The Growth Question (May)

In the AI Story

May observed that patients could spend years in therapy producing the appearance of progress—attending sessions, speaking fluently about their problems, demonstrating insight—while their actual capacity for living courageously in the world remained unchanged. The insight was intellectual rather than operational; it did not translate into expanded ability to face difficulty. May's measure of genuine therapeutic progress was not insight but courage: Could the patient now do what they previously could not? Face conversations they previously avoided? Make decisions they previously deferred? Tolerate uncertainty they previously resolved prematurely? If the answers were no, the therapy had failed regardless of how insightful the patient had become.

Applied to creative work: the builder can become extraordinarily fluent with AI tools—prompting efficiently, iterating rapidly, generating abundant output—while creative capacity remains static. The fluency is real; the growth is absent. The builder is getting better at using the tool without getting better at the thing the tool is meant to serve: the encounter with genuinely uncertain questions about what deserves to exist. The growth question forces assessment at the level that matters: not skill with the tool but capacity for the encounter that gives the tool's output its weight and authenticity.

The question is deliberately longitudinal—six months, not six weeks—because growth is invisible in the short term. Any given session can feel productive regardless of whether encounter occurred. The accumulated effect of hundreds of sessions is what reveals whether capacity expanded or merely output increased. The builder who asks the growth question must compare not today's productivity to last week's but today's capacity for encounter to the capacity possessed before the tools arrived. This comparison requires honest self-assessment of a dimension the culture does not measure and the builder may prefer not to examine: Am I more capable of sitting with genuine uncertainty? Of making judgments under conditions where no answer is clearly right? Of bringing questions to my work that I cannot answer in advance?

May's framework suggests that many builders will answer no—not because the tools are harmful but because the tools make it possible to produce without encountering, and the path of least resistance is to use capability for production rather than for the harder work of genuine creative encounter. This is not failure of the tools; it is the predictable human tendency to avoid anxiety when avoidance becomes frictionless. The growth question is the structural correction—the deliberate assessment that reveals when the collaboration has drifted from creative partnership into sophisticated production assistance.

Origin

May's emphasis on growth over symptom-relief originated in his synthesis of existential philosophy with clinical practice. Unlike psychoanalysis (focused on resolving neurosis) or behaviorism (focused on eliminating maladaptive responses), existential therapy evaluated progress by expansion of freedom—the patient's increasing capacity to face what was previously too threatening to face. This criterion appears across May's works but receives fullest articulation in The Art of Counseling (1939) and The Courage to Create (1975).

Key Ideas

Capacity, Not Output. Measures whether the builder can do what was previously too difficult—face uncertainty, make judgments under ambiguity, bring genuine questions—not whether more gets produced.

Longitudinal Assessment. Requires six-month comparison because growth is invisible in individual sessions—the accumulated effect of hundreds of encounters reveals capacity expansion or stagnation.

Honest Self-Examination. The question cannot be answered by productivity dashboards or external validation—demands self-assessment of a dimension the culture does not measure.

Reveals Drift. If answer is no—if collaboration has not expanded capacity for encounter—the partnership has succeeded as production tool while failing as creative instrument.

Corrective Diagnostic. Not a one-time assessment but recurring practice that reveals when collaboration has drifted from genuine encounter toward mechanical production.