Writing Should Hurt

On our relationship to pain and creativity

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If it’s true no one reads anymore, you’d think there’d be fewer writers. But there are a lot of them. Hundreds of articles about what it means to be a writer are published every day. How to do it. How not to do it. Meanwhile, I’m told, our society is slouching toward illiteracy. Every week a new study reports that a room of Harvard students was shown “Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was white as snow” and couldn’t interpret it, believing it to be Olde English and speculating that it’s about depression.

Soon, writers will outnumber readers 1,000 to 1. You may call this absurd. You may despair. But it’s progress. Since the dawn of technology, we’ve been picking at the locks, trying to free Being from the shackles of Doing. We’re on the cusp of a major breakthrough. Today, you don’t have to read to be a writer. Soon, you won’t have to write to be a writer either. Our utopia will have no readers at all. Terms like writer and artist will be freely elected opt-in demographics. Not something you do, but something you are.

The belief that you shouldn’t have to do anything to be something isn’t exclusive to one political ideology. Outside of a dwindling population of cranks who were probably already struggling with the basics of email, the idea enjoys broad consensus. The progressive set thinks work is a capitalist conspiracy. You don’t have to look hard to find arguments like “expecting writers to read is ableist.” Meanwhile, the Silicon Valley types are using SeedDance to conjure forth scenes of breasty anime girls with pink hair wielding samurai swords and boobily mowing down hordes of robo-soldiers. This visual appears to be the one idea they have, and they are passionate about it. You might think such enterprising individuals would call themselves “prompt engineers,” something cold and technical, but they don’t. They demand to be called artists. Uniting the camps is an entitlement to validation. They want moral approval for what they were going to do anyway, and they want dignity, in the form of the mantle.

Intuiting that we are about to become defunct, we, the remaining few who take the craft seriously, have closed ranks and grimly concluded that we have no choice. We have to use it. The secret weapon artists have always wielded in dire situations. We pound the alarm, shatter the glass labeled EMERGENCY, and remove it from its case: Impotent Critique. Your video is shit. Your article is shit. You are shit you are poop you are feces you are excrement and you should be embarrassed and it should be legal to flush you and banish you from our sight.

And so on. And so forth. We retreat into superiority, cling to the cold comfort of “better.” I am better, better, better. This doesn’t seem to be accomplishing much. Nothing we say is more effective than letting these people share their own work. It’s the equivalent of someone showing you ejaculate in their hand and proudly telling you it’s their baby, and that they’ve named it Timothy. But how long will our balms be effective? Of course it’s great that the output is terrible and easily identifiable, and it remains wonderful news that it’s “bad for the environment.” Imagine if it was somehow good for the environment! Count your lucky stars while you can still see them. Through the smog. Or whatever the fuck.

This might not always be the case. The machines are getting better all the time. Only yesterday, the height of technological achievement was a blurry image that, if you squinted, looked like something. The digital version of seeing the Virgin Mary in your toast. Today’s AI can put The Last Supper on toast, legibly. I’m just saying there’s an evolution there. And by sharing our work on the internet, we feed the borg. Virtuosic anti-AI prose gets incorporated into the AI. We can’t hurt its feelings. We can only give it presents. As parents know, this is a recipe for spoiled, ungrateful children. We do have one thing we can’t give it: discomfort.

Our problem, our big problem, is our relationship to comfort. It predates LLMs. We are powerless before anything that promises to reduce effort. We hate effort. We think effort is a barrier between us and being able to be: a writer, an artist, a creative. Effort is uncomfortable, and discomfort is the devil. “I’m uncomfortable” ends the conversation.

But effort is creation. There’s no creation without it. I think writing should hurt. If it doesn’t hurt, you probably aren’t writing.

Let’s define terms. What is pain? Evidence of aliveness. Information. Pain is the most urgent form information can take. I am, says the ache, the burn, the bleeding cut. Pain verifies connection. What doesn’t hurt, we are disconnected from. If you pressed the bruise on my leg, I would grit my teeth. If you hurt my mother, I would hurt. My arm, cut off from circulation, becomes rubber. Stab it, and I’d feel nothing. Pain tells us something is happening.

What is discomfort? A thwarted will. An unmet I want. It often leads to pain. Response to discomfort is everything. If you do something with it, you’re probably a creator. If you demand to have it removed, you’re probably a customer. Discomfort is anathema to the customer. A customer seeking discomfort is a pervert seeking pleasure. The line between creator and customer has blurred as artists let social media further encroach into their lives. They’re becoming indistinguishable.

The strongest argument against generative AI is also the least coherent: it has no soul. It’s the woo-woo argument. But what’s the thing we can do that AI can’t? Hurt. AI can send writing into the world and feel nothing about how it’s received. My writing is mine. I’m connected to it. My nerve endings are here. I labored over choices. I wondered. I guessed. I changed. I felt bad, then good, then bad again.

Hurt.

You might be thinking that I’m advocating for suffering. To be fair, I am a lapsed Catholic. Suspicion is warranted. But suffering isn’t the same thing as pain, which isn’t the same thing as discomfort. Suffering is persistent, inescapable pain. When comfort is prized over everything else, suffering becomes a totem. We all know on some level that pain affirms being. When someone wants to be perceived as authentic, they reach for their suffering. My pro-discomfort argument is anti-suffering. The valorization of suffering is a byproduct of our misaligned relationship to pain.

I’m not telling you to flagellate yourself. I’m not saying writing should always feel bad. Writing sometimes feels wonderful. Sometimes it feels like a mistake. It feels scary and like a waste of time and like the best part of my day. Writing is the biggest thing in my life, and life is a process. Life is doing. Process involves change. Metabolism. The transmutation of this to that. A fire below the beaker. Pain is the inevitable accomplice to change. We shouldn’t seek out unnecessary pain, but we should cooperate with it. We should work beside and through it, like we do with pleasure.

Pain and pleasure beget each other. The ascetic’s dilemma: he can inflict all the punishment he likes, but over time he begins to feel proud simply for enduring. His wisdom becomes hoarded treasure. He finds pleasure in his piety. That’s the risk of too much. The risk of too little is that we want the ascetic’s benefits, the self-actualization, the mastery, the untetheredness from suffering, without his sacrifice.

How do we do that? One option is to outsource the sacrifice to a machine or a machine-like laborer, preferably one whose face is obscured by a motorcycle helmet or, better yet, altogether invisible. Just leave it at the door, thank you. We like to think technology reduces suffering. Just as often, it displaces and obscures it. It’s a fancy screen. Upgrade to premium and you can obscure suffering without ads. Freedom from suffering, we assume, will liberate the soul, which we suspect is an artist.

Consumerism has always relied on willful self-deception. Individuality, for us, expresses itself through a collage of purchases. In high school I could leave for summer break and come back a different person, because I bought new clothes. That’s what a brand promises. A borrowed essence we can mistake for our own. This self-deception is itself a move to comfort. Comfort is an anesthetic. It is not pleasure. Pain and pleasure both rely on friction. A culture that pursues frictionlessness will find itself pursuing non-humanness.

On tech platforms, we’re all customers. The platform has a responsibility for our comfort. Ironic, considering how unpleasant these platforms feel, but the dynamic remains. There’s a help desk. We’re engaging with a service. No wonder people feel comfortable (ha) engaging with art as if it’s a product, dressing up a desire for customization as critique. To be fair, the art is becoming more product-like. People feel entitled to an experience. If they want to experience “being a writer,” well, who can stop them? These dynamics predate generative AI.

In my book, though, these people will never be writers. You may accuse me of gatekeeping. Of snobbery. But I disagree. Anyone who agonizes over a word choice is a writer, even if they never share the sentence, because authentic identity, and authentic creation, lives inside that agony. Inside that agony, “voice” lies buried. It’s the dark jagged cave that every great writer has had to enter in blind pursuit of themselves.

Those same greats, the ones who brought back something unique and valuable, are the ones generative AI is trained on. You can ask a machine to sound like them, to bring your idea to life in someone else’s voice. Sure. But don’t fool yourself. You aren’t writing. You’re shopping.

Writing, like life, is in the doing. In the hurting. As for being, I have theories. I’m starting to question whether the soul is a deep interior element of authenticity waiting to be freed, or something more collaborative. What if the soul isn’t a thing? What if it’s an act, seeking expression in our thoughts, our decisions, in how we move through the world?

I don’t know. Not knowing is uncomfortable.

What I do know is that AI can’t bruise or ache and that it has no mother. It can’t send an anxious “hey?” text to a man it suspects has ghosted him and it can’t break down in tears in a CVS while listening to “Landslide” and it can’t embarrass itself by sharing too much and it can’t pick up stray lines of dialogue from strangers nearby. It can’t say “take care” knowing it’s the last time it will ever see someone. It can’t hurt. You can.

Pinch yourself, and rejoice.