on creators and makers
February 28, 2025
the internet has turned everyone into creators. i think there is such a distinction between a creator and a maker. content creation exists to contain, to maintain, to last. perhaps "create" has become synonymous with "to live," as in content that is created must live forever on this abstract thing we call the internet.
there is a transience to a thing that is made. to make is to change, in the same way to make is to be. creation feels too much like a definite, determinate, and one-time transaction, the way we were only really born once. i am now realizing the way there is no noun form of "make," only a four-letter versatile syllable we pair with other words to give meaning. make up, make out, made, making. A creation stands superior to a [make].
to be a creator maybe means to be a god. i am not religious, and i will likely lack all the nuances of believing in a deity. has the internet made all of us little gods?
i use that phrase loosely because i once liked to imagine that a late crush and i were little gods. we made a lot of things both separately and together, and everything was shared in an expansive server. like a joint universe, i'd convinced myself. of course nothing in crush-driven isabel's mind was truly real, but maybe a metaphor could have been...made.
i make a lot of things. i create only a fraction of them. when i'm sculpting, i try to sculpt what has been sculpted. i prefer to boast that i can ostensibly "make anything," because what "anything" entails is an image of a conceivable concept that i can then translate to a 3-dimensional figure. i don't often create, in the sense that creation truly comes from within, from a small seed of an idea borne from moments of stillness and quietness from the outside world. one could argue that everything made is created, and truthfully speaking it seems near impossible to create from a vacuum nowadays. inspiration is still something that exists through consumption. i cannot "create anything," because if "anything" refers to concepts that have already existed, then i'm certainly making a copy of a copy of a copy to some capacity. in essence, content creation isn't all quite creation. i'm very aware of all the arguments of nonexistent originality.
are humans created? again, i am not religious, but i believe the creation process is evolution itself. humans (plural) are created, but each person is not, if we are adhering to our definitions above. it is arguable to say that each person's DNA is created, because the stochasticism of enzymes and proteins is truly unique.
i do know that humans are made. i once told a past lover that i was "made to find him," and i believe it to be true, the same way i was made to lose him and live the life i am currently living and weather all the storms that have been made to be placed in my path. i'm about to graduate college and my friend recently noted that i've seemed to "find myself" over the past four years. i think i'm find-ING myself, because to fully find myself would mean to stop finding, and i don't think that's possible given that i am someone who holds everything a little too tightly. i do think i'm mak-ING myself, and that i have made myself a person i want to make. that much i am sure about for now, though everything is mutable.