For the past several months, we’ve been quietly working away on improving The Villager. It took us longer than we would have liked, but life always finds a way to keep us busy.
We are still working on it so we won’t reveal everything just yet, but we wanted to provide some context as to why we are making certain decisions.
Over the next few issues, you will find more context before we fully reveal what we are planning to do.
The first reason why we decided to make changes is because we felt creatively stuck. After working on the magazine for two years and the podcast for one, we kind of fell into a loop of simply going through the motions.
After a long time, we finally understood why we were feeling burnt out: we didn’t have anything creative to do.
We weren’t engaging with our process, coming up with exciting ideas, going through interesting experiments, pushing us to get out of our comfort zone.
We didn’t realize just how important it was to keep up with creativity, to challenge ourselves and the work to discover more about ourselves and how we interact with the world.
Modern times seem to have a way of stripping that creativity and discovery away from you.
Creativity is an essential part of who we are as humans. Our ancestors painted on cave walls not because they had to, but because they needed to communicate something deeper than words. Today, we watch a movie and feel real human emotions transmitted through a screen by people we’ll never meet.
Without creativity, we’d still be grunting at each other in the dark.
And as everyone knows, creativity doesn’t just happen. It needs space to breathe, to think, and to act. But we have grown accustomed to doing the opposite in modern times.
Nowadays, we refuse to be bored.
Every time we need to wait in line, wait for the doctor to see us, or have 10 minutes before our next meeting, we instinctively pick up the phone and zone out.
We refuse to let our brain breathe, to give ourselves time to think. To sit and talk to people next to us, gather ideas, and build mutually beneficial relationships.
I’ve been reading about Leonardo da Vinci lately, and here’s what struck me: his genius didn’t happen in isolation.
Da Vinci created “The Last Supper” while he was part of Duke Ludovico Sforza’s court in Milan. The court wasn’t just about one brilliant artist working alone. It was a community where artists, scientists, musicians, philosophers, and inventors all lived and worked together, sharing ideas, challenging each other, building on what came before.
These courts were like creative ecosystems. Ideas cross-pollinated in ways that never would have happened if everyone had stayed in their separate workshops.
Yet that is what the world feels like right now, each of us in separate workshops we call smartphones.
When the Internet Had Soul
For those of us who were part of the early days of the internet, remember StumbleUpon? You’d click a button and it would take you somewhere completely unexpected on the internet. Maybe a blog about urban beekeeping. Maybe a gallery of photographs taken from inside old grain elevators. Maybe a website dedicated entirely to unusual door knockers from around the world.
It was magical because it was curated by real humans who found something interesting and wanted to share it. People voted on websites not because an algorithm told them to, but because they genuinely thought others should see what they’d discovered.
StumbleUpon started a revolution. For the first time, we could explore the internet like wandering through an endless library where every book had been personally recommended by someone who loved it.
The discovery was the whole point.
Now look where we are.
AI and modern internet algorithms give us exactly what we ask for and nothing more. They analyze every click, every pause, every scroll, and then serve us ads and posts designed specifically for our perceived preferences.
Instagram shows me photos of coffee shops because I liked one coffee photo three months ago. YouTube thinks I want to watch seventeen videos about making sourdough because I searched for one recipe when I was stuck at home with nothing to do.
Where’s the fun in that? Where’s the discovery? Where’s the creativity?
The algorithm doesn’t know that I might be ready to fall in love with jazz even though I’ve only ever listened to rock. It can’t guess that I’d be fascinated by a documentary about urban planning even though my viewing history suggests I only care about cooking shows.
Even worse, AI can now copy other people’s artwork and pretend to be people. We’re drowning in synthetic creativity that looks real but has no soul behind it. No human experience. No genuine emotion. No story of struggle and breakthrough and the messy process of making something from nothing.
But here’s what gives me hope.
My daughter is wearing bell-bottom jeans that look exactly like the ones worn in the 1970s.
Vinyl records are selling better than they have in decades.
Everything in life seems to have a cycle. What becomes old and stale eventually comes back because it turns out to be exactly what we needed all along.
We believe this will happen with creativity too.
Communities that allow that sharing of ideas are going to become more important, not less. A human perspective in creativity is going to become a luxury that people actively seek out. We’re going to crave discovery rather than mere alignment.
We believe it’s time to get more creative, and seek out discovery more.
Because here’s what we learned: in a world where algorithms think they know exactly what we want, the most radical act is to want something we haven’t been programmed to expect.
The most human thing we can do is seek out other humans who are making beautiful things for no other reason than because beauty matters.
And the most important discovery I can make is that I don’t need an algorithm to find wonder.
