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There’s a pyramid in the middle of Salt Lake City. A smaller replica of one of the Egyptian pyramids. Inside it are dozens of mummified pets and a mummified man (Seriously. Check it out).
For a pet, it costs $12K and takes about 10 months to remove the organs, preserve the body, wrap it, and finally store Fido in a bronze sarcophagus. For a person, it costs about $67K. So, when grandma kicks the bucket you can have her preserved like King Tut and stored in a tiny pyramid. Here lies Queen Margot of the Beehive State.
People do odd things no typical person would ever think of. And they make a living at it.
It’s 2026 and people are practicing mummification, yet when I was in college, it seemed wild to those around me that I’d pursue an art degree. “Why not get an MBA?” my mom asked about a dozen times. “What the hell are you gonna do with an English degree?” the workers at my construction job would ask. Even my academic advisor – the head of the English department – said, “Well, English takes you down one of two paths. You teach or you go to law school.” Practical advice and technically true, but in some way my dream of writing stories for a living died a little that day. Was there room for art or was I being impractical?
People say well-meaning things that crush dreams. A living hangs in the balance.
But I did get a full time job writing. The internet of 2012 needed writers for this thing called SEO (search engine optimization). In those days it was an arms race to write enough content to get Google to find you and rank you.. You did that by throwing thousands of words into your website with a few keywords peppered around. I was an infantryman. Lobbing blog bombs on the front lines. I wrote hundreds of blog posts, eBooks, web pages, etc. Content, they called it. Content marketing specialist, they called me. I spent my first 5 years out of college creating things that probably went on to feed AI systems without my knowledge. Systems that scraped hard work from writers, thinkers, and artists across the globe. Organs removed, bandaged, and served up in a bronze sarcophagus. Somewhere between dead and alive.
People build odd things with impacts they ignore. Some lose their living to it.
So, in a world that’s decided to mummify the mere concept of art, does creativity fit? Is there still a living to be made or am I being impractical?
I find morbid hope in the fact that we live in a world with a religion that still practices mummification. If folks are out here making mummies for money, then possibilities are endless. And the AI? Well, all its best ideas are just buried in the past anyway.
People create incredible things if they have guts, dreams, and the will to chase them. Smart ones make a life out of it.