On 11 May 1997, the best chess player in the world resigned after 19 moves.
Garry Kasparov was playing the sixth and final game of his rematch against Deep Blue, a computer built by IBM. The game lasted about an hour. When it was over, a machine had beaten a reigning world chess champion in a match under tournament conditions for the first time. Kasparov later said he had lost his fighting spirit.
People wrote that chess was finished. If a machine could play it better than the best human alive, what was the point of a human playing it at all?
I have been asking a version of that question for a while now. Not about chess. About everything.
Tools in every hand
As we can all witness, our world is now a place where the tools to do almost anything are available to almost anyone. Anyone can design a poster. Anyone can make a song, write a story, build an app. I have written before about taste, about what separates excellent work from banal work when the tools are the same for everybody. But underneath taste there is a bigger question, and it is harder.
If anyone can do what I do, and a machine can do it faster, what is the meaning of my doing it?
What gives a human life its meaning, when the work no longer needs us?
The champion who put down the stones
Not everyone who loses to a machine keeps playing. Lee Sedol was one of the strongest Go players in the world when Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo beat him four games to one in March 2016. Three years later, at 36, he retired.
He told South Korea’s Yonhap news agency: “Even if I become the number one, there is an entity that cannot be defeated.”
Look at what he measured himself against. Being the best. That was the thing the machine took away. Yonhap also reported a second reason, a dispute with the Korea Baduk Association over membership fees, so I do not want to make his decision simpler than it was. But the sentence he chose to say was about the machine.
If meaning comes from being number one, the machines will take it from us. They already have, in one game after another.
A hundred million reasons to play
Chess did not die. It grew. By December 2022, Chess.com had passed 100 million members. The milestone came during a live broadcast, while Magnus Carlsen was playing Maxime Vachier-Lagrave. Every one of those 100 million people knows that a free program on their phone can beat them, and beat Carlsen too. They play anyway.
They are not playing to be the best in the world. Almost none of them ever will be. They are playing because they like it. The opening they are learning. The blunder they will not make twice. The friend across the board.
Their meaning was never in being number one. It was in the playing.
Watering the seeds of growing joy
Kurt Vonnegut once answered this question for five teenagers. They were students at Xavier High School in New York, and in 2006 they wrote asking him to visit. He was the only author who replied. He told them he would not come, and then he gave them an assignment: write a six-line rhyming poem, make it as good as you can, and then tear it up and throw it away without showing anyone.
Practise any art, he told them, however well or badly, and do it “to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.”
The poem was never the point. The tearing up was the lesson. Nobody would ever read it, nobody would ever pay for it, and it would still have done its work in the person who wrote it.
Breaking the link between worth and work
Even the people building these systems are asking the question. Dario Amodei, who runs Anthropic, gives it a section of its own in The Adolescence of Technology, the long essay he published in January 2026. He asks whether people will be able to find meaning in a world like the one I am describing. His answer is that we will need to “break the link between the generation of economic value and self-worth and meaning.” He says people can find purpose through “stories and projects that they love.”
That is the man building one of these systems saying, in effect, what Vonnegut told five teenagers twenty years earlier.
The foundational roots of meaning
So where does meaning go, when anyone can do anything?
We go back to the roots. Back to asking questions. Back to beauty, and nature, and philosophy, and art, and music. Back to experiencing life for what it is. Going outside. Listening to the birds instead of a recording of them. Being human on purpose.
Sooner or later, everyone gets to the same small questions about whatever they do. Does this give me joy? Am I doing it from a place of peace?
It is easy to find meaning in the things we do when we are the only ones who can do them. When everybody can do them, the meaning has to come from somewhere else. It comes from doing them with joy. It does not matter whether the next person can do it better than me. It does not matter whether a machine can. What matters is the process. The learning phase, when you are bad at it and getting less bad. The curiosity. That almost childish way of walking up to a new thing and wanting to touch it.
What stays in the sieve
Design is where I see this most clearly. Anyone can make a graphic now. Anyone can generate a logo or a layout in seconds. A lot of people who came to design for the money will leave, because the money will move.
I believe that is going to work like a sieve. It will separate the people who love this from the people who do not. I notice that 100 million people chose to play a game they will never be the best at, and I cannot ignore that.
The ones who stay will be the ones who would have done it anyway. The ones who would write the poem and tear it up.
So do the thing you love, and do it slowly enough to enjoy it. Let the machine be faster. Let the next person be better.
Nobody else can enjoy it for you.
