10 Things (I Think) I Think About the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine)

Untested Hypothesis #2: Genius isn’t genius (anymore?).

Factoid: I’m not a genius (though I once aspired to be one).

I’m recovering from that notion. There are, to be sure, lapses. Alas.  

The author Elizabeth Gilbert has a popular TED-talk¹⁶ on the subject of genius. Her thesis goes something like this: in the aftermath of her greatest success — the bestselling memoir Eat, Pray, Love — she was paralyzed with fear. What if, she asked herself, that was as good as it gets for her? What if she couldn’t produce anything as “good” (i.e., “successful”) as Eat, Pray, Love ever again? That led her to search the history of creativity (in the Western world, so to speak), and she came to the conclusion that the notion of “genius” has evolved over time into our current perception that our intellectual and creative gifts are intrinsic to us.

Here I will quote from the talk at some length (bear with me):

And that search has led me to ancient Greece and ancient Rome. So stay with me, because it does circle around and back. But, ancient Greece and ancient Rome — people did not happen to believe that creativity came from human beings back then, OK? People believed that creativity was this divine attendant spirit that came to human beings from some distant and unknowable source, for distant and unknowable reasons. The Greeks famously called these divine attendant spirits of creativity “daemons.” Socrates, famously, believed that he had a daemon who spoke wisdom to him from afar.

The Romans had the same idea, but they called that sort of disembodied creative spirit a genius. Which is great, because the Romans did not actually think that a genius was a particularly clever individual. They believed that a genius was this, sort of magical divine entity, who was believed to literally live in the walls of an artist’s studio, kind of like Dobby the house elf, and who would come out and sort of invisibly assist the artist with their work and would shape the outcome of that work.

So brilliant — there it is, right there, that distance that I’m talking about — that psychological construct to protect you from the results of your work. And everyone knew that this is how it functioned, right? So the ancient artist was protected from certain things, like, for example, too much narcissism, right? If your work was brilliant, you couldn’t take all the credit for it, everybody knew that you had this disembodied genius who had helped you. If your work bombed, not entirely your fault, you know? Everyone knew your genius was kind of lame.

It’s important (to/for me) to realize a couple of things about Gilbert’s talk.

First of all, Gilbert’s TED-talk is more than fifteen years old. Generative AI, particularly as it relates to writing (and thinking), wasn’t even a blip on the radar of mainstream consciousness at that time. Thus, her conception of genius, and her harkening back to older impersonal notions of it, has turned out to be particularly prescient (IMO).     

Second, it’s a TED-talk. One could argue plausibly that the phenomenon of TED-talks has done as much (or more) to undermine our relationship with “expertise” — particularly if we’re talking about intellectual expertise — than the Internet itself. Gilbert’s talk has, as of today (April 18, 2025), 21,932,094 plays. We can assume, of course, that it has been played multiple times by the same viewer. But it’s not a stretch to think that at least 5 million separate people have viewed the talk. Possibly many more than that. After all, one play could be viewed by dozens if not hundreds of people (or more?) at the same time. If we believe the Internet (more on this to come), there are nearly 7,100 TED-talks extant as of today, and an additional >200K more TEDx-talks. Suffice it to say, then, hundreds of millions of humans (perhaps into the billions?) have, in the past 20 years, become familiar with a very specific — accessible, formalized, convenient, quotable (ahem) — means of disseminating “Big Ideas.” We need not put forth the effort and energy, nor (crucially) expend the time, that a big thinker like Socrates (or even Liz Gilbert) has to engage the kinds of ideas writers, philosophers, poets, prophets, and assorted other weirdos have offered into the world, for better and for worse, since time immemorial. It’s all there on my device. Synthesized and curated in easy-to-consume <20-minute clips. If almost everyone has access to almost everything, maybe no one is a genius (anymore).  

NEXT: Untested Hypothesis #3: In other words, TS Eliot was right.