What is Worth Building
In an age of "unlimited" possibilities
In late 2019 I was a high school senior, naively confident in what the next year would hold. In March of 2020 I woke up to a notification; school was moving online, effective immediately. It took me a moment to process what that meant. That the day before, without knowing it, I had walked out of my school for the last time. Said goodbye to friends without realizing it was goodbye. That ordinary Tuesday turned out to be the beginning of a brave new world. In the fall, I started university, attending classes through a screen. The social clubs and chance encounters that were supposed to define freshman year were simply gone. And then, almost as abruptly as it had all collapsed, the world decided it was over.
Virtual learning was the tip of the iceberg in what was about to be a monumental shift in the way I saw the world. During my sophomore year, a friend introduced me to ChatGPT, immediately changing how I studied and prepared for the future. Grumblings began to appear about the power of this technology and how influential it would be in society. The future quickly turned from unknown to totally unrecognizable. The possibilities were endless, and that was where I struggled most. With no history and no cultural customs, what was there to guide me?
Looking back on the pandemic, I don’t think we realized the extent of what we had lost in the form of life and societal customs. AI promises to do something similar: it promises to replace humans and to outsource the 10x’ing of job productivity, further alienating us from our peers and from purposeful work.
AI dissolves the tradeoffs that once forced us to choose. Tasks become cheap, and any skill can be acquired on demand, breaking down the logic of opportunity cost. Genuine choice has always depended on scarcity: choosing one thing meant surrendering another, and that sacrifice is what gave decisions their weight and meaning. Strip away the cost, and you get an endless, undifferentiated menu of possibilities, each one as weightless as the next: that is its own kind of trap that can be described as slavery to the infinite.
Creativity thrives from the tension between absolute freedom and total constraint. Consider the man in solitary confinement, strapped down, monitored, with nowhere to go and nothing to build toward. Now consider the man who has everything, every resource available, and every option open. Neither one is able to create; the confined man has no room, and the rich man has no reason. The sweet spot has always been the middle: enough constraint to give direction and enough freedom to move within it.
So what does this mean for the question of what’s worth building? Perhaps the question itself has to change. Maybe we stop asking “what can I build?” and start asking something more difficult and human: what would I grieve not having tried?
I don’t have a clean answer. But I think it starts with looking backward before looking forward. The traditions and frameworks our ancestors built were hard-won answers to permanent questions: what is worth doing, what is worth sacrificing, what is worth a life. We were handed a compass and threw it away.
The faster the world moves, the more valuable the compass becomes. Without it, we risk running in a direction totally antithetical to our goals. The ancient lesson of Icarus was never about the danger of flying, but about knowing where the sea ends and the sun begins, and choosing your altitude deliberately. The discipline is to know yourself well enough that when everything is possible, you can still choose what is worth building.
“The sweet spot has always been the middle: enough constraint to give direction and enough freedom to move within it.” Yes!