Across my professional creative career and personal life, I have written the same kinds of words. I have used the same vocabulary. I have absorbed and projected the same frameworks. The question becomes more evident with time and experience.
They all sound alike. Every project now arrives with a story.
A tower. A hotel. A chair, a candle, a painting, a room. All carry one. Heritage. Ritual. Memory. Material. Place.
Written well.
The output is often extraordinary. The talent is real. The craft is real. But the narratives draw from the same dictionary. Intentional. Curated. Mindful. Honest. Layered. Rooted. They reach the same conclusions. They flatten into a single voice that no longer belongs to any designer, architect, or artist. It belongs to the system.
The institutions need this language to publish you. The appreciation needs it to recognize you. The clients expect it to connect with you. So we reach for the familiar words. Originally we may have been biologically engineered to seek tribal approval for survival, now we are socially engineered to gravitate towards collective approval for a different kind of existential reason: the ironic practice of blending in while standing out, echoing the same tone while delivering a different message, scraping surface level while digging deep. An undeniable human trait, contradiction.
A story used to be where humans tested how to live. What a life is worth. What a thing is worth making. What a society is building toward. The narrative was heavy because the question underneath was heavier.
The stories we now attach to our work rarely carry that load. Depth is not a function of time. A true insight can arrive in an instant. The problem is what sits beneath. There is no inspiration with reach. No aspiration pointing anywhere worth pointing. Vocabulary arranged to look like meaning.
Two answers can stand on their own.
I designed it this way because I think it looks good. Nothing more, nothing deeper. This is enough. Work made for beauty alone has a long tradition, and the world is better for it.
I designed it from something real. A question that matters. A philosophy, a history, a hard human truth. The premise is heavy because what sits underneath is substantial. Instant or decade. The substance is there.
The third answer is the one the system rewards. A thin claim, dressed in borrowed vocabulary, pointing at a meaning that is not there. Sometimes it is written after the design is finished, to make the work sound like more than it is. Sometimes it comes first and steers the project, a hollow idea producing output that gestures at significance without holding any. Either direction, same shape. The weight has been described, not carried.
That is what I keep encountering. That is what I have produced.
If the work were not attached to a name, a brand, a location, a budget, what weight would be left? What depth would still be grounding your thinking?
AI changes this. Production is now compressible. Renderings. Captions. Proposals. The hours we spent making are being given back, whether we asked for them or not.
Use the return to produce more hollow narratives, faster, and the problem accelerates. Use it to think, to read, to sit with what is worth sitting with, to draw from something with real reach, and the practice grows heavier. The machine cannot make that on its own. It was trained on the lighter version.
I do not know what the heavier version looks like yet. I am trying to find out.
What would our work look like if every story behind it had to answer for its own weight, or admit it has none?