Why do we need human creation?

Why do we need human creation?

September 2026

Jane Zhang

Oct 07, 2026

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This month, I visited Paris for the fourth time and my favorite museum, the Musée de l’Orangerie. The hallmark of l’Orangerie are two oval shaped rooms, wrapped completely with Claude Monet’s Water Lilies. As you walk through each room, your feet trace an infinity symbol, and sky lights shower you and Monet’s eight impressionist works in a warm, ethereal light.

The last time I was at l’Orangerie was when I was in my last year of college. I was and

still am

a lover of impressionist music, the likes of Claude Debussy and Erik Satie, and I remember putting on my headphones, playing Debussy’s

Rêverie

, and walking straight into Monet’s dreamy landscapes for a doubly immersive impressionist experience.

Claude Monet,

Le matin clair aux

saules

, oil on canvas, Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris. Photo credit: Sophie Crépy.

This time was different. I walked into the museum and stopped to look at the placards displayed before the first room. I read that the water lilies were some of Monet’s last paintings, paintings he worked on for thirty years—more than I’ve been alive. Next to the writing, there was a black and white photo of Monet: I saw an older man standing against canvases taller than him, in his left hand was a wooden pallet and in his right, a brush.

Claude Monet in his studio at Giverny with the Water Lilies panels. Photograph. Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris.

The image stayed with me as I started my trace around the infinity. I focused on the individual strokes of blues, purples, and whites; then I stepped back and saw a reflecting pond emerged. I imagined Monet standing where I was, reaching forward to place a couple of brush strokes, then stepping back to see his work. Only the steps of his feet and the bounce of the canvas could be heard. I imagined him coming to greet his canvas day after day, after a cold winter rain, a walk through a beautiful orange fall, and the sweat of a hot summer day. In a long time lapse, the four five brush strokes, the minute to step back and discern became hundreds of thousands of brush strokes and millions of minutes of discernment, culminating in the ninety one meters of beautiful canvas sprawled across the room.

In the evening, I returned to my Airbnb in the 10th arrondissement and laid long-ways on the couch. I caught up on my text messages and read about yet another new AI model. In one group chat, my friends lamented that their coding and writing work was disappearing by the day. Another friend tells me that he was able to use AI to design a cancer vaccine. On social media, I saw post after post of people vibe-coding their own personal websites: a footer made of draggable Lego blocks, a resume designed like an Animal Crossing village.

I closed my phone and tossed it on the carpet. Instead, I reached for the book I’d bought at a Japanese bookstore a few days prior—Haruki Murakami’s

Vocation as a Novelist.

I read the first few chapters and learned that Murakami struggled to find interest in studying, barely graduating college. But he loved Jazz music, and so he started his own jazz cafe with his wife, working every day beyond exhaustion. Then one day at the age of thirty he went to a baseball game:

In the bottom of the first ining, Hilton slammed Takahashi’s first pitch into left field for a clean double. The satisfying crack when bat met ball resounded through Jingu Stadium. Scattered applause rose around me. In that instant, and based on no grounds whatsoever, it suddenly struck me: I think I can write a novel.

He went home and, over many evenings, wrote his first novel

Hear the Wind Sing

by hand. On a whim, he sent his one manuscript copy to a publisher and, somewhat miraculously, his book was published and awarded the Gunzo Literature Prize for New Writers. Two books later Murakami shut down his Jazz cafe to write full time, and now his books have been translated in many languages and read around the world.

As Murakami described his evenings writing, I imagined myself watching him from the corner of his kitchen. I saw him sitting on a stool under yellowish, dim lighting. His back was hunched over and his hand scribbled black fountain pen ink onto sheets of off-white manuscript paper. Murakami explained that he has never experienced writer’s block (absolutely crazy to me), and so I imagined him writing a page of Japanese characters, putting down his pen to read what came before, and picking up his pen to discover what happens next, for hours and hours into the night. His face was serene the whole time.

I thought about my own nights writing. How I would type a sentence, stop to read it, delete a couple words, and add a couple more. How I would fiddle with the ordering of my phrases and paragraphs until they followed the syntactical rules stained in my mind. Murakami’s process filled me with awe. To be similar to me in all the ways a human is and to have such deftness with words and story.

I’m left asking myself:

why does it matter that something was created by a human?

Why does it matter that I can imagine Monet’s thirty years with a brush? And Murakami’s late night writing? If one day, machines can create paintings and books to the aesthetic quality of both Monet and Murakami, what changes for us?

I think human creations matter because they give us ground to believe in our own creative abilities. Us, humans, naturally mimic the behaviors of humans around us, and the artifacts of our favorite creators are proxies for behaviors that we feel inspired to mimic.

In a void, I could write an essay every month and believe that my growing fluency could lead me to start publishing two essays a month. I can also pick up Murakami’s book. I can experience it, extrapolate the intention, the time, the discernment, and the years of skill building that went in. And I can believe that I, in my fleshy, sleepy, hungry body, am really not all that different than Murakami. That with time and effort, I can write novels like he does. In fact, I can go sit in my kitchen right now, pull out a pen, and start writing.

And if not to realize what I am humanly capable of, I think human creations matter because they act as representations of people and their time. It’s unfortunate that most of the things we live in today are created by faceless corporations. But the few things in my life that are attributed to real people (every book on my shelf from the fiction stories to the software textbooks, the plants my mom helped me replant, the furniture my dad built for me), I look at them and I see people who wanted me to experience something. And suddenly when I’m in my room by myself, I feel surrounded by people. My life feels full.

I end with this quote because it reminds me that human creation is about helping other people be human and to feel that they are not alone:

It’s enough for you to do it once for a few men to remember you. But if you do it year after year, then many people remember you and they tell it to their children, and their children and grandchildren remember and, if it concerns books, they can read them. And if it’s good enough, it will last as long as there are human beings.

— Malcom Cowley, A Portrait of Mr. Papa (aka, Ernest Hemingway)

Thanks for reading my September essay. Subscribe for to receive next month’s!

If you made it this far, thank you for reading my September essay. If you have questions, opinions, experiences about any of these topics, I would love to discuss! That’s why I write after all :) You can find me @jjanezhang on X.

A special shoutout to Joyce, Chris, Amy, Andrew, Ivy, and Ayush!

A side note, I was originally thinking of naming this piece “Man Obsessed” but then I thought it would be miscategorized as other things. If you made is this far, I’m curious if you would’ve liked the title.

Other topics I thought about but didn’t write about:

1.

Put the researcher and the writer in the same room.

I have this idea that it would be so fun to put Nathan Lambert and pick any professional writer in a room and discuss why AI writing is bad and if it can ever be good. This may be the subject of my next essay.

2.

My biases are now my super power.

There’s something interesting about how AI “knows everything” and you being a person that has only a select number of experiences makes you biased in more ways than the model. And it is this bias, your ability to determine what is just and unjust, that makes you better at creating art.

3.

Where is the next cheese?

My friend Andrew and I were sitting in the Mill Valley library and we were asking ourselves the question: where is the next cheese? It feels like we haven’t found a new category food in my life time, beyond fibertizing and proteintizing everything that is already known.

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