AS usual, I like looking at matters through the lens of the ancients.
Heraclitus said you can never step into the same river twice – the water has moved on and so has everything else.
Somewhere between last year and this one, the river moved again. Most people are still standing on the bank, asking the same question they asked the last time they looked.
The mountain I never climbed
I found this out at a family gathering. I played a new music video – me, performing my own song, lip-syncing on a mountainside I never climbed, in a location I never flew to, shot by a crew that never existed.
Every frame was generated. No camera, no flight ticket, no production company.
Just prompting, and the editorial instincts I spent years in university building.
The footage was clean, ultra-realistic – the kind of real that makes people stop mid-sentence.
And they did stop, but not for the reason I expected. The questions came fast: did you hire a production company? What camera did you use?
Did you fly out there? I have a degree in film and television. Some of them know this.
And still, the questions landed exactly where they would have landed a year ago.
Nothing had moved for them. The river kept flowing and they kept asking about the same stretch of water.
This is the elephant on the pavement. It is not hiding, it is not subtle.
It is standing in the middle of the walkway, and everyone is stepping around it, pretending the detour is normal.
The elephant in your pocket
Here is what unsettles me more than the questions themselves: the tools that made that video live on the same phones my family was holding while they asked me about production companies.
Free to download, free to try. No crew, no budget, no connections required – just the willingness to open an app and fail at something a few times before getting it right.
That willingness was the only ingredient anyone was missing, and it was the one ingredient nobody reached for.
Lao Tzu talked about wu wei – action through non-forcing movement that aligns with what is already happening rather than resisting it.
People mistake this for passivity. It is not. Wu wei is not about doing nothing, it’s about not fighting the current.
And right now, an extraordinary number of people are doing the opposite – expending real effort, real money, real above-the-roof invoices – to avoid a current that would have carried them for free, had they simply stepped in.
Hiring the answer: Instead of holding the question.
That is the quieter, stranger form of ignorance. Not the absence of information – it’s sitting in the app store, one tap away – but the active avoidance of it.
People will pay a stranger a premium to produce what they could learn to produce themselves, specifically so they never have to sit with the discomfort of not knowing.
They would rather hire the answer than hold the question for an afternoon.
Even an emperor had to talk himself into doing the uncomfortable, necessary thing, daily.
The rest of us are not exempt from that labour just because the uncomfortable thing today is opening an unfamiliar app instead of ruling an empire.
The tool itself is neutral. Your judgment about it – that it’s for other people, too technical, somehow beneath the real way of doing things – that judgment is the only thing standing between you and the mountain you never had to climb.
What the elephant Is actually carrying
Here is what gets lost in all the suspicion: this is not some novelty act for making music videos look expensive.
The same tools that put me on a mountain I never climbed are quietly doing heavier, kinder work elsewhere.
A small business owner in a longhouse without the budget for a marketing team can now produce a professional campaign on her own phone.
A student who cannot afford design school can learn the craft through free tutorials and AI-assisted practice, at his own pace.
Someone who has lost their voice to illness can type a sentence and hear it spoken back in a version of their own voice, preserved from an old recording.
These are not hypotheticals – they’re happening now, quietly, to people who did not wait by the riverbank.
That is the part of the elephant nobody wants to look at directly, because it’s harder to be cynical about.
It’s easier to ask, “Did you pay for it?” than to ask, “What else could I build with this?”
The elephant is not just blocking the pavement – it’s also, if you let it, willing to carry you somewhere.
Literacy as self-Ddfence
And here is the part that should sit heavier than a music video ever could.
If a voice can be cloned convincingly enough that you would not notice the difference – and it can, today, with nothing more than a short recording – then the stakes of staying on the riverbank are no longer about missing a creative trend.
They are about literacy as self-defence. The same ignorance that asks, “Did you hire a crew?” is the ignorance that will not recognise a cloned voice on the other end of a phone call until it is too late to matter.
Love your fate, the ancients said – the whole of it, including the parts you did not choose.
I’d put it simpler: love your tools. Not blind enthusiasm, just an honest relationship with what’s actually available to you, instead of a performance of bewilderment every time it comes up in conversation.
You did not choose to be born into an age that moves this fast. You do get to choose whether you meet it or avoid it.
Put your hand on it
None of this requires genius. It requires the same thing wu wei always requires – alignment rather than resistance.
Open the app, fail at the first attempt, fail at the second.
By the fifth, you will have made something, and the question you ask at the next family gathering will not be the one you asked last year.
The elephant on the pavement does not move because you ignore it.
It only stops blocking the way once you walk up and put your hand on it.
Until then, it stays exactly where it is – massive, obvious, and somehow still a surprise to everyone pretending not to see it – sitting quietly in your pocket, waiting for you to notice it was never really hiding at all.
The views expressed here are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of Sarawak Tribune.
