Appreciating the beauty of a blank page
This post originally appeared on The Sustainability Story Substack. Read it here.
There’s something beautiful about a blank page’s possibilities.
Like the universe before the Big Bang, where there’s nothing, there could be something: a new story, idea, lesson, or provocation. Writing is an act of creation—translating our thoughts, knowledge, and intuitions into words that others can absorb, understand, and act upon. It’s the closest humans get to telepathy and time travel: writing allows us to transmit the contents of our hearts and minds to others in a way which transcends borders, cultures, languages, and even time itself.
Today, sustainability professionals are writing more than ever—emails, instant messages, texts, disclosures, and PowerPoint copy—making it feel more like a chore than a craft. And writing sustainability reports, of course, is a different beast than writing an inspiring thought leadership piece about a sustainability topic you’re passionate about. But writing remains important nonetheless—it helps us organize our thoughts and influence stakeholders to act when we lack the direct authority to compel them.
While many think of writing in terms of the final product—polished prose on a page—it’s more of a process. It starts with the spark of an idea or inspiration that the writer feels compelled to bring to life and ends after several rounds of drafting, editing, and polishing.
To write is to suffer—from self-doubt, distraction, and other mental blockages that impede progress on the page. Call me a glutton for punishment, but I love it.
When I first sat down to write my book, Sustainability Storytelling, I felt the specter of 75,000 words hovering overhead. Sometimes I’d sit for hours facing the taunt of my word processor’s blinking caret. And I was my own worst enemy—berating myself with thoughts questioning my own credibility, competency, and even likability. It was Type II fun—like when I summited Kilimanjaro.
Writing is, in a word, hard. Beyond understanding the elements of grammar, style, and rhetoric, writing well means having something to say—and that requires having learned knowledge (e.g. from books and formal schooling), lived experience, curiosity, and the courage to be disliked. Yes, writing something that matters means making some people uncomfortable or even angry. And sometimes that’ll cost you—but it’s the price you pay for relevance.
Achieving flow is a writer’s ultimate, if elusive goal. Finding it consistently requires both practice and patience. When in a flow state, a writer’s thoughts and feelings seem to seamlessly translate into words on the page. Time and space disappear as the universe envelops you in infinite inspiration. Yet the vast majority of a writer’s time is spent outside of a flow state, fighting to escape a black hole of muddled thoughts—better known as writer’s block.
“Writing is thinking,” said the late historian and Pulitzer Prize winner David McCullough. “To write well is to think clearly. That’s why it’s so hard.”
If writing is thinking, then writing with artificial intelligence deprives human writers of the opportunity to think for themselves. While AI can produce words, sentences, paragraphs, articles, papers, and entire books that are grammatically correct, well-structured, and even smart-sounding, it struggles to match the might and depth of human writing. AI might be able to imitate thought, but it can’t fake feelings. And writing is as much about the heart as it is the head.
AI doesn’t experience fear, anger, sadness, love, happiness, or hope. It doesn’t lie awake at night pondering the meaning of life; meander through a park daydreaming about tomorrow; or suffer the loss of a loved one. AI is but an expensive and environmentally destructive knock off of the human mind—one of the most extraordinary things evolution on Earth has ever produced. Surrendering our ability to think to AI hurts our ability to write, just as having AI write for us sacrifices our ability to think.
In May 2026, Wharton researchers coined the term “cognitive surrender” to describe what happens when people accept an AI’s answer as their own without checking it. Building off Daniel Kahneman’s System 1 (fast, automatic, and intuitive) and 2 (slow, deliberate, and effortful) thinking, they proposed a new category—System 3—to describe AI-assisted thinking, which gradually weakens System 1 and 2 thinking through disuse. In other words: when it comes to our brain, if we don’t use it, we lose it.
While humans have long pursued cognitive offloading to support complex tasks—like using calculators for math, GPS for directions, or thesaurus, dictionaries, and spell check for writing—this has always kept human ownership of the decision and judgment behind it. When writing with AI, we risk cognitive surrender by giving up or discounting our own critical thinking to conform to what AI tells us or writes for us.
AI’s allure is understandable—it dampens the pain of the writing process by getting words on the page with little to no thought. But suffering is where the good stuff comes from—and how a writer develops his or her own style and voice. That’s why AI-generated content seems so sterile, generic, and inconsequential.
After spending the past few years experimenting with AI in my own writing process, I’ve decided it’s best used as an occasional editorial sparring partner for checking my writing once it’s 90% there. Bringing it into the writing process too early sacrifices my ability to achieve flow, think deeply and creatively, and produce my best work.
To be fair, as a former journalist and lifelong writer, I have the benefit of having written thousands of pieces before AI emerged. This allowed me to earn the skills, experience, and confidence that gives me the judgment to go head-to-head with AI’s bravado, identify the good feedback and reject the bad. As I teach in my masterclasses, building confidence through the act of writing is the best way to overcome self-defeating thoughts and carry on to create your best work.
I fear that the next generation of sustainability professionals that grew up with AI tools will never learn how to write the old-fashioned way—and therefore think for themselves.
“There is something druglike about using AI, not because it necessarily produces pleasure, but because it removes a particular kind of pain,” writes Debbie Millman in The New York Times. “A person who grows up with AI may never know the necessary agony of a blank page, the false start, the dull vocabulary and the private embarrassment of a first draft. A student who relies on AI too early will likely never sit long enough with confusion to distinguish it from failure.”
As more people—sustainability professionals included—surrender their ability to think independently to AI, the more vulnerable their organizations will become to simple power outages and the growing cost of tokens once the venture capital subsidies run out. Those who know how to write well will also know how to think clearly and critically in a way which sets them apart from their peers.
If anything, remember this: Everything worth writing is worth being written by a human mind, guided by a human heart.
And don’t fear the blank page—appreciate the beauty of its possibility.
