The modern makers’ machine does not want you to create heavy things. It runs on the internet—powered by social media, fueled by mass appeal, and addicted to speed. It thrives on spikes, scrolls, and screenshots. It resists weight and avoids friction. It does not care for patience, deliberation, or anything but production. It doesn’t care what you create, only that you keep creating. Make more. Make faster. Make lighter. Make something that can be consumed in a breath and discarded just as quickly. Heavy things take time. And here, time is a tax.

even the most successful Substackers—those who’ve turned newsletters into brands and businesses—eventually want to stop stacking things. They want to make one really, really good thing. One truly heavy thing. A book. A manifesto. A movie. A media company. A momument.

At any given time, you’re either pre–heavy thing or post–heavy thing. You’ve either made something weighty already, or you haven’t. Pre–heavy thing people are still searching, experimenting, iterating. Post–heavy thing people have crossed the threshold. They’ve made something substantial—something that commands respect, inspires others, and becomes a foundation to build on. And it shows. They move with confidence and calm. (But this feeling doesn’t always last forever.)

No one wants to stay in light mode forever. Sooner or later, everyone gravitates toward heavy mode—toward making something with weight. Your life’s work will be heavy. Finding the balance of light and heavy is the game.4 Note: heavy doesn’t have to mean “big.” Heavy can be small, niche, hard to scale. What I’m talking about is more like density. It’s about what is defining, meaningful, durable.

Telling everyone they’re a creator has only fostered a new strain of imposter syndrome. Being called a creator doesn’t make you one or make you feel like one; creating something with weight does. When you’ve made something heavy—something that stands on its own—you don’t need validation. You just know, because you feel its weight in your hands.

It’s not that most people can’t make heavy things. It’s that they don’t notice they aren’t. Lightness has its virtues—it pulls us in, subtly, innocently, whispering, 'Just do things.' The machine rewards movement, so we keep going, collecting badges. One day, we look up and realize we’ve been running in place.

Why does it feel bad to stop posting after weeks of consistency? Because the force of your work instantly drops to zero. It was all motion, no mass—momentum without weight. 99% dopamine, near-zero serotonin, and no trace of oxytocin. This is the contemporary creator’s dilemma—the contemporary generation’s dilemma.

We spend our lives crafting weighted blankets for ourselves—something heavy enough to anchor our ambition and quiet our minds.

Online, by nature, weight is harder to find, harder to hold on to, and only getting harder in a world where it feels like anyone can make anything.

Thinking in dialogue is easier and more entertaining than struggling with feelings, letters, grammar and style all by ourselves. Using AI as a writing dialogue partner, ChatGPT can become a catalyst for clarifying what we want to say. Even if it is wrong.6 Sometimes we need to hear what’s wrong to understand what’s right.

Seeing in clear text what is wrong or, at least, what we don’t mean can help us set our minds straight about what we really mean. If you get stuck, you can also simply let it ask you questions. If you don’t know how to improve, you can tell it to be evil in its critique of your writing

Just compare usage with AI to how we dealt with similar issues before AI. Discussing our writing with others is a general practice and regarded as universally helpful; honest writers honor and credit their discussion partners We already use spell checkers and grammar tools It’s common practice to use human editors for substantial or minor copy editing of our public writing Clearly, using dictionaries and thesauri to find the right expression is not a crime

Using AI in the editor replaces thinking. Using AI in dialogue increases thinking. Now, how can connect the editor and the chat window without making a mess? Is there a way to keep human and artificial text apart?

With iA Writer 7 you can manually mark ChatGPT’s contributions as AI text. AI text is greyed out. This allows you to separate and control what you borrow and what you type. By splitting what you type and what you pasted, you can make sure that you speak your mind with your voice, rhythm and tone.

As a dialog partner AI makes you think more and write better. As ghost writer it takes over and you lose your voice. Yet, sometimes it helps to paste its replies and notes. And if you want to use that information, you rewrite it to make it our own. So far, in traditional apps we are not able to easily see what we wrote and what we pasted from AI. iA Writer lets you discern your words from what you borrowed as you write on top of it. As you type over the AI generated text you can see it becoming your own. We found that in most cases, and with the exception of some generic pronouns and common verbs like “to have” and “to be”, most texts profit from a full rewrite.

we believe that using AI for writing will likely become as common as using dishwashers, spellcheckers, and pocket calculators. The question is: How will it be used? Like spell checkers, dishwashers, chess computers and pocket calculators, writing with AI will be tied to varying rules in different settings.

We suggest using AI’s ability to replace thinking not for ourselves but for writing in dialogue. Don’t use it as a ghost writer. Because why should anyone bother to read what you didn’t write? Use it as a writing companion. It comes with a ChatUI, so ask it questions and let it ask you questions about what you write. Use it to think better, don’t become a vegetable.