Imagine a technology is launched next week which allows anyone with a smartphone to teleport to any mountain top on the planet. Something that is challenging & many aspire to would become available to most of humanity overnight.

You can look to current internet meme culture to know how this would play out.

Mountain tops would suddenly be heaving with people. There would be lethal overcrowding on high-profile summits like Mt Everest & many ill-prepared people would fall or succumb to cold on the more inhospitable peaks. Now that pretty much anyone can go to the top of a mountain, what people do on the mountain tops would rapidly devolve into a competition around what can be done on the top of a mountain - for views & likes, of course. Any genuine mountain climbers are going to be understandably upset that something they’ve invested months or years of their life into is now available to anyone with a phone.

But as we’ve seen, fads tend to pass quickly & most of the population will grow tired of people in their underwear hand standing on the top of mountains while eating cake & will move on to the next shiny thing.

One way to look at this scenario is that something previously out of reach for most people has been made available through the wonders of technology. Very few people make it to the top of high-altitude mountains & summitting generally requires a combination of money, planning, practice, fitness, logistics & time. Making such an aspirational experience available to the masses must be good, right?

But - is the experience standing on top of a mountain, or is the experience climbing the mountain?

I’ve dabbled in mountain climbing around New Zealand & know the divine thrill of standing on summits a third of the height of Everest. If I were given the opportunity to teleport to the top of Everest my initial reaction would be “Hell yeah!”, followed rapidly by a pause for thought.

Reading the title of this post, I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this. We haven’t developed teleportation technology yet, but we have technology that can write or code, make music, pictures or video. People without money, planning, practice or time can use AI to create content or “art” in moments. At the rate generative AI is advancing, we’re not far from a feature-length film made with generative AI.

It’s not uncommon for people to have an “oh” moment right after an AI has turned their prompt into words, images, or sound. Satisfaction of seeing “your creation” turns into a feeling that something isn’t right. People often say they feel like they’ve cheated, but I reckon there’s more going on than that.

For most people, the creative process is more important than the creation. We find ourselves putting pencil to paper, brush to canvas, lenses to scene or fingers to keyboard. Sure, we’d like an appreciative audience, but if we didn’t pour our heart & soul into the creation what’s the point?

The emotion felt while crossing the finish line of a race is built on the effort of the race itself, not the physical crossing of the line. Can I run a marathon? With difficulty. Do I want to get an Uber to the finish & run across it waving my arms? Absolutely not.

Listening to people talk about AI in 2025 gives me some optimism. While the AI slop tsunami is washing over the digital landscape, there are people actively looking for enjoyment, comfort & meaning in human creation. Whether that’s their own creative endeavours or the creations of others.

By not taking part in the journey we end up robbing ourselves of the most important part of the entire experience. I don’t want to get too hyperbolic, but our journeys are an important part of our humanity. We’re shaped by our experiences, endeavours, failures & successes. Do we want to hand part of our humanity over to a machine? I certainly don’t.

So get out, create something. Don’t worry if it’s bad, don’t worry if you don’t finish it, don’t worry if no one sees it. It may be utterly brilliant.

It’s the journey that counts.