In art and in life; in reality and in fiction, a point of view is the building block. It is the initial spark. The foundation. The masterpiece. The crown we reveal. The fuel.

But the engine; it is the medium we choose.

In today’s new era, the medium has become artificial intelligence; whether in finance, healthcare, arts, or education.

The moment AI entered our creative fields, we started running in many directions just like a criminal trying to wipe his fingerprints from the crime scene.

Now let’s get to the point. With the arrival of AI, are we mourning creativity or control?

We have always loved, admired, and quoted the speeches of the greatest people. We have lived by their words. Whether a CEO, a rebel, an actress, a public figure. The words we admired and lived by, whether in speeches, memoirs, or books, were - in many cases - written by a third party. The ghost writer. Yet, we never questioned or bothered to care. Now replace the ghost writers with AI and watch out how the world will rebel against originality.

How often have we fallen -willingly- to the comfort of believing that a fashion designer is the solitary genius behind a big fashion brand? We all know that the designer is not the only dreamer at the atelier. Behind every fashion house, there is a huge team of creatives, artisans, dreamers, interns who work day and night to bring a masterpiece to the spotlight. So behind every visionary is a village, yet only one name is celebrated. Now let’s replace that village with AI generated sketches; and watch out how the whole brand’s soul will be questioned. So it has always been a fight between credit and creativity. We never questioned the credibility of the brand or the originality of the designer no matter what creative control happens behind the scene. Yet today with AI, we ask; “What about the artist?” The hypocrisy.

You know what I find endlessly amusing? The reverence we have for names. For credit. For spotlight. For recognition.

The irony is that we have always accepted the invisible hands behind the work we bring to the public, and we have always hired a secret creative to help bring our vision to life. And this is divine. Collaboration is divine.

The method of a third party creative joining the creative work is not new. What is new is the demand for transparency. We have always had our masks on. But as of today, we don’t have the luxury to control the masks.

In fact, we have never created anything alone. We created from who or what came before us. From borrowed wisdom or archives. We created with the help of friends, family, and mentors. We created with silent collaborators. We created with behind the scenes creatives. And many times we borrowed phrases from here and there to make bold statements.

So why hide now? Maybe because before we were protected. Not by integrity, but by contracts and NDAs.

Imagine if we were to sign NDAs with AI and take full ownership of our work, would we still experience the same fear? Because this fear isn’t about losing creativity. It is about losing control over our creative persona. We are not afraid that AI is going to write a better article or song, we are not afraid the AI is going to generate designer sketches. We are afraid that we will no longer be able to pretend that we have done this alone. We are scared of the unmasking; of being exposed.

Our problem with AI is very psychological. In psychology they refer to this as imposter syndrome; that we are not as talented and as intelligent as the image we project to the public; and that one day they will find out. Carl Jung once wrote: “The persona is that which in reality one is not, but which oneself as well as others think one is.” In this new era, AI threatens the persona. We can no longer present creativity as a solitary act. Today the ego is being challenged by a collaborator that doesn’t obey the persona and who can never be silenced by an NDA. And today - more than ever - we shall ask ourselves, do we want to create so that our work is admired and delivered to the right people, or do we want to create so that the identity behind it gets validated?

While we like to think that we are witnessing a technological shift, we are in fact witnessing a psychological shift. Maybe we never wanted to belong to ourselves. Maybe we always wanted to belong to our glory.

Let me be clear, AI will not end creativity. But it will definitely expose how fragile and performative it has always been. But this isn’t the battle. Not yet.

The real war is not only about coding and copyright. It is about courage. The courage to show up. The courage to be vulnerable. The courage to be wrong. And the courage to admit; this isn’t my masterpiece. And if we fail to teach the next generation this courage; and we just pass to them our fears, our masks, and our NDA’s; they will never learn how to dance with the devil of their times. Or worse; with their own devil.

AI just arrived announcing itself as the runway debut of a new era. And it did not arrive quietly. It made the entrance of Lady Gaga at the Met Gala. And we have witnessed this before; many times. This is a historical pattern for us to question the new, to fear change, and to fall into biased comparisons. Painters or photographers. Theater of film. The print or the digital publications. Brick and mortar or e-commerce. And here we are, more than ever, queuing for Birkins and labubus.

I remember more than 8 years back I heard one entrepreneur saying that AI will never replace humans; but the people who know how to work with AI will replace the ones who don’t. There is a lot going on these days, and people are resisting this evolution. Big announcements, heavy conversations, and deep accusations. Who is initiating these controversies? We are. The paradox is that the people in the creative fields -whether in film, media, or arts - are the ones claiming that AI has announced the death of creativity.

I’ve come across a beautiful piece written by Salman Khan; the “sleep on the problem” method. The visionary behind Khan Academy says that whenever he is faced with a complex problem, he wouldn’t force a solution. “I would engage with them for a few minutes and then delegate them to my subconscious.” And he adds: “I have faith that my brain, or someone else’s, will come up with a creative solution in the morning.” This is the quiet magic of the human mind. The initial spark always comes from the mind, and that spark breeds imagination; and once we put that imagination into practice, we witness creativity.

A while back, I was speaking with a friend about my desire to publish online few of my articles. My friend said “2025 marks the death of writers. Who will want to read random articles in the time of AI” and I went cold. For six months. Literally.

Makes sense; no? It took me 6 months to figure out that her perspective was, in fact, a total nonsense- for me, and that her perspective reveals her own limitations not mine. The people who believe that AI is going to replace humans are the same people who declare that a certain business is going to fail because the market is saturated. I didn’t know why it took me some time to absorb the statement she made. As if a 6 month freeze of thought would make me ready to accept the arrival of AI; just like the public call of the 6 months pause that was published by the Future of Life Institute and signed by many; to prepare for the unsettling speed of innovation.

I have come to believe that we witness what we are ready for. We may look like we are not accepting innovation, but I believe it arrived in the perfect time; whether or not we choose to acknowledge it. And like my forever muse said it once : “You’re not supposed to give people what they want. You're supposed to give them what they don't know they want yet.”

Disclaimer: AI, creativity, and imagination are not topics to be contained. They are open-ended conversations. This article is the first of many; it serves as an introduction and a single point of view. More reflections will follow in the upcoming articles.

Today, we are witnessing an era that I like to call “The Performance of Presence.”

Welcome to the age of exposure, where visibility is the currency of value. Social media has introduced us to a new set of beliefs, as if the ones we already carry weren’t enough! If you are not seen, you do not exist.

This article came to me as an inspiration while I was having dinner with some people. One guy, who presents himself as a creative director; told me, or worse, announced, that if my Instagram account is private, that if I don’t create content to entertain people, I am invisible. I am no one.

He spoke with the confidence of Newton discovering gravity. And he paused, looking at me sharply waiting for me to entertain his illusion; he didn’t know that I am an artist. I turn illusions into alchemy. I alchemize the moment into meaning. And just like any creative, my curiosity was in motion to create an editorial piece out of this encounter to unveil all the layers of this conversation; The Pressure of Visibility.

Under this title, I want to explore how social media, marketing, and self worth have merged into one endless staged performance.

I am a true believer in one’s personal journey of self discovery, as this journey unveils many layers to who we truly are, why we are here, what we want to do, or who we want to become. And this journey is very subjective. No one gets to dictate upon us our own mission statement. And the more we walk through the self discovery path, the more worthiness we are going to invite into our lives.

Yet today, social media has rewired how we define who we are. Self-worth was once rooted in essence, values, beliefs, but now it has been outsourced to metrics. How many followers? How much reach? How many views? Did it go viral? What are the chances? The digital gaze has created an identity crisis among people.

Life was about becoming. Now it is about being seen. Life was about interior richness. Now it is about exterior validation. When I say “life was” I don’t aim at showing that the past didn’t have its own challenges of visibility and pressure to prove something, but the past wasn’t as loud as today. Wasn’t as fast as today. And this is clearly portrayed in the dynamics of marketing as one campaign is not enough, one product is absolutely not enough. And within the same campaign one face is never enough. There has to be many faces. We see this everyday. How many times do we scroll through our feed and see different influencers talking and unpacking the same product; saying the same product description, or worse, the scripted product’s promise to give us a free pass to self worth. Because yes, makeup primers or face cleansers, through history, have proven to get us out of our identity crisis. Let's be frank, brands have cracked the code of cultural manipulation. All they do is send products to influencers and voila. You know the rest. Mission accomplished. With all the content being created online, we are not witnessing creativity, we are watching compliance with a marketing brief.

In a world where everyone is publishing themselves, we are under pressure to become brands, not human beings. The greatest masquerade of the century. This is the identity crisis of our time; the dissonance between who we are internally and what feel compelled to present externally. We are trapped in a loop of performance. Visibility has become a market. Influence is a commodity. And self worth? It is being auctioned at the intersection of content and commerce.

This is the identity crisis of the century. Not the absence of self; but the overload of personas demanding an online presence to prove they are worth of something. The pressure of visibility will eventually keep generating different personas until one day the original identity disappears beneath the noise and chaos.

And no one has the courage to openly ask; if I stop being seen, do I still matter?

Heavens, yes. But few today dare to live as if that were true.

Self worth is not meant to be staged and true worth doesn’t beg for attention. No one needs to be seen to exist. Perhaps the most radical act today to step off the stage and live a life that doesn’t need an audience. And I believe, this is the only performance worth giving.

We, humans, are captivated by direction. We want to know what comes next, we want a guide, a glimpse, or maybe a simple guarantee. And when someone; be it an entrepreneur, a CEO, a salesman; says “this is the future,” they are not merely selling us the latest product or service. They are offering certainty. They are selling the one little thing that has been a bestseller for years; HOPE.

Now more than ever; what sells is hope. It gives a temporal royalty. The chance to step ahead of the curve, the chance to beat time, and the chance to be among the chosen few who belong to the future.

I have come across a short video on Instagram about a salesman introducing the washing machine to the public. I like to believe that this scene from 1923 was the birth of modern persuasion. When the man in the scene said “this is the future,” he wasn’t just selling the washing machine, he was selling time, status, transformation, new roles, and new identities. And the woman who was looking at that glimmering object that promised to rearrange her life; perfectly reflects the emotional crossroad many people face when confronted with change. What happened in 1923 is a mirror that reflects all times. And that shimmering phrase “this is the future” is rarely a neutral one.

One phrase that has been said, and still being said, to sell us skin. To reinvent our motherhood, to redesign our love life, to make us question our bodies, our jobs, our faces, and our very own way of being alive. This is the future is an announcement that our current reality is no longer enough. And what must we become? More filtered, more optimized, more profitable. When companies or innovators introduce new technologies, they often frame them as the inevitable so that resisting them feels like resisting progress itself.

This isn’t a rebellion against the future nor an unrealistic desire to return to the good old days. I adore innovation. Humans have all the right to embrace the new, to dance with technology, to choose the marvels of science. The danger lies not in the invention but in the blind seduction. In mistaking trends for truths . In outsourcing our worth to what’s next, simply because the world has told us that this sparkles. Inventions and the future have one thing in common; they are both a divine act. We have always invented; it is what we do as human when imagination meets material. Introducing new ways of living or creating new tools is never the real threat. It is the unexamined handover of the self.

It is in the moment we allow algorithms to tell us what we desire. When we no longer write, eat, dress, age, think, or dream without wondering first; “Will this make me belong to the future?”

We are endlessly seduced into abandoning the moment. But the truth is; life is never lived in the future.

“This is the future” can be thrilling, but we shall not be hypnotized. It is not always a promise. Sometimes, or worse, many times, it is a plea to conform, to follow, to change our essence, to vanish into someone else’s vision of what life should be. We owe it to ourselves to pause, to ask, to choose with intention. Because the time we belong to right now is not outdated; it is sacred. Whatever comes next should never take away our belonging to this very moment.

And the future, though dazzling, often forgets its vows.