Eliana Nodari

The Mercy of the Mundane: Why Art Needs the Boring Parts

February 18, 2026

I have a confession to make: I hate the blank page.

I hate the pacing, the staring, the deleting of sentences that go nowhere, and the peculiar, itching anxiety that comes when I know what I want to say but can’t seem to arrange the words to say it.

For years, I viewed this friction as a defect—a "bug" in my operating system.

So, when the current wave of Generative AI arrived, pitching itself as the ultimate cure for writer’s block, I was intrigued. The sales pitch is seductive: Let the AI handle the drudgery. Let the machine do the outlining, the drafting, and the tedious technical work, so you can focus on the "big ideas."

It sounds perfect. It sounds like liberation. But the more I lean on these tools to skip the "boring parts," the more I worry that I’ve misunderstood the nature of creativity entirely.

I’m beginning to suspect that the drudgery isn't a tax we pay to make art; the drudgery is the art.

The Myth of the "Idea Man"

There is a dangerous dualism floating around the tech world today. It suggests that creativity can be neatly sliced into two parts: Ideation (the "soul" or "vision") and Execution (the "grunt work"). The argument goes that as long as we remain the "Directors" of the work, it doesn't matter if an algorithm acts as the "Technician."

But this ignores a fundamental truth about how humans think. In his seminal book The Craftsman, sociologist Richard Sennett argues that "making is thinking." He pushes back against the idea that the mind commands and the hand merely obeys. Instead, he suggests there is a dialogue between the two.

When a painter mixes a color and realizes it’s too muddy, that physical failure forces the brain to pivot. When a writer struggles to fix a clunky sentence, the struggle often reveals that the idea itself is clunky.

If I use an LLM to generate a smooth, perfectly structured paragraph to bridge two ideas, I haven’t just saved twenty minutes of frustration. I have bypassed the very mechanism that forces me to clarify my thoughts. I have skipped the workout. By outsourcing the execution, I am slowly losing the ability to have the idea in the first place.

The Glass Cage of Efficiency

In my previous post, "The Pulse of the Machine," I argued that AI could be a useful "brainstorming partner." I still believe that’s true, but there is a fine line between a partner and a pilot.

Nicholas Carr, in his book The Glass Cage: Automation and Us, explores what happens to human skills when we use "co-pilot" technologies. He looks at airline pilots who, after years of relying on autopilot, lose the "tactile sense" of the aircraft. They can still fly the plane, but they no longer feel the plane.

Carr argues that when we automate the difficult parts of a task, we suffer from "de-skilling." We become passive observers of our own work. This is the hidden cost of the "efficiency" I praised earlier.

If I let an algorithm handle the structure of my essay, or if a visual artist uses Midjourney to skip the sketching phase, we are essentially putting our creativity on autopilot. We get a finished product faster, yes. But the product feels thinner, and our connection to it feels more distant. We are becoming "managers" of art rather than creators of it.

In Defense of Boredom

So, why do we want to skip the work? Because the work is often boring, and modern life has declared a war on boredom.

We live in a culture of constant stimulation. If we are stuck on a creative problem for more than five minutes, we instinctively reach for a phone, a distraction, or now, a prompt box. We treat boredom as a void that needs to be filled.

But the philosopher Byung-Chul Han offers a different perspective. In The Burnout Society, Han distinguishes between "simple boredom" (which is restless) and "deep boredom." He argues that deep boredom is the "peak of mental relaxation" and the birthplace of the creative spirit.

It is only when we tolerate the silence—when we sit with the frustration of the blank page without rushing to fill it with "slop"—that our minds can truly wander. That "stuckness" is where the subconscious gets to work.

If we use AI to instantly fill the void, we kill the deep boredom. We turn the creative process into the "slot machine" I warned about in my last essay. We get the dopamine hit of a result without the necessary gestation period of the struggle.

The Mercy of the Mundane

I don't want to be a Luddite. I use spellcheck; I use Google; I use digital tools. But I am realizing that I need to draw a protective circle around the "mundane" parts of my creative process.

I need the messy first draft. I need the hour spent staring at the wall. I need the frustration of not knowing where the sentence is going.

We are being sold a future where we can all be "creators" without ever having to suffer the indignity of being a beginner. We are promised the destination without the journey. But as any traveler knows, you cannot teleport to the top of the mountain and claim you went for a hike. The view might look the same in the photo, but the feeling—the internal change that happens when you climb—is entirely absent.

Maybe we shouldn't be asking how AI can make us more efficient. Maybe we should be asking why we are in such a rush to finish the only thing that makes us feel alive.

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