In the era of artificial intelligence, analog creative practices such as morning pages and the appointment with the artist do not lose their validity: they gain it. As content production becomes automated and generic, what is scarce and valuable becomes the personal voice, lived experience, and own judgment. Julia Cameron's method works like an anchor: it maintains contact with your inner self in an environment that pushes you to externalize everything. It's not nostalgia; It is a strategy to not lose yourself.
The paradox of abundance
When something becomes abundant and cheap, its value falls; what becomes scarce, rises. Generative AI is flooding the world with content: text, images and music that are mass-produced, correct and virtually free. The foreseeable consequence is that this generic content will be worth less and less, precisely because it is abundant. And what will remain scarce—and therefore valuable—will be what the machine cannot replicate: the genuine voice, the personal perspective, the lived story.
This reverses a common intuition. Many fear that AI will make human creativity irrelevant. The opposite is more likely: in an ocean of average content, the authentic human signal becomes more recognizable and more sought after. But to offer it, you first have to have it. And having it requires internal work that no tool does for you.
Why analog becomes strategic
The morning pages and the appointment with the artist seem, at first glance, relics from another era: writing by hand, walking without a cell phone, looking at the world slowly. In a hyperautomated future, these practices stop being nostalgic and become strategic. They are the few spaces where your mind does not receive prefabricated answers and has to generate its own.
Think of it as strength training in a world of lifts. When everything can be done effortlessly, chosen effort becomes the way to maintain capabilities that would otherwise atrophy. The creative muscle works the same: if you delegate all the initial thinking to an AI, you stop knowing how to think for yourself. Analog practices keep that muscle alive.
The method as an anchor, not a wall
Anchoring does not mean rejecting technology or locking yourself in the past. An anchor does not prevent the ship from sailing; It prevents the current from dragging you where you don't want to go. Julia Cameron's method does that: it brings you back to yourself every morning, so that when you later use powerful tools, you do so from a center of your own and not from drifting away.
The anchored person uses AI judiciously: they know what they want to say before asking for help saying it, they distinguish what is genuine from what is generic, and they do not confuse speed with value. The person without an anchor, on the other hand, lets himself be filled with other people's content until he forgets what he would have said. The difference between one and the other is not marked by technology, but by previous internal work.
What can you do today
The future is not prepared with big gestures, but with small and sustained habits. Writing your pages every morning, going out once a week to look at the world without a screen, and setting aside time to create with your hands are investments in your future creativity. They do not produce immediate or presentable results, and that is why it is so easy to abandon them just when they will be needed most.
Human creativity is not going to disappear because AI exists, just as walking did not disappear because cars exist. But, like walking, it risks becoming optional and therefore rare. Maintaining the habit, deliberately, is what will separate those who maintain their own voice from those who end up repeating the machine's average. The method is one of the best known ways to preserve that voice.
Creativity as a form of resistance
In an environment designed to give us everything done, choosing creative effort is something of an act of resistance. Every time you decide to think for yourself before consulting a machine, or create something of your own instead of generating it, you are asserting an autonomy that technological convenience noiselessly erodes. It is not a heroic or noisy resistance: it is the silent decision to continue being the author of your own mind.
That autonomy has practical consequences. He who retains his own voice better distinguishes what is true from what is plausible, resists manipulation better and contributes something that the average machine cannot. In a future saturated with automated content, these capabilities will not be an aesthetic luxury, but a form of lucidity. Julia Cameron's method, without intending to, trains precisely that lucidity.
Teaching the next generations to create by hand
If analog becomes strategic, it makes sense to protect it early. Children who grow up delegating everything to screens run the risk of never developing the muscle to tolerate boredom, imagine without help or create from scratch. Reserving spaces without technology to draw, write or simply do nothing will, increasingly, be a conscious and valuable educational decision.
The same goes for adults. It is not about rejecting AI on principle, but about deliberately cultivating what it does not give. Morning Pages and Artist Appointment are simple, free tools to do this at any age. In a world that pushes to externalize thinking, maintaining an analog corner where your creativity remains yours can be the most profitable personal investment of the coming decades.
What is scarce will be attention, not production
For centuries, the bottleneck of creativity was production: it took time, technique and resources to materialize an idea. AI is removing that bottleneck. But in doing so, it moves scarcity to another place: there will no longer be a lack of capacity to produce, there will be a lack of capacity to pay attention, to discern what deserves to exist, and to provide a worthwhile perspective.
That is hopeful news for those who cultivate their inner world. In a future where anyone can generate a thousand images in an afternoon, value will migrate towards judgment, taste and intention: qualities that are only forged by looking at the world with sustained attention. The appointment with the artist trains exactly that—attention—and the morning pages sharpen your discernment about what really matters to you. Far from becoming obsolete, these practices cultivate exactly what the future will reward.