What’s the Point of Practicing an Artform?

We’re building rockets to Mars, training AIs that write code better than most programmers, engineering robots that may soon do our dishes, drive our cars, and perhaps even tuck our children into bed. We dream of a future where no one starves, where disease is a historical footnote, and where human consciousness hops from planet to planet like a cosmic frog on lily pads.

But let me ask the uncomfortable question no one in the labs likes to ask out loud:

What is the point of surviving—if we forget how to be alive?

Elon Musk once said he wants to make humanity multiplanetary so that consciousness can continue even if Earth eventually fails us. Fair enough.

Consciousness is precious. But consciousness without feeling, without awe, without heartbreak, without the inexplicable urge to paint a sunset or cry at a violin solo… is that still human consciousness? Or is it just computation wearing a meat suit?

We already see the early warning signs. People who can code in twelve languages but have never been moved to tears by anything that wasn’t a stock ticker. Architects who design flawless smart cities that feel colder than the concrete they’re made of. A generation that can generate a perfect Rembrandt in ten seconds with AI and therefore never learns what it actually feels like to hold a brush to canvas and fail for ten thousand hours.

Science and technology give us reach. Art gives us reason.

The Hidden Payoff of “Useless” Things

The universe makes a brilliant case for pure science: we went to the moon “because it was hard,” but we came back with memory foam, better solar panels, water purification systems, and a thousand other spin-offs we never could have planned. The pursuit of something seemingly useless often births the exact tools we later declare essential.

The same is true of art, only the dividends are subtler and therefore easier to dismiss in a spreadsheet.

When a dancer spends ten years learning to balance on the ball of one foot, she is not just building muscle memory. She is training a human body to express what words cannot. And in that decade of falling and getting up again, she also invents new materials for pointe shoes, new physical-therapy protocols, new motion-capture techniques that later make video-game characters move like actual people, and surgical methods for rebuilding shattered ankles.

When a novelist spends five years alone in a room wrestling a story out of her guts, she is not just entertaining future readers. She is mapping the contours of grief, love, betrayal, hope—creating an emotional atlas that therapists, policymakers, friends, and lovers will later use (often without realising it) to navigate their own lives.

When a sixteen-year-old kid in a garage records a lo-fi song about heartbreak on a cracked iPhone, he is not just making noise. He is teaching an entire generation a new harmonic language that twenty years later becomes the soundtrack for humanity’s first steps on Mars, because someone needed music that finally matched what it feels like to look back at a blue dot from a million miles away.

The spin-offs of art are not always tangible, but they are never trivial. They are the difference between surviving and thriving. Between existing and mattering.

The Thing Robots Will Never Steal

AI can now paint like Van Gogh, compose like Bach, write like Márquez. Give it ten more years and the technical skill gap will be indistinguishable from zero.

But AI cannot tell me what it felt like when its father died. It cannot decide to blow three months’ rent on a plane ticket to sit in a jazz club in New Orleans because it heard one trumpet solo that made the hair on its arms stand up. It cannot fall so deeply in love with a flawed human being that it writes a symphony anyway, knowing the object of its affection will never hear it.

That irrational, inefficient, embarrassingly human stuff? That is the payload.

We are not preserving consciousness merely to keep the lights on inside the skull. We are preserving it so there is still someone around to notice that the lights are beautiful.

A Modest Proposal

Keep building the rockets. Keep training the AIs. Keep pushing mathematics into realms most of us will never understand.

But for the love of whatever you hold sacred, do not outsource your humanity while you’re at it.

Pick up the guitar that’s been gathering dust since college. Go watch a play in a half-empty theatre with terrible acoustics. Sit in a museum and stare at a painting until you cry for reasons you can’t explain. Dance badly. Write poetry no one will read. Sing in the shower like the hot water will never run out.

Do it on purpose. Do it wastefully. Do it because it will never earn you a dollar or extend your life by a single day.

Do it because one day we will live on Mars, or in floating cities, or inside perfect virtual utopias where no one ever has to work again.

And when that day comes, someone will still need to stand on a red dune under an alien sky and whisper:

“Holy shit. Look what we did. Look what we felt on the way here.”

That whisper is the entire point.

The rest is just infrastructure.

So practice your useless, beautiful, stubborn artform. The species you save may be your own soul.