Listen, my friends. Every act of communication is a small act of risk.
When you speak, you open a window into yourself.
When you smile, you let the world see what warms you.
When you weep, you let the world see what wounds you.
Even the way you walk, the way you move your hands — these betray the inner self you work so hard to guard.
Every word, every gesture, says: This is who I am. This is what I desire. This is what I cannot stand.
We have not always been quick to reveal ourselves. Long ago, those who learned to guard their hearts survived more than those who bared them too freely. Through blood and through story, we inherited their caution.
Over time, we became clever in hiding behind masks.
And one of our most beautiful masks is style.
Style is how we dress our thoughts, our songs, our dances.
For many, it has become the same thing as identity.
Artists swear their style is their soul.
Musicians repeat the same chords because the crowd cheers for them.
Film halls are filled with sequels because the familiar feels safe.
We mistake the wrapping for the gift itself.
But I have seen something coming that will test us.
This week alone, I have lived it.
I spent days shaping a tool — https://cinemaplot.com — so filmmakers can write scripts together, and even cast their actors right from the page. With the help of Claude 4 Sonnet, I built more than ten thousand lines of code without first carrying most of that knowledge in my own head.
And yet, the work that drained me most was not the code.
It was editing a client’s three-minute Ratha Yatra festival video — sitting for hours, staring at nearly identical shots, struggling to decide which moment’s light, which subtle movement, would speak best.
One task felt like summoning a mountain with little effort. The other felt like lifting a feather made of iron.
This is the world that is coming.
Machines will make style cheap. They will write, paint, compose, and build in a thousand styles with ease. The performance of style — the thing many of us thought made us valuable — will no longer be rare.
And when style is cheap, only essence will remain as the true measure.
This is not the first time we have faced such a shift.
When the printing press arrived, it took what was once a holy man’s mystery — the reading of scripture — and placed it in the hands of anyone who could read. The preacher’s lofty role was shaken, even contested. New movements, like the Lutherans, rose from this new freedom.
Now, the same is about to happen to the knowledge-keepers of our time.
Already, monks, prophets, healers, athletes, and other spiritual practitioners are seen as mysterious because they have mastered a depth that is not proportional to the number of books they’ve read. Their power does not come from acquiring knowledge, but from embodying something no scroll, no sermon, no search engine can fully give.
When AI makes the acquiring of knowledge as simple as breathing, more of us will walk that path. We will turn to pursuits that cannot be copied so easily:
To meditation, where the battlefield is the mind.
To sport, where the proof is in the body.
To journeys of the spirit, even through mind-altering paths, where endurance and surrender become the true tests.
These will become the new measures among humans — not how much we know, but how deeply we can live.
So I warn you: begin now.
Go beyond the mask of style. Seek the ground beneath the roots of your craft.
For the time is coming when the world will ask of you not How do you say it? but What is the soul from which it is said?