A World Full of Pretty Things That Have No Meaning
The dystopian future of work and art.
I never understood why some folks follow beautiful people on social media.
I'm not talking about OnlyFans or Fansly models where there's a clear financial transaction, or people who do interesting things and just happen to be attractive.
I mean those accounts where about 90% of their content consists simply of appealing videos or photos of themselves without any apparent attempt to sell products or services.
Unless you work in the beauty industry, I don’t see any real reason to follow them or continuously consume their content. In fact, I don’t see any reason to follow them at all, even for personal improvement, because they don’t even do makeup tutorials or creative fashion!
Yet, it’s easy to find accounts like the above that get close to a million followers just because they’re pretty. Why? What’s the meaning behind it?
Yesterday, I finally understood.
Majority of people are satisfied with seeing and consuming pretty things. Even if it is meaningless beauty.
Last week, OpenAI announced that ChatGPT can now generate images. They originally released it for everyone’s use, including free users. But after it proved to be “more popular than we expected,” Sam Altman decided to make it exclusive to paying members.
Still, within days, people flooded social media with AI-generated images in the style of Studio Ghibli. Family photos, selfies, pets, memes: all transformed to resemble scenes from films like "My Neighbor Totoro" or "Spirited Away."
Meanwhile, Hayao Miyazaki, one of the creators of Studio Ghibli, has previously called AI-generated art "an insult to life itself."
The dystopian future of work and art
Real beauty, the kind you experience watching a Ghibli film or reading a great novel, comes with meaning. This meaning often exists beyond words. Sometimes, we feel it more than we can explain it.
A real Ghibli film carries Miyazaki's worldview, his environmental concerns, his attention to human emotion. The AI-generated images borrow the visual style but leave behind everything that makes the style matter.
People who only engage with the surface appearance might not notice what's missing. If you've never cared about why a Ghibli film looks the way it does, you might be perfectly content with the AI imitation. But for those who look deeper, for those who value meaning, the difference is obvious and important.
And yet…
A few days ago, I read this disheartening article by tenured professor Hilarius Bookbinder about what average college students are like today.
“Most of our students are functionally illiterate… Their writing skills are at the 8th-grade level. Spelling is atrocious, grammar is random, and the correct use of apostrophes is cause for celebration.”
Worst of all, they’re addicted to their phones.
“When I go work out at the Campus Rec Center, easily half of the students there are just sitting on the machines scrolling on their phones. I was talking with a retired faculty member at the Rec this morning who works out all the time. He said he has done six sets waiting for a student to put down their phone and get off the machine he wanted. The students can’t get off their phones for an hour to do a voluntary activity they chose for fun. Sometimes I’m amazed they ever leave their goon caves at all.”
I remember the conversation I had with my younger brother, who was born in 2007. He’s turning 18 this year. And while he was cleaning my apartment (in return, I was buying him running equipment), we got to talking about what his classmates’ parents did for a living. He said he mostly didn’t know, and that he doubts his own classmates even know.
“It’s not really a topic we talk about in school,“ he said.
“But haven’t you tried doing sleepovers at their place? For projects and stuff? So you’d have seen what their homes and parents are like?”
He shook his head. I was shocked.
"You've never had a group project that required so much work you didn't have a choice but to work on it all day and night," I insisted, "that you end up sleeping at one of your groupmates' houses?"
“You gotta understand, kuya,” he replied. “Kids these days only want to do the bare minimum.”
I said I understood.
Even during my student days, unless I was lucky, I had come to expect only 20-30% of group members to actually get shit done. The rest were dead weight who wanted to do the bare minimum. Still, I asked him to elaborate. He recalled their recent filmmaking project, where his classmates wanted to stick to a plot that didn’t require much shooting time and effort. No one bothered to read any of the class’s reading materials. Everyone had their own scheduling conflict.
One groupmate would say they’re only available for an hour or two. Another would say they have something to do in the afternoon, so they can’t do afternoons. Someone else would say they can’t do mornings.
“Peoples’ interests just don’t align, and they don’t care,” he concluded.
It’s the “main character energy” that is so popular these days. You can see it in how people obliviously play TikToks on public transport, talk loudly on calls in coffee shops, or move around in public spaces like they’re the only person that matters and everyone else is an NPC.
I agree with Elle Griffin when she said we need more social development over self-development. You don’t see many social development products and services in tech right now. But self-optimization companies are making big bucks. That’s where all the demand is.
This leads us back to how most people naturally appreciate pretty things with no meaning.
Having "main character energy" only makes sense if you've gone through significant character development. Think reading (or listening to) insightful books, meaningful living, emotional and intellectual growth earned over major life challenges. But people today are skipping that crucial step. They feel entitled to be the main character without doing the work.
This creates a feedback loop.
People who haven't developed depth idolize and follow others who lack depth but look good. Beauty without meaning becomes the standard everyone chases. So I wouldn’t be surprised if, ten or twenty years from now, most people actually prefer AI art and literature over human-made works.
Today's kids who spend their lives doom-scrolling and being satisfied with AI-generated Ghibli images will grow up to be the adults who dictate cultural taste. They'll become the audience, the consumers, and eventually the creators who shape our art and culture.
This is deeply troubling news for writers and creators who care about meaning.
When your audience has been trained to value quick hits over sustained engagement, how will meaningful work find its place? We can’t all be rich-born artists who create art almost exclusively for other rich artists and consumers (Yes, I’m looking at you, high-brow literature and cinema).
I can almost imagine it. A world where genuine human art can only be made by those born or equipped with substantial resources.
By that point, the price of human art will be determined exclusively by its clout, not by its quality or material worth. (Remember that JPG file that sold for $69 million in exchange for a digital "ownership certificate"?) It will be a world where only tech moguls who built their wealth with AI can buy “real art.”
For the rest of us mortals, we'll need to settle for highly-advanced and sophisticated AI slop, which is all we can afford after spending 16 hours working three jobs because one isn't enough to buy groceries anymore. By the time we're done, and after two to three hours of commute (because despite AI, bosses will still uphold return-to-office mandates unless they automate your job too), we're all too exhausted and numbed to do anything but get a few hits of dopamine from doom scrolling.
So, what now?
I am honestly struggling with the conclusion of this piece. With such a bleak outlook, what can we do? I want to focus on what we can do. Personally.
And what to do when faced with questions that have no clear answers?
When Google doesn’t know AI does. Here’s what Anthropic’s Claude said:
"The challenge isn't that meaning is disappearing, but that we must be more intentional about creating and preserving it.
While technology and cultural shifts may favor surface-level engagement, meaningful connection has always required effort. Build small communities that value depth, create work that prioritizes substance over reach, and remember that throughout history, periods of shallow consumption have often preceded cultural renaissance. The most radical act might simply be choosing to engage deeply in a world designed for skimming."
This sounds nice, but I’m going to disagree.
Because what the fuck do you know, Claude? Have you read the blue-collar novel Post Office by Charles Bukowski? You probably have, haven’t you? How did you access it? From Libgen, like I did? (Because my local book store only contains Sarah J. Maas and other romantasy).
The truth is, most people can’t “engage deeply” when they’re under immense pressure to be more productive “because you can use AI!” All while creating their art and marketing it in an increasingly competitive space.
I don’t have an answer. But Ted Hope said something that I, as an artist, deeply agree with:
“It shouldn’t matter that our good actions are meaningless beyond the few souls they encompass…
This thing that we do, even just the trying of doing, it is enough. It is a miracle and a thing of beauty. It is fulfilling… I will keep on loving what I do, even if they chip chip chip away at it. My devotion is my greatest art. It is the commitment of a lifetime.”
I’ll continue to make money. I’ll continue to create my art. That’s what I’ll do.
How about you?
Tempting to share this with my college student and teen. I think the fear is also that creativity is being taken away as a career possibility. It was hard enough already. Yet, here we are writing anyway!
Bleak, but with a profound and deep beauty in its own way.