Twitter at all? Your bot responds to messages being generated by other bots. Twitter is full of conversation. None of it is happening among human beings. And for the people outside of Twitter who look at Twitter and consider it some kind of reflection of whatever is happening in actual human society and human discourse, it will be unfortunate because they will come to the conclusion that this is what people are like now. Or maybe they won't come to that conclusion. Maybe it will be something else. Maybe we will all collectively come to the conclusion that social media is inhuman, that it is not people talking to each other and that it's just a lot of machine-generated text going up against each other, agreeing with each other and disagreeing with each other, et cetera.

Can you imagine that kind of a social web? I'm pretty sure there will be platforms that come up. Maybe Blue Sky will be one of them. Maybe something else will do it. I'm pretty sure there will be platforms that come up that are of the opinion that no, we are for humans only. No AI bots allowed. Even something as large as Twitter will eventually have to just say we are not in favor of bots or maybe put some kind of a cap on the number of bots any single account is able to create. Although I'm not sure that will help because these seem to be, I'm not a techie, but these seem to be rather simple problems to get around for the enterprising disingenuous mind.

I don't know how things will turn out, but social media is not getting better, is my point. It is only getting worse. It is only becoming more inhuman, more dishonest, and more of the kind of plays that can only survive as a result of rage bait being the primary currency as far as discourse is concerned. So if you still had doubts about whether or not you should stay on social media, maybe look at this very near future projection and make a decision for the sake of your own sanity and perhaps for the betterment of all humanity.

That was it. I'll see you in the next one.

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If you have ever run into a reel or short where a gullible “podcaster” is engaged in an “interview” with an astrologer and wondered who these people are and why you have never heard of them despite their apparent authority and popularity, join the club.

Of course the simple answer is that this is a mix of familiar old marketing practices being put to use to poison our feeds and, by extension, our culture.

Much has been said about how the Liberal media of America inadvertently fed Trump’s popularity, but we don’t apply it to our political condition and how the same dynamics sustain demagoguery closer to home. Add to that the fact that there are numerous smaller demagogues in the making at any given point of time, building their tiny toxic empires on social media platforms.

Some amount of media literacy might put us on a path that leads out of this morass but it seems a distant dream in a country where people bathe in excrement in order to get rid of diseases.

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Imagine there are two spoons. You go to decide which one to buy. One is made of aluminum. One is made of steel. One is quite beautiful and ornate. The other is just functional. One, it seems, will not last very long. The other will not only last, but it will also be nice to look at. But they both serve the same function. They're both spoons. They are both going to be used for the exact same thing, putting nutritious items—hopefully—into your mouth and feeding you or feeding the people you choose to make food for.

Two spoons are essentially the same thing. We find that we live in capitalism, inside markets, and the value of an object is decided on the basis of a few factors. In the case of these spoons, it is probably going to be durability because it is not even possible, I think, to improve the spoon as far as design is concerned. There is a book called This Is Not the End of the Book, where the authors—one of whom I think is Umberto Eco—talk about how there are some machines whose design it is impossible to improve. One of those things is the spoon. The other one, ironically, is the book.

I say ironically because the topic of this episode is what differentiates art and why it is not always healthy to describe art as a consumer product or a commodity whose value is only going to be decided by how much people choose to pay for it. While two spoons are essentially the same, two stories are not the same. They may serve a similar function as far as appearances are concerned. For example, for any two stories, the thing you’re going to do with them is read them and get some variety of edification. You’re going to find yourself happier, sadder, more excited, or wiser at the end of reading a story. Or at the very least, you’re going to be entertained, as in the story is going to help you pass the time. That is the function of a story.

But is that all a story is? Like the spoon, is the story eventually reducible to the thing that it does to us? I do not think so. I think that at the heart of art is uniqueness. The reason we go for art, the reason we consume art, the reason we appreciate art, is because we want something unique. We want a unique experience. We want a unique insight from the thing we have read. That is primarily why we go for art. We wish to find something relatable. We are different from other people, and we are looking to find something unique out there that would validate that feeling in us. Something that would tell us, "Yes, you are strange, you are different, but you are also equal to everyone else in the sense that everyone is different, and everyone is unique in their own way."

We look for that. We go out looking for that when we go out looking for art. The trouble is, the place we go looking for art is the market because eventually that is where we are going to find everything. Take this podcast, for example. I record these in order to express myself. I am aware that whatever I make is going to have to compete with other things of the same kind in a marketplace, which is either your favorite podcast player or YouTube or wherever you’re consuming this. But that is only part of the equation. That is not the entirety of it.

When I say that I am expressing myself, I am making art, I am making something that will pass for art at the very least. What I am doing, I would still do even if it did not have to perform in a market. No matter how many people listen to this, no matter how few people listen to this, no matter how good or bad it is, I would still do it. The spoon will not exist if it did not have practical utility. Art is created to express something. From the point of view of the person who creates the art, it is also created to experience the act of expressing yourself.

We are presently living in a time where the value of art is being defined in terms of how much it sells and how much money it can make the person who’s creating the art. This is not completely wrong because artists, at the end of the day, do have to exist inside a market. But whenever I hear talk of AI replacing artists, I’m struck by the fact that whoever says these things doesn’t really understand why people create art and why people consume art.

Imagine two places. One, a temple of creativity into which inspiration is flowing from all dimensions through magical portals. And then there is the market where art is sold. The artist who comes from the temple, who is creating stuff because they’re expressing themselves and experiencing the art of expression, will surely die if they never manage to sell anything in the market. But I think we have convinced ourselves that it is possible to live in the market. Because I am equally sure that the artist who lives in the market will also die if he was not visiting the temple of creativity every once in a while.

Thank you for listening. I hope that made sense. I will see you in the next one.

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So, largely, there are going to be two kinds of people in your life—in anyone's life, really. These are going to be people who are good to you and people who are bad to you. People who you get along with and people who you don't get along with. People who care about you and people who don't care about you or actively dislike you.

The mistake a lot of us make is that, like, let's visually imagine them as two different folders: people who are good to you and people who are not good to you. People who are mean and nasty to you, people who are actively working towards your detriment, and people who care about you, people who want you to do better, people who want to help you, and people who do help you. Right? These are the two broad categories.

The mistake a lot of us make is that we want to live in a world where everyone is in this folder, where everyone is our friend and cares for us and wants to help us. We want these people—the ones who don't care about us—to be in the folder containing people who do want to help us. This is a mistake because it is never going to happen. You are never, ever going to live in a world where everyone likes you, cares for you, and wants to help you.

I call it a mistake because I find a lot of people trying to turn these people into these people. They want to spend time making sure that the people who dislike you become people who like you. I'm not saying it is impossible to do so. I'm just saying that the inordinate amount of time many of us spend doing that is mostly wasted time because you are never going to become absolutely successful at it. And even if you are a little bit successful at it, you will want to be more successful at it. And you're not going to be—it’s not going to be, I put in one effort and I got two result. Therefore, I will put five effort and get 10 result. There is an upper limit to it. Some people are never going to become part of this folder.

Ideally, in a sane world, you would spend more time with these people, right? You would care about the people who care about you. You would want to help them. You would want to do things for them. You would want to understand them better and try to do things that make them happy. But because you're fixated on turning these people into these people, you don't do that. Most of your time is spent on the people who don't like you.

The people who care about you deserve more of your attention. I think we can all agree on this. The people who care about you deserve to spend more time with you. The people who care about you deserve more of your attention and more of your love and more of your care. And yet, because you're fixated on the people who don't like you—people who you are looking to bring into this folder—you don't do that. You take for granted the people who do care about you, and you spend your time on the people who don't care about you.

Taking your loved ones for granted is never a good idea because they don't deserve that. They deserve the best of you. They deserve your time, your effort, and your understanding. But your time, your effort, and your understanding is going in the wrong direction. It is going in the direction of the people who don't really care about all that.

Another side effect of it is that, with every action you take, you are sending a message out into the universe. I don't mean this in a woo kind of way. I'm literally saying that if you are a public personality, or even if you are not a public personality and you simply have a great, large social circle, an extended family, or friend circle, then everything you do that is visible to the people around you sends a message out.

And this message is something you should pay attention to because this is not something you're saying, and yet it is something you're conveying with your actions. So what is the message you send out when you do this thing? You tell the people who want your attention that the best way to get your attention is to be mean and nasty to you, because those are the people who you are spending time on. You're literally telling the world that if you want something from me, you shouldn't be good to me because if you are good to me, I will take you for granted. The best way to get my attention is to be mean and nasty to me because those are the people I will spend time and effort on.

We all do this. I myself have done this. But if one thing that age has taught me—I'm 41 years old, in case anyone here on this channel did not know about it—if there is one thing that age has taught me, it’s that there is only so much you can achieve by focusing on all that is going wrong with your life.

There are things that are right with your life. If you focus on those things, if you spend time with the people who are everything that is going right with your life, you might find that the amount of control that the dark forces have on you is reducing. Or, at the very least, that you are now more powerful—powerful enough to deal with it and, dare I say, defeat it.

That was it. I usually don't do this kind of thing, but something personal triggered this video, and I hope that you find it useful. Thank you for watching. I'll see you in the next one.

BTW, the podcast now has a YouTube presence here. You can subscribe if you like.

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A large part of the discourse on the future of work leaves out huge chunks of the working class. Just as, a decade or so ago, the discourse on the connecting power of social media left out the capitalistic motivations of the corporations running these platforms. Every technology has an ethic of its own, and the ethic behind generative AI has so far proven to be somewhat akin to robbery on a global scale. Maybe things will change. Maybe they won’t. But questions need to be asked of this new system that seeks to govern how we see labour and how we define work.

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If you are a creative person, do pay attention to what AI work involves before getting caught up in the hype about the future of work.

In the age of artificial intelligence, we encounter creators and content makers who are deeply optimistic about its potential. Their enthusiasm is understandable; their livelihoods often depend on the increasing use and acceptance of AI. Many of these creators actively encourage others to embrace AI, presenting it as a tool that can revolutionize industries and transform workflows.

Recently, I watched a video where an AI advocate made a point that struck a chord with me. They said, "Customers don't care how the software is made." Their argument was straightforward: whether you write the code manually or use AI assistance, customers only care about the product's functionality. This mindset might work for software, but its implications for creative fields deserve deeper exploration.

Creativity is Personal

Unlike software, creative endeavors don’t operate solely on utility. Creative works depend on interpersonal relationships between the creator and the audience. For instance, if I write a story and share it with you, the relationship we form is based on my honesty about the work's origins. If I claim it’s entirely my creation but secretly relied on AI, you might feel deceived. Transparency here becomes critical.

Honesty in creativity is about acknowledging the tools and processes used. If I incorporate AI into my writing, I owe it to my audience to share that fact. Concealing it risks undermining the trust that defines the relationship between creators and their audience.

Art is More Than a Commodity

The internet is full of voices insisting that creative works are merely commodities. A book, for example, can be seen as a product—written, packaged, and sold. But art transcends commodification. The act of creation, the labor behind it, and the authenticity it carries all add dimensions that cannot be reduced to market value.

This distinction becomes apparent when controversies arise about artists and their personal lives. Readers often stop supporting a writer whose ethics they find questionable. This reaction demonstrates that art, for many, is not separate from the artist. It is not merely about consuming a product; it is about connecting with the creator's values and vision.

The Role of AI in Art

AI's growing influence in creative fields brings us to a crossroads. Several scenarios could unfold:

* Over-Saturation: AI-generated content becomes ubiquitous, losing its novelty and value. We might adjust to this as the new normal, just as we have with Photoshop-edited images.

* Exclusivity: The high cost of AI tools limits their use to a few creators, making AI-generated content a niche rather than the norm.

* Integration: Human creators and AI collaborate in honest, balanced ways, leading to new forms of creativity that audiences learn to appreciate.

Over time, we may view AI-assisted creations as distinct yet legitimate categories, akin to photography or digital art. History has shown us that new mediums often face skepticism before gaining acceptance. Digital art faced similar controversies but is now widely acknowledged as a legitimate form of expression. AI art may follow a similar trajectory.

The Need for New Definitions

As AI reshapes creative processes, we may need new terms to define the roles of those using these tools. This linguistic gap often fuels the tensions we see online. Are these individuals artists, writers, or something else entirely? Until we find answers, the best path forward is honesty.

Honesty as the Foundation

Creativity thrives on authenticity and trust. If you’re an artist experimenting with AI tools, be upfront with your audience. Acknowledge where and how you’ve used AI, and don’t claim sole credit for work that isn’t entirely yours. This openness not only preserves the integrity of your relationship with your audience but also enriches the evolving conversation about creativity in the AI age.

Disclaimer: This essay is based on a podcast episode originally recorded in Hindi. The content was translated and edited with the assistance of AI tools. While efforts have been made to preserve the original meaning and tone, some nuances may have been adapted during the editing process. This disclaimer was also written by AI. The previous sentence, as well as this sentence, were written by a human.

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Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the podcast.

I wanted to talk about importance—about how we know something is important and how we know something is not important—and how that method of measuring importance has been somewhat impaired in our information superhighway age.

I wanted to talk about letters because that is exactly what I found myself talking to my father and mother about some weeks ago. I was inundated with messages, and I asked them how many messages they had to deal with back in the days before even telephones existed. Back when the primary methods of entertainment and information were radio, and people used to send letters to each other in order to communicate because there was no electronic method of doing so.

My mother said she had a lot of friends who were really, you know, avid letter writers, so she used to get multiple letters every week—like maybe four or five. My father said maybe twice a week, and on really uneventful months, maybe a few—like four or five a month. And it varied, of course, depending on how many people one was in contact with and how much information people wanted to share.

But I got to thinking about the process of letters, how they're composed, how they're sent, how much time they take to reach the person for whom they're intended. And I quickly realized that time plays a huge role in it, doesn't it?

It takes time to live life. It takes time to think about, “Okay, I have lived life for a month, and now these are the things that stand out.” And then it takes time to compose the letter because you're curating your life. You'll mention only the things that you think are important, and you leave out most of it because there is a limited amount of space in the letter. And also because, you know, not everything is worth mentioning.

Then you write the letter; you take time to write the letter in a very proper way because readability matters. And then you send it, and then you wait for the letter to get to the person you have sent it to. That person gets the letter a few days later, by which time, if there was something urgent in it, it is probably already outdated. And if there wasn’t anything urgent in it, then they read the letter and absorb it because it is a valuable thing. It stands out from the mundane reality of their life.

They were doing work, they were living life, they were doing other things, and then the letter comes. They take time out of their life to read that letter, to absorb it, to appreciate it, and to think about the person who sent the letter. Then they preserve the letter because they can. It doesn't take much space, and they preserve the letter so that they may perhaps read it at a later point in time.

In all of this, time played a huge role. Time was the limiting factor. Time and space got in the way of the letter. And almost miraculously, they made the experience important because we measure things—we measure how important something is based on how much time and how much space they occupy.

I mean, in our times, practically 90% of the value of a luxury item is its price. And if a thing does not cost that much, then it must have less value. We measure the value of things in our life using how much they cost.

I got to thinking about our messaging systems, about the systems that we use to contact each other. How easy it is to contact anyone—even with a video call. And as far as text messaging goes, that's even easier and faster. I mean, faster doesn't even come into it. It's instantaneous. And in fact, the thing that gets in the way of getting to a message that has been sent to you and reading it and appreciating it is, again, time—but it is a lack of time.

People can send you whatever they want, whenever they want, and it will get to you instantaneously. Whether or not you are able to get to it, read it, and reply depends on how much time you have. And quite possibly, the reason you don't have time is because you are reading other messages. Forget getting four messages a week. You're getting orders of magnitude higher as far as the number of messages is concerned. On an hourly basis, your message boxes are full.

People are sending you random stuff—a link, a video, maybe a single word or a single emoji. Sometimes people are not writing longer messages. Letter writing is a forgotten art almost. People talk about it. And the result of all this has been that there has been a great flattening as far as meaning and importance are concerned. In the life of someone who lived before the time of telephones, a letter stood out. It was important because you could tell that it took time, space, and effort to produce it and to bring it to you.

Now, we don’t get letters. We don’t get messages that are of vital importance. We get much more by way of messaging, and all of it has the same value—which is zero. If, in your messaging landscape right now, you were to look at two messages and try to decide which one is more important, which one is something that you will return to later and re-read because it has intrinsic value of its own, you might struggle to find the answer to that question.

One of the things that our electronic messaging landscape has done to us is that it has flattened all our messages into the same level of importance. The meme that a friend sent you is of the same importance as an office email. The office email is of the same importance as a video link someone sent to you. And as a result of all this, we live in a time where nothing is more important or less important than any other thing.

And a side effect of this is that our understanding of what is important is now a free-for-all thing. It is out there, and people are looking to decide for us what is important for us. So a quarrel between two social media influencers becomes the most important thing in our life, despite the fact that if we look at real life, we have other more important things to worry about. But a social media platform powered by an algorithm that feeds on our emotions has managed to become something that can decide for us what is more important.

In this attention-based economy of ours, a politician or a political party spokesperson can stand on a stage, either real or virtual, and tell us that their personal religious agenda is more important than the future of your children or the fact that you don’t have enough money to buy food for your family.

And people fall for it too because we have lost our ability to measure importance. The scale we use to decide what is more important and what is less important is no longer in our hands. And it is out there in the hands of people with power and advertisers and corporations that feed us “important” things using an algorithm.

Just so I'm clear, I’m not really calling for a return to the good old days like an old man. What I am calling for is more control over the mechanisms in our brain that decide what is more important and what is less important. Because if we allow this brave new world of ours to decide what is more important for us, it will tell us. And what it will tell us will probably not be the right answer.

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