The Spy in the Sandwich

Sunday, December 29, 2024

7:00 AM | A New World

Something caught my eye on Facebook a few weeks ago—it was not a meme but a snippet of story about a therapist telling some patient some hard truth about living in the now: “The reason you feel ‘behind’ isn’t because you have failed at timing. It’s because you’re measuring your life against a timeline that was written for a world that doesn’t exist anymore. Your parents’ milestones were mapped for an economy that died, a housing market that vanished, and relationships that didn’t have to survive social media. You’re not behind, you’re navigating a new way through.”

I bumped into this on social media because the playwright Dustin Celestino had added a rejoinder to the above: “The same goes for most industries, these days,” wrote Dustin. “We’re ‘navigating a new way through.’ We’re trying to be artists in a world where AI can generate art at speeds we can’t compete with. We’re trying to start businesses in a world where some of the most successful companies don’t actually have any products of their own—Grab, Food Panda, Angkas. We’re trying to make films for an audience with a wide selection of streaming platforms, with hundreds of foreign movies they can watch—on demand—from the comfort of their living room. No one knows the ‘right way’ to do anything. There is no ‘tried and tested strategy’ anymore. It’s a scary, but exciting time. Today, we are all pioneers.”

Pioneers navigating a new way through.

The thought lingered, reverberated in my mind long after I logged out from Facebook and went about the task of facing Christmas and the New Year. I realized that this feeling about navigating a new world wasn’t just a personal thing; it was universal, a veritable anthem of people grappling with a shifting reality, the rules of which we never wrote in the first place but are undeniably here now, and cannot be ignored. The milestones we’re been told to chase— the stable job, the house by 30—feel like ghosts from another time, haunting us as we build lives in a landscape that have utterly transformed. What gets me though are the changes in this vein we have now come to face as artists. Artists today are charting paths through unfamiliar terrain where the old maps have been rendered useless. The ways of creating things—of writing, of painting, of making music—are being vastly rewritten. I look back on the path I undertook to become a published author only two decades ago, and it galls me to realize that what was once assured is no longer quite viable. And when I do publish, do people still even read? From recent, pandemic-era statistics, I’ve learned a hard truth: more than 90% of tenth graders in the Philippines cannot read, or at least read properly. What is the future?

Do I stop writing then, or trying to get published? But I have been writing for so long I know that this has become a vital part of who I am, how I define myself. Where do I stand in these seismic changes? Like Dustin, I once thought that the creation of art was sacred labor, rooted in painstaking hours honing craft. Today, AI can churn out a painting, a poem, or a musical score in seconds. And while there is a certain soullessness to these creations—a lack of the human heart, a lack of trembling hands shaping clay, a lack of beautiful uncertainty choosing the right word—it still forces us to ask: what now? What does it mean to create in a world where machines can mimic us so effortlessly?

I don’t really know the answer. There are days when I think that perhaps it’s no longer about competing with AI, but redefining art’s purpose. Perhaps it’s about returning to art as communion—a connection that no algorithm can replicate. But what does that even mean?

Dustin mentioned the world of business in these changing times. The rules have changed here, too, and not subtly. Some of the most successful companies of our time don’t actually make anything tangible. Grab and Uber don’t own cars; Food Panda doesn’t own restaurants; Angkas doesn’t own motorbikes; AirBnB doesn’t own hotels. Looking closely into what they do, we realize they thrive on connection, on being the middleman in a transactional world. For would-be entrepreneurs, this begs a reevaluation of ambition. Should we make something, or simply make something happen? And if the latter, does it cheapen the enterprise—or does it speak to an evolving ingenuity?

Dustin is a playwright but he is also a filmmaker, and has helmed several films, including Utopia in 2019 and Ang Duyan ng Magiting in 2023 [before turning to VivaMax to produce such flicks as Cheaters, Nurse Abi, and Pilya]. Which is why he mentioned film in his addendum. Once, a filmmaker’s primary hurdle used to be getting audiences to theaters. Today, the new challenge is cutting through a sea of endless content—to lure viewers away from Netflix’s treasure trove of international films or the irresistible call of YouTube’s algorithm. The tools to create films have become democratized, yes, but so has the competition for attention. How do you make something that stands out, that matters, in a world where stories are abundant and attention is finite? And so we stumble through, trying to figure out a “right way” when no such path exists. The old strategies—go to school, get the degree, stick to the formula—feel like relics from another era, artifacts buried under the rubble of rapid technological advancement and global shifts.

But there is beauty in this chaos. There is freedom in being unmoored from the past. Pioneering—the very act of navigating—is a declaration of hope, a rebellion against inertia. The fear is real, yes. But so is the excitement. To be here, now, in this liminal space between what was and what will be, is to participate in an unfolding experiment: what does it mean to live, to create, to love, in this brave new world?

We are all of us, pioneers in this new world. And yes, there will be missteps, failures, moments of crushing self-doubt. But I hope there will also be discoveries—the thrill of finding a new path, the satisfaction of creating something that didn’t exist before, the forging of connections in the shared experience of figuring it out as we go. The milestones we inherited are no longer our burdens to bear, but we are free to redefine them, to craft lives and careers that speak to the world as it is—messy, interconnected, uncharted.

And so I—we—navigate, all of us pioneers of a present that is still inventing itself.