# Fast and Slow

> I wrote this essay by hand. It was painful to write, and that's the point.

URL: https://paragraph.com/@nyewarburton.eth/fast-and-slow
Author: Nye
Published: August 30, 2026
Categories: writing, ai, essay, pain, creativity

Nye's Digital Lab is a weekly scribble on creativity in an age of rapid change. 
The following was written with a keyboard and human labor. 
Moving Sidewalks
I can't think of too many use cases for the moving sidewalk.
But airports, especially the big ones, seem to have plenty of them. My wife never gets in elevators, because if it's a chance to move her body, she always takes the stairs!
By the same logic, she never uses moving sidewalks. So, while my two boys and I run to the moving sidewalks to make our connecting flights, my wife always, despite overloaded with bags and shoving Auntie Anne's in her mouth while running, will not take the moving sidewalks.
It's that moment you step off of a moving sidewalk that I am feeling right now.
You are casually standing, your movement and baggage handled for you. Then, at a moment, you are returned to the normal and the SLOW world, where your own effort and power needs to motivate you. It's the feeling that your wife is already 50 yards ahead, running towards your connecting flight, and you need to step it up, and motivate your children who are also complaining that we have to actually run and exert physical effort.
I'm writing this essay, for the first time in at least a year, by hand.

Well, actually not by hand. It's keyboard tapping, but you get the idea. No agentic research, no improvisational sessions with otter.ai, and no claude or gemini to spruce it up and spar with. And it feels slow, and worse, to me... it feels painful. This is my point. I am doing this exercise to confront an awareness that AI is destroying our ability to write and potentially, to think.
As the backlash against AI gains momentum, and I begin to lose faith in the corporations who are shoving it down our throats, I've begun to consider the effects of using it as much as I have. The biggest effect being, it's hard to just sit and write.
If I am losing this ability, being someone who spent decades doing content the old fashioned way, how can a young learner exposed to pervasive algorithmic systems learn to be a creative?
How can they learn to write and think, and struggle with the difficulties of the process?
Because, let's face it, being creative sucks. It hurts. No normal human would subject themselves to this.
Being creative means people think you are wrong all the time. They don't get you. People hate everything you do. With good reason! Your skills are mediocre for a very long time. Mastery is so far away, and realistically, it seems impossible for you to possibly achieve.
And if you are like me, your self doubt and self destruction will come at you again and again over the course of your life. Who wants to do that? Who wants to spend all of your time, alone, with a head full of self doubt?
Of course we want GPT to make the pain go away.

Thinking
Daniel Kahnman, and his partner (the name of which I do not recall -- and won't search the internet or ask AI for), won the nobel prize for the recognition of emotionally driven economics. It should be obvious in retrospect, the market is not rational, because humans are not rational. At the core of this upheaval in economic thought was their concept, and their book, Thinking Fast and Slow, a best seller from a few years back.
Kahnman explains that there are two modes to human thinking. There is System 1 and System 2. Both are necessary, but each require different amounts of mental "energy." System 1 is near instant, what we might attribute to instinct or learned repeated behavior. System 1 might be the mental effort of walking down the street or driving to work on your usual route. However, when real thinking is required, your mind jump-starts System 2.
If you are driving, but you need to cross two lanes of traffic and merge, you suddenly are paying full attention. Your mind is burning energy to light up this second system. Real thought, and real problem solving is the world of System 2.
Since System 2 requires thinking, and real effort, I wonder if it's this System 2 work that is being threatened by our agentic visitors. If I can't spend the mental exertion on critical thought, then I will rely on my instincts from System 1 to get me there, and source my more difficult thinking System 2 efforts to an AI.
This is the terror that holds me to this hand written essay. This is the terror that makes me actually write this one letter at a time. My System 2 is on full tilt this morning.
To what end
Without the ability to sit and write, or read, or draw, or program, or just think...
we lose what it is to be a creative human.
There is no reason for us to lose what it is to be a creative human. I don't care if AI makes us unfathomably productive. It will, but it won't really be us.
As we pick up our pitchforks and our torches and we march on the data centers, and we rebel agains the tech titans who promise to sheppard our humanity while actively looking to monetize it, I bring the fight back to myself.
I sit here in quiet, and I look around the room. I'm racking my brain on how to construct these thoughts. I look out the window at a passing car, and look down to stretch my foot. The thoughts don't come, they are stuck somewhere. And this is my failure and my procrastination. This is because, in my mind, I am not good at any of this.
And now, here comes the anger. The self doubt.
Ah, hello old friends, yes... this is where I need to be.
Yeah, it's been a while since I did this. It's been a while since I'm sitting in the middle of self doubt. It's been a while since I felt that the work that I was writing was mediocre at best. And maybe this is what I should be doing with my writing time. I need to suck at something in public. I need to do this, regardless of what anyone else thinks.
I've been told repeatedly that people enjoy my blog. A point that has always sat with an asterisk for me, because while my ideas are always me, the prose and the execution were augmented with a polish that comes from machines.
So, maybe I should misspell words or struggle with a transition that I can't quite put together. Maybe I should just be here, nakedly visible, stretching my foot and looking out the window for ideas that may or may not come. And deal with the wave after wave of self hatred that battle hardens a creative into a master.
It might be too much for all of us. Or maybe it's what we all should consider doing before we lose all of it.
Thanks for reading.
Make it happen.
Nye Warburton is an artist in Savannah, GA. This essay was written with anxiety and human labor. For more information visit https://nyewarburton.com
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