Trust the Struggle
I’ve redesigned my landing page four times. Maybe five. I don’t remember because each version felt equally wrong.
The internal monologue runs in circles: Is this professional? Does it pop? Does it capture the emotion I’m trying to convey? Each attempt lands somewhere between “acceptable” and “nowhere,” and that gap between expectation and reality becomes a weight.
I was asking the wrong question. I thought the problem was execution; I just needed the right tool, the right technique, the right aesthetic framework. I tried AI-generated art. The results felt generic, soulless—technically competent but empty. I tried hand-coded SVGs, spending hours on curves and colors. Still nothing. The closer I got to what I imagined, the more it fell short. So I kept searching, kept iterating, kept measuring myself against some phantom standard that lived only in my mind’s eye.
Then I discovered OpenProcessing.
It’s a gallery of generative art, not AI-generated, but code-generated. Artists write algorithms that create beauty. I found sketches of ripples spreading across beaches, sand dunes emerging from noise functions, particles swarming into text. Each one could run forever, slightly different each time, organic and alive.
What struck me was how unpolished they were, and how much that didn’t matter. They were genuinely interesting without demanding to be epic or impressive. The artist wrote the code, ran it, looked at it, and decided: yeah, that’s neat. Then they moved on. That’s where the power was—in the permission to say “that’s enough” and mean it.
I realized I’d been filtering all creative work through perfectionism. Right or wrong. Success or failure. Epic or forgettable. But sitting with OpenProcessing, I recognized a different standard altogether: Is this actually interesting to me? Not to an imagined audience, not to some external judge, but to me, the person who made it.
The struggle to perfect the landing page wasn’t wasted. In studying these generative sketches, I started asking questions. How do ripples propagate? What makes sand form dunes? I researched the mathematics behind them. That led me to Turing patterns, which describe how two chemicals react and diffuse to create stripes and spots. Then Scott-gray diffusion reactions—the mathematics that explain how cells organize themselves at the molecular level. I was reading papers I never expected to understand. The frustration over a landing page had opened a door to genuine discovery.
That’s what struggle does: it redirects you before you realize you need redirection.
The liberation comes from dropping the judge inside your head. You make something. You run it. You look at it and decide: is this actually interesting to me? If yes, you’re done. Not perfect. Not impressive to some imagined standard. Neat.
That’s the question I’m learning to ask now. Not “Is this good enough?” but “Do I actually like this?” The second question is honest. It cuts through the noise. It connects you to why you started making things in the first place.
So I’m still working on that landing page. But I’m approaching it differently now. I’m thinking about Turing patterns, about algorithms that self-organize, about watching chemicals diffuse into living geometry. Maybe the landing page will use those ideas. Maybe it won’t. But when I look at what I’m making, I’m not measuring it against some impossible standard. I’m asking: does this feel true? Does it interest me? Does it have something alive in it?
That’s the question that matters. Not “Is this perfect?” but “Is this me?” And that makes all the difference.