If You’re Not Starving, You’re Dreaming
#creativefreedomact
an article based on a comment to N M Davis related to the past post The Creative Freedom Act - 117th CONGRESS
If You’re Not Starving, You’re Dreaming
On Automation, the End of Work, and the Creative Turn Ahead
We’re entering an inflection point - one of those civilizational pivot moments that will only look obvious in hindsight. The machines are getting smarter. The algorithms are getting more human-like. And every task that can be automated will be. Not because of some sinister plot, but because efficiency is the logic of the machine. It replicates itself.
Every job that’s repetitive, routine, or reducible to pattern is already halfway gone. AI doesn’t sleep. It doesn’t unionize. It learns fast. And it’s not just factory lines or call centers anymore - it’s legal assistants, radiologists, analysts, writers, teachers, coders. We’ve trained our tools so well they no longer need us for the tasks we once thought defined our professions.
If this continues - and it will - then we’re looking at a near future where half the population will be functionally jobless. Not because they’ve failed, but because the structure has shifted beneath them. We are heading toward a post-labor world - a world where work, as we’ve defined it for centuries, no longer organizes our time, our value, or our identity.
That sounds like a crisis. And in many ways, it is. But it’s also an invitation and an opportunity.
If survival is no longer tethered to labor, then what takes its place?
Sooner or later, everyone will have to become an artist of some sort.
Not necessarily a painter or a poet, but someone engaged in meaning-making, beauty-tending, care-giving, soul-growing.
The future belongs to those working in the humanities - in the gardens, the kitchens, the healing rooms, the sanctuaries, the studios, the schools, the mythic archive of human becoming.
A New Economy of Presence
In this world, what becomes valuable isn’t productivity. It’s presence.
Imagination. Attention. Play. Ritual. Restoration.
The ability to listen deeply. To create atmospheres. To tell new stories.
We’re entering an era where the most important skill may be the capacity to hold space for what the machine can’t replicate.
This is not utopia. It won’t be without friction, collapse, reordering. But it could be the beginning of a creative renaissance - if we allow it.
"If You’re Not Starving, You’re Dreaming."
I have a saying:
If you’re not starving, you’re dreaming.
When the body is fed, the soul begins to speak.
When the daily grind loosens its grip, the imagination stretches out its limbs.
We’ve been trained to conflate survival with virtue - if you’re busy, you’re good. If you’re exhausted, you’re useful. But what happens when you’re not scraping to get by? What happens when survival is covered?
You begin to wonder. You begin to care. You begin to imagine.
The greatest danger of the post-labor world isn’t laziness—it’s emptiness if we don’t reimagine the shape of a life. If we don’t replace work with something richer. Something more human.
Is that good or bad?
We’re about to find out.
This Is My Art Project 2025 Now
My art project at the moment is not just a painting, a collage, or a gallery show.
It’s an imaginative act - a civic, poetic, social, and spiritual intervention.
I am working to imagine a new future, and to speak it aloud.
To name what’s possible beyond the machinery of human labor and the spectacle of collapse.
To offer visions, provocations, and proposals that might help reorient the compass of the creative community.
I’m putting these ideas out not as doctrine, but as living drafts. As imaginative possibilities.
Contributions to a conversation I believe we urgently need to be having.
Because the next chapter of this story isn’t going to be written by politicians alone.
It will be shaped by those who can imagine differently, see deeply, and build with care.
With the U.S. midterm elections on the horizon, we have an opportunity - not just to vote, but to dream out loud. To shift the discourse. To move the public imagination toward something more human, more beautiful, and more whole.
So I’m offering this work—these essays, these practices, these questions - as part of that effort.
If they resonate, use them. Share them. Respond to them.
This is not just commentary.
It’s collaboration.
It’s a kind of civic poetics.
It’s what I can do - the part I can play.
And maybe it's what we’re all being called to do now. At least for a while.
Hashtags to use: #CreativeFreedomAct #CultureShiftAct #CreativeSocietyAct
web address: https://www.touchonian.com/s/creative-freedom-act