were you there?
I have always thought of creation and consumption as opposites.
Creation felt meaningful, while consumption felt hollow: it is more satisfying to cook than to order food. More fun to take photos than to scroll through someone else's. I found it weird that I consume so much and produce so little – and I always tried to tip the balance.
But then I encountered a phrase that didn't make sense: "listening as creation." How can consumption also be a creative act?
Mindful consumption
When you listen, you don't receive a finished object. You shape it by engaging with it – layering memories onto melodies, reading meaning into pauses, filling gaps the artist left open. The work becomes partly yours.
The same applies to reading. To viewing. To any engagement with art. The observer participates in the work.
Mindless creation
But working through this, I realized something else. The creation vs consumption axis isn't as important as I thought.
Consumption can be creative. And creation can be empty. You can produce without creating – one-click generation, reposting without thought, churning content with no personal investment.
This matters now more than ever. Soon anyone will be able to generate a song, an image, a story – with a single click.
When high-quality outputs can be produced instantly, the finished object loses its importance. What still feels meaningful is the process behind it – the intention, the constraints, the iterations, the story of how something came to be.
Rick Rubin puts it simply:
"We tend to think of the artist's work as the output. The real work of the artist is a way of being in the world."
People have always cared about how things are made. But AI accelerates the shift. The question "what was made?" becomes less interesting than "how was it made?" and "why?"
There's a more useful distinction than creation vs consumption.
Mindful vs mindless
Not all consumption is equal. Scrolling through feeds is not the same as reading a book. Background music is not deep listening. Passive consumption is to true engagement as hearing is to listening.
And mindless creation mirrors mindless consumption. One produces without creating. The other consumes without engaging.
Thoughtful creation and thoughtful engagement both resist automation. They require attention that cannot be delegated.
Examples for creation:
- Mindful, like writing, curation, journaling, sketching, crafting, cooking from scratch
- Mindless, like prompting (one-shot), reposting
Examples for consumption:
- Mindful, like deep listening, focused reading, slow travel
- Mindless, like algorithmic background music, scrolling
Curation is a favorite example – it blurs the line between consumption and creation. When you assemble a playlist, you're not making the songs – but the arrangement creates meaning that didn't exist in the individual pieces.
The same activity can be mindful or mindless. It's not what you do – it's whether you're present.
Art is making choices
Mindfulness, in this sense, means making choices. Mindlessness means delegating them.
Sci-fi author Ted Chiang puts it this way:
"Art is something that results from making a lot of choices. [...] When you are writing fiction, you are—consciously or unconsciously—making a choice about almost every word you type; [...] a ten-thousand-word short story requires something on the order of ten thousand choices. When you give a generative-A.I. program a prompt, you are making very few choices; if you supply a hundred-word prompt, you have made on the order of a hundred choices. [...] The image might be exquisitely rendered, but the person entering the prompt can't claim credit for that."
By that definition, curation is art — it's a collection of choices: what to include, what to omit, what order, what context.
Were you there?
In a world saturated with generated content, the scarcity shifts. It is no longer skilled output. It is attention.
Deep listening becomes a form of art. Not because it produces anything visible, but because it requires the same thing creation does: presence, attention, the willingness to make choices.
The question isn't "did you create or consume?" It's "were you there?"
