I’ve been thinking a lot about what work is what it means.
Maybe it’s an age-and-stage thing. You reach a point, midlife, maybe later, when the script starts to fray. You realise you’ve been moving forward on tracks laid by others. School feeds you in. Careers are mapped. You’re told to pursue success, security, status.

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But then something shifts. Mortality comes a little closer.
And you start asking:Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedWhy am I still doing this? What was it all for?

And if you're lucky, really lucky like I have been, the answer isn't just about survival. It’s about something deeper. Something closer to the soul.

I made the decision, years ago, to step away from medicine and follow music.
Not because it made sense. But because it called. it was against the odds - I remember my uni mates bemused. The faculty head said something that probably has had a big factor in driving me forward - ‘off you go to join the circus’ - that belittling can be powerful at that stage in life - who knows!!

And somehow, through persistence, madness, grace I’ve been able to make a life from it. Every day of my working life has involved sound, story, composition, listening. I know how rare that is. I know how lucky I am. So I don’t say any of this lightly.[

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But having spent a life doing what I love I’ve also come to realise:
Even that can be distorted.

Because even meaningful work, if framed only in terms of productivity or profit, can lose its essence.
Music becomes content. Creation becomes output.
And suddenly, the thing you once loved becomes a metric to optimise.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published**We don’t just make music.**We become it.Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedWork, real work isn’t just economic, It’s existential, It’s how we live ourselves into the world, A kind of becoming.Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedThis isn’t just poetic it’s grounded in science.

Psychologists Deci & Ryan argue that autonomy, competence, and relatedness are core human needs. Creative work activates all three. It gives us agency. Skill. Connection. And in sociology, Richard Sennett writes about the dignity of craft, of doing something well, not for gain, but because it matters.

That’s the joy.
Not in success.
In presence.

But in our current culture, work gets hijacked.
Stripped for parts.
And now AI is stepping in to take over the rest.[

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It can produce.

**

But can it create?**

Because for us, humans, process is meaning.

We don’t just care about the result.
We care about how it came to be.
And why.

What was lived, felt, lost, discovered along the way.

That’s what anthropologists call thick description, the messy, human, embodied context behind what we do.
It’s what makes a melody matter.
What makes a story real.
What gives work its soul.

And that’s the one thing AI can’t fake.
Not really.
Because it has no wounds. No memory. No longing.

Machines don’t have ** agency.**
Not in the biological sense. Not in the existential sense.

Living beings, even the simplest single-cell organisms, have a reason to act. A compulsion to move, adapt, survive. This is what evolutionary biology calls teleonomy, goal-directed behaviour arising from natural selection, not consciousness. A bacterium swims toward nutrients. A plant grows toward light. A human builds, protects, creates.

Why?
Because to stop is to die.

Agency is rooted in this tension, the drive to maintain internal order in the face of entropy. That cellular insistence not to dissolve into a puddle of inert atoms. From there, life stacks meaning on top of motive: identity, memory, family, story, hope.

AI doesn’t have that.

It doesn’t need to survive.
It doesn’t suffer when ignored.
It has no hunger, no mortality, no boundary to protect. No sense of self under threat.

So when it generates music, art, or story, it does so without consequence.
Without cost.
Without risk.

And that’s what gives human creation its weight, its ache, its pulse.
We make because we must.
Because we’re here, briefly, and it matters.

AI can simulate the product.
But it can’t simulate the pressure that made it.

This isn’t a rejection of AI.

It’s a remembering of us.

Because the more we offload the act of making to machines, the more we risk losing something vital. Not just culturally, neurologically.

Creative practice builds cognitive flexibility, resilience, empathy.
Passive consumption, especially of algorithmic content, diminishes attention, memory, and emotional engagement.

So this isn’t just about art.
It’s about staying human.

If creativity is how we metabolise life, how we process the world and our place in it, what happens when we stop doing it for ourselves?[

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Maybe that’s what work really is.

Not a job.
Not a metric.
Not even a calling.

But a way of bearing witness.
To our own experience.
To what matters.
To each other.

A way of saying: I was here. I felt this. I made this for you.

That’s what makes it music.
Not the polish.
Not the profit.
The presence.

If this resonated, share it.

Send it to someone at a crossroads. Or someone who forgot what they once loved.
Leave a comment, tell me what work means to you, now.

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