The Schadenfreude* Economy: Why Some People Root for Creative Obsolescence

There's a particular breed of social media prophet I've been noticing lately. They lurk in the comments sections of articles about AI, waiting to pounce with their hot takes about the creative apocalypse. "Designers are toast!" they proclaim. "Copywriters? Dead in the water!" They practically vibrate with excitement as they type these predictions, as if they're announcing the scores at a particularly satisfying sporting event.

I'm a copywriter, and I'll admit it: this whole phenomenon makes my skin crawl.

It's not the AI part that bothers me. Technology evolves. Industries adapt. Creative tools have always changed, from the printing press to Photoshop to whatever comes next. That's just the natural order of things, and frankly, some of these AI tools are genuinely impressive and useful.

No, what gets under my skin is the gleeful schadenfreude of these self-appointed futurists. The way they seem to relish the idea of creative professionals being swept aside. The barely contained excitement in their voices when they talk about entire industries becoming obsolete overnight.

The Sport of Creative Destruction

These folks treat the potential displacement of creative professionals like it's March Madness. They've got their brackets filled out: First round, photographers get knocked out by Midjourney. Second round, copywriters fall to ChatGPT. The championship? Some AI overlord that can direct Super Bowl commercials while simultaneously designing the next iPhone.

But here's what these armchair analysts fundamentally misunderstand: creativity isn't just pushing buttons. It's not a mechanical process where you input "make good ad" and output comes a campaign that moves hearts and minds and, yes, products off shelves.

Real creativity is messy. It's human. It's the copywriter who spends three hours agonizing over whether "discover" or "explore" better captures the emotional journey they're trying to create. It's the designer who throws out seventeen concepts because none of them feel right for that particular client's particular problem. It's the filmmaker who knows that the magic isn't just in the technical execution, but in understanding what makes people laugh, cry, or reach for their wallets.

The Button-Pushers Never Get It

The "creatives are doomed" crowd reveals something telling about themselves with every gleeful prediction. They see the work we do as purely mechanical: a series of inputs and outputs, templates and formulas. In their minds, a copywriter is just someone who arranges words according to some predetermined pattern. A designer is just someone who makes things look pretty according to established rules.

This reductive view says more about their own relationship with creativity than it does about the actual future of our industries. These are often the same people who look at a piece of great advertising and think, "How hard could that be?" They're the clients who want you to "make the logo bigger" or "add more synergy." They fundamentally don't understand that great creative work is part art, part psychology, part sociology, and part pure intuition.

The Craft They Can't See

Here's what they miss: the best creative work happens in the spaces between the obvious solutions. It's in the unexpected connections, the cultural insights, the ability to see what others can't. It's knowing when to break the rules you've spent years learning. It's understanding that a successful campaign isn't just about perfect grammar or pixel-perfect layouts. It's about creating something that resonates with real humans living real lives.

Can AI help with this process? Absolutely. I've used AI tools myself, and they can be genuinely useful for brainstorming, research, and handling some of the more mechanical aspects of the work. But thinking that AI will completely replace human creativity is like thinking that a really good calculator will replace mathematicians. The tool might get more sophisticated, but the thinking behind how to use it? That's still ours.

The Joyless Future They're Rooting For

What really bothers me about the "creatives are finished" crowd is the future they seem to want. A world where marketing is entirely algorithmic, where every ad is optimized for engagement but devoid of genuine human insight or emotion. Where brands communicate with us through perfectly efficient but soulless messaging that was generated rather than crafted.

They're essentially rooting for a more boring world. A world where the surprise of great creative work—that moment when you see an ad or design that makes you think or feel something unexpected—gets optimized away in favor of whatever the algorithm says will perform best.

The Real Future

I suspect the reality will be more nuanced than either the doomsayers or the AI evangelists predict. Creative professionals will adapt, as we always have. We'll use these new tools to augment our work, to handle the tedious parts so we can focus on the thinking and feeling and problem-solving that makes the work worthwhile.

The brands that thrive will be the ones that understand the difference between efficiency and effectiveness, between optimization and inspiration. They'll use AI to make their creative teams more powerful, not to replace them entirely.

And the LinkedIn prophets of creative doom? They'll find something new to be gleeful about, probably while the rest of us are busy doing what we've always done: figuring out how to make people care about things they didn't know they wanted.

Because that's the thing about creativity. It's not just about making things. It's about making things matter. And no amount of artificial intelligence can replace the very human ability to understand what matters to other humans.

At least not yet.

_________________________ 

 

* OK, I'll admit it: I've been waiting for an opportunity to use the word "schadenfreude" in a blog post for a while. When I first heard it, I was like a crow finding a shiny object and couldn’t wait to use it. Not just use it, but show it off, like a kid who’s learned a new curse word and is itching to drop it at the dinner table. The way it looks in writing is a bit scary, and I love that ... I also love the way it sounds. And it's one word that can replace many. If you're new to this word and want to add it to your vocabulary, it's the German word for the emotional experience of pleasure or joy one might feel to another’s pain or misfortune. Now you're gonna look for an excuse to employ it, aren't you?

The Great AI Misunderstanding

We've got this whole AI revolution completely backwards.

While Silicon Valley is busy teaching robots to paint masterpieces and compose symphonies, regular humans are drowning in spreadsheets and wondering if they remembered to buy milk. 

Walk into any coffee shop and eavesdrop on conversations. You won't hear people lamenting that AI can't write the next great American novel. You'll hear them complaining about expense reports, scheduling nightmares, and the soul-crushing monotony of administrative tasks that eat up half their day.

Yet here we are, in a world where AI can generate a decent oil painting but still can't reliably book you a dentist appointment without three confirmation emails and a phone call.

The disconnect is staggering.

People want AI to be their personal assistant, not their replacement artist. They want it to handle the boring stuff: the repetitive, time-sucking tasks that keep them from doing what they actually care about. Like spending time with their kids. Or finally writing that screenplay they've been putting off for five years.

But instead, we're in an arms race to see who can build the most creative machine. Meanwhile, Lydia from accounting is still manually entering data from PDFs because nobody thought to solve that problem.

Here's what's really happening: We're automating all the fun stuff and leaving humans with the drudgery. It's like hiring a robot to eat your dessert while you're stuck doing dishes.

For those of us in the word business, this matters.

Because the brands that figure this out first -- the ones that use AI to eliminate friction instead of replacing human creativity -- are going to win. They're going to free up their people to do what people do best: think strategically, connect emotionally, and create genuinely compelling work.

The future isn't about AI that can write like Hemingway. It's about AI that can handle your research, organize your notes, and manage your calendar so you have time to write like you.

Stop trying to replace human creativity. Start amplifying it.

The revolution isn't coming. It's already here. We're just looking in the wrong direction.

Don't Let AI Kill Your Analog Intelligence

Look, I get it. AI is everywhere. It's writing your emails, generating your creative briefs, and probably composing better headlines than most junior copywriters. Hell, maybe it even wrote this sentence. (It didn't, but you had to wonder for a second, didn't you?)

But here's the thing that's been gnawing at me lately: In our rush to embrace artificial intelligence, we're accidentally lobotomizing our analog intelligence. And that's a problem. A big fucking problem.

Ann Handley nailed it when she said: "Analog Intelligence isn't a throwback. It's not nostalgia. Analog is rooted in the physical: It's how we experience something directly, without a screen or algorithm butting in and mediating the moment."

Read that again. Without a screen or algorithm butting in.

When was the last time you experienced something -- really experienced it -- without immediately reaching for your phone to document it, Google it, or ask ChatGPT to explain it? When did you last sit with discomfort long enough to actually think your way through a problem instead of letting some AI tool solve it for you?

We're outsourcing our thinking. And not just the mundane stuff … we're outsourcing the messy, uncomfortable, beautifully human process of figuring things out.

The Death of Productive Struggle

Remember struggling with a creative problem? I mean really struggling. Sitting there, frustrated, cycling through terrible ideas, feeling like your brain was broken. Then suddenly, breakthrough. That moment when the right idea finally clicked, when all the pieces fell into place, when you knew you'd found something real.

AI is stealing that from us. Not maliciously, but efficiently. It's giving us answers before we've even learned to ask better questions. It's solving problems before we've developed the muscles to solve them ourselves.

Your analog intelligence is what happens in the space between the problem and the solution. It's the messy middle where real thinking lives. It's where you develop intuition, where you learn to trust your gut, where you build the creative confidence that no algorithm can replicate.

The Texture of Real Experience

Analog intelligence isn't just about unplugging. It's about texture. It's about the way a pen feels in your hand when you're sketching out an idea. It's about reading the room in a client meeting, picking up on micro-expressions and energy shifts that no video conference can capture. It's about the serendipitous conversation that happens when you're standing in line for coffee instead of ordering through an app.

It's about failure, too. Real, analog failure. The kind where you can't ctrl+z your way out. The kind that teaches you something about resilience, about iteration, about the difference between failing fast and failing smart.

Digital tools give us perfect drafts. Analog intelligence gives us perfect intuition.

The Paradox of Efficiency

Here's what nobody wants to admit: The most efficient way to solve a problem isn't always the best way. Sometimes the scenic route teaches you more than the highway. Sometimes the wrong turn leads to the right insight.

AI is optimized for efficiency. It's trained on existing solutions to give you the most probable next word, the most likely successful outcome. But breakthrough ideas don't come from probability. They come from the improbable connections your analog intelligence makes when it's allowed to wander, to wonder, to waste time.

The best creative work I've ever seen came from people who knew when to ignore the data, when to trust their instincts over the algorithm, when to choose the harder path because it felt more true.

Don't Throw the Baby Out with the Bandwidth

I'm not saying AI is evil. I use it. It's useful. It can be a powerful tool for extending human capability. But it should be extending, not replacing.

Use AI to handle the routine so you can focus on the remarkable. Let it make suggestions on the first draft so you can spend your time making the second that much better. Ask it to organize your thoughts, not do your thinking.

But for God's sake, don't let it mediate every moment of discovery. Don't let it rob you of the productive struggle that builds creative muscle. Don't let it smooth away all the beautiful rough edges that make your work uniquely human.

Exercising Your Analog Intelligence

So how do you keep your analog intelligence sharp in an AI world?

Start small. Take notes by hand sometimes. Walk to think through a problem instead of typing it into a chat window. Have conversations without looking anything up. Sit with not knowing for a while.

Read books -- actual books -- that challenge you. Books that don't give you quick answers or bullet-pointed takeaways. Books that make you think harder, not faster.

Engage with the physical world. Touch things. Make things with your hands. Notice how materials behave, how light changes throughout the day, how people move through space.

Most importantly, defend your right to be inefficient sometimes. To take the long way. To figure things out for yourself, even when there's an AI tool that could do it faster.

Because in the end, your analog intelligence isn't just about being more creative or more human. It's about being more you. The messy, imperfect, beautifully analog you that no algorithm can replicate.

And that's worth preserving.

 _________________________

"Students who use AI tools to complete assignments
tend to do better on homework—but worse on tests.
They’re getting the right answers, but they’re not learning."

Daniel Oppenheimer
Professor of Psychology and Decision Sciences
Carnegie Mellon University

"But our new so-called tools no longer lighten our load.
They do our load for us.
This makes AI no longer a tool,
in fact, but a usurpation."

George Tannenbaum
Copywriter & Blogger

4 Pieces of Unsolicited Advice for Marketing Writers

Just because you didn't ask for it, doesn't mean you don't need to hear it.

1. Thick Skin

Grow some armor. Because one day you’re gonna walk into a meeting and watch your precious idea get ripped apart like a piñata at a six-year-old’s birthday party. That’s the gig.

Everyone at the table’s got to earn their paycheck, so they’ll take a swing: “Wait, wait, I’ve got it.” Which loosely translates to “Your idea sucks.” Get used to it.

Your job? Be ready. Have the brief tattooed on your brain and use it like a shield. Or hell, just have a better idea in your back pocket … that’s how you got good enough to get in the meeting in the first place.

2. Editing

Hack at it. Then hack at it again. Then perform precise surgery. Picture a cranky little bastard in your skull screaming, “Get to the fucking point!” and listen to him.

Every extra word is dead weight. Drop it.

Now read it out loud. If it sounds like something a writer wrote, you’re screwed. If it sounds like something a human said, you’re onto something. 

3. Content Strategy

If someone sidles up and asks you for some “content,” like it’s peanut butter you can just spread on their stale toast, run. Fast. Brands don’t need to be vomiting words into the void 24/7. Nobody’s impressed by a constant drizzle. They remember the thunderclap.

Every time you open your laptop, you’ve got a shot at something that could actually matter. Doesn’t matter if it’s a monster billboard on the highway or a Tweet that barely fits in your palm ... swing like you’re trying to knock it out of the park.

Forget the hamster wheel. Forget the quota. Quality beats quantity every single time.

4. THE Question

Every killer ad starts as an answer to a question. And the only question that matters is: What’s in it for me? Why the hell should I give a damn about your brand?

Here’s the rub: most clients can’t answer that without sounding like a spreadsheet. They’ll drown you in logic, features, bullet points. Bless their left-brain hearts. But people don’t buy logic. They buy the hit. The laugh. The goosebumps. That little electric jolt of feeling something. 

So when you’re grilling a client, stop asking, “What do we want to tell people?” Instead, ask the only thing that counts: “How do we want to make them feel?” Because if it doesn’t move 'em, it won’t move product either.