I think I'm losing my creativity. Not dramatically, not all at once. Slowly, the way you lose a language you stop speaking.
I noticed it one evening. I'd finished work on time, had dinner, and our little one was in bed. I finally had some time to myself, so I sat down to continue the novel I started ages ago. But my mind was blank. Nothing.
And that's fine. Blank pages happen. What bothered me was my reaction. Instead of sitting with that blinking cursor and patiently waiting for a thought to arrive, I opened Claude. I was instinctively looking to it for a starting point.
I didn't even notice I'd done it until the prompt box was already open.
Twenty years of making things
My entire career — more than twenty years now — I've been doing something creative. Started designing MySpace layouts, then websites, then later finding creative solutions for new and complex problems, and these days building user interfaces that deliver top customer experience. That's the work I'm proud of. The feeling of coming up with something out of nothing. Spending time thinking, exploring, searching to create something beautiful.
I don't get that feeling anymore.
What I have instead is a very refined skill for choosing. Choosing the right tool, the right platform, the right template. I know how to compose the question so the reply I get back is usable. I can reason properly through different options and share my opinion. But that picking and choosing has become the entire job.
Not that it's worth nothing. Knowing what works for your customer, understanding why a UI pattern might be bad user experience, seeing how a piece of copy doesn't quite hit the tone — that's real work.
But it's not creativity.
Ranking instead of choosing
It's just reacting to work that someone — or something — else already did. And the more I lean on it, the more I need those options sitting in front of me before I can move. Hand me three directions and I'll weigh them and tell you which is best, with reasons. But that's an opinion. A recommendation. Not a choice I actually made. Somewhere along the way I stopped boldly picking one and started quietly ranking what I was handed.
I've become someone who's good at selecting a path but really bad at walking it.
It's not just work
The lack of creativity is visible everywhere in my life. At work, I'm working with AI a lot — to the point that I rely on it.
But even at home: I don't experiment with cooking anymore or improvise based on what I'd already tried; instead I just follow recipes. If I want to go on a trip, I look at what others did rather than exploring myself. I ask AI chats the tiniest household questions, like how to connect a washing machine, just because I'm not sure I still remember all the steps.
My tolerance for not-knowing has collapsed. The gap between "I don't know" and "let me look it up" used to have space in it. That space was where the creative part happened.
That's not there anymore.
Treating it like a creative block
I want to get it back. And the best way to fix this is to treat it as a really large creative block.
Changing my environment more often, trying new things, touching grass — and also just staring at blank pages. I'm trying to do these more intentionally now.
For example, I've stopped listening to my own curated playlists and instead just listen to whatever's on the radio. I'm trying to do more of these.
And hope to find my creativity back.