I had a weird Wednesday, last week.

I was cleaning out the inbox and came across Jim Ruland’s latest edition of Message from the Underworld, titled, “Praying for what you don’t want: An attempt to stop worrying about AI.”

He talks about getting ready for a reading and showed his process. Our guy literally hand copies words (thousands of words) into a notebook. Crazy teenager style. All-caps. Big white spaces to keep track of where you are when you’re reading it and no longer have teenager eyes.

He tweaked stuff as he went. The process was slow. By every modern means it could be best described as inefficient.

And when it was done, he noticed he felt more connected in that process than in almost anything he’d done in a long time. It triggered this thought in his brain: worrying is praying for what you don’t want.

A few hours later I was doing a recording with Ben Hunt, as part of our new Epsilon Theory: Unplugged series for Panoptica, where a group of us - friends, writers - are sharing a piece, one at a time, one a week, and also taking a beat to discuss the process of creating it.

I’ve talked to Ben before about his behind the scenes process, but I don’t think he’s ever shared much of this publicly. It’s, just being honest here, kind of madness to see it. Also, it’s a lot like Ruland’s speech prep. It felt surreal when it clicked.

Synchronicities. Pretty cool.

Because while we were discussing Ben’s latest note, Contact: AI and the Semantic Dimension, I was feeling the weight of how present he makes himself when he’s writing. With the whole world and all the tools right there too, he crowds it all out to be hunched over a notebook with a pen. It’s a compulsive crowding out of everything except for the pen, the paper, and his art.

Jim’s story was out there blowing in the wind of my inbox. Ben’s was loaded up in my browser. They were in communication with each other yet totally removed, because Jim’s one of my favorite music writers, and Ben’s a mix of markets, history, and games.

Yet here they were talking process. Because both of their worlds are evolving. Fast.

Ben writes each of his essays in stages. First on note cards. Then it goes in the moleskine notebook. Later it goes into the computer, but after that it gets printed out for handwritten corrections. To your average outsider, it looks laborious if not insane, or at least manic.

And so on Saturday morning, as I’m typing this note, Jim and Ben are both rattling around in my head again, and I can’t shake just how big the inefficiency - that isn’t incidental - is, as a theme.

Ownership of ideas, and ownership of stories, is born in slowness.

You don’t optimize for the output. You optimize for the experience. And the experience is yours and yours alone as the creator, until you co-create some shared experience of your art with your audience.

I’m not worried about AI and my art. I don’t think Jim or Ben is either. It’s still too special to take the time to make, and we’re all still too compelled to stop making it.

I have a hunch that if you’re reading this, you feel this way too.

Fear not. No need to pray for what you actually want. Do it.

Ps. Epsilon Theory: Unplugged is off and running over on Panoptica. This is a friend group/email thread that turned into a project, over our collective frustration with “there’s just too much content to keep up.” Brent Donnelly’s note, “I Want It, But I Don’t Like It" about his relationship with his phone is out now, and you can see his notes on notes interview about his process on Epsilon Theory YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.