Many people are predicting an existential crisis as AI replaces more and more jobs. But I think this is just a symptom of the bigger reckoning we’re facing: we’ve been worshipping false idols in our entire orientation to what living is for.
More. More intelligence, more production, more value creation: the false idol of modernism. Intelligence on demand’s making people psychotic, addicted, working harder. That won’t make us happier!
Happiness. “Pursue wellness, creative self-expression, following your bliss then!” you say. Welcome to the false idol of postmodernism. When AI does this, we mostly see through it (sycophancy, slop), so why do we think our own version will save us? All empty self-expressions are equally empty. Then make the self-expression deep, right!?
Depth. Meaning, purpose, growth, transformation, authenticity, shadow integration and solving civilizational level problems (and winky self-implication)? The false idol of meta-modernism. AI is quite the therapist / coach. Your “assistant” can reframe, organize, philosophize, even solve famous math problems in an endless snake-eating-its-tail loop that never looks the core question of existence in the eye. It reflects back to us our own sisyphean quest, and even recursively makes overcoming the sisyphean quest-making into another boulder to roll up the hill. Yikes.
AI falsifies each idol by fulfilling its promises better than we ever have. Infinite intelligence didn’t make us happy, infinite self-expression is sloppy, infinite deep diving is a boulder-generating existential-avoidance-trap. “Salvation” delivered, absolution absent, idol dethroned.
AI won’t fix this for us because it is the child of these idols. Optimal for optimizing.
I’m not blaming AI, frontier labs, or even Western Civilization (whatever that means) that we turned living life into a KPI. And then made a tool that 1000xs our obsession with always-being-somewhere-else. What for? To enjoy life with our kids? To have great conversations? To appreciate nature?
Maybe we’ll even be able to use AI to help us after all. But we’ll have to reshape ourselves for us to enact it differently. Here’s what I suggest—
I don’t read a book to get the bullet points.1
I don’t raise my children to get to adulthood.
People who love to cook aren’t upset when the fruit of their labors disappears minutes after their hours of labor.
As Alan Watts said “The whole point of the dancing is the dance.”2
But wait! Isn’t this counterdependency: giving up the fancy clothes for monk’s robes, but still being attached to what we wear? Replacing “more” / “happiness” / “depth” with “presence” / “surrender” / “being” / “union”?
You tell me: are you instrumentalizing this?3 Or are you delighting in what’s already here?4
Are you “doing the work” or are you playing? Play isn’t purposeless. Play is direction without rigidity. Control without being controlling. I do prepare my kids to have a wonderful adulthood. It’s just preparing is not what family is for; it’s not for anything.
I love progress like I love getting better at rock climbing: as a happy bonus that comes from being in love. I don’t climb to progress in climbing, I progress in climbing because I love to climb.
I’ve loved fruit-bearing trees for my 39 years on this earth (gift of grandpa Myska), yet it wasn’t until a few weeks ago that I discovered the Texas persimmon: native, small black fruit with big seeds, delicious. I discovered them on a hike with a friend, from a sign on the trail (not from the internet). Now I see (and eat) them everywhere in the wild.
My daughter Ciça interrupted me as I wrote this. "hey daddy, look at this." It’s a Lego creation, bc I gently encouraged her to play quietly with legos in the dark rather than force her to keep trying to sleep; a lesson I learned from being too harsh with my son.
I read for all kinds of reasons, including to dialogue with the author, to learn how to see the world the way they see it, and become the kind of person who could write the sentence I’m reading and be proud of it, even if I disagree. I am changed, but more importantly I am touched. And reading to get information isn’t nearly as satisfying to my soul.
“In music, though, one doesn’t make the end of the composition the point of the composition. If that were so, the best conductors would be those who played fastest. And there would be composers who only wrote finales. People would go to a concert just to hear one crackling chord… because that’s the end! Same way with dancing. You don’t aim at a particular spot in the room because that’s where you will arrive. The whole point of the dancing is the dance.” -Alan Watts
Using these words to justify an endless improvement loop, itself a solution to your endless sense of not-being-good-enough, itself a solution to the problem of feeling guilty for having separated from God, itself an impossibility?
Loving your reaction, whatever it is, and the sensation of being able to experience anything at all? Unafraid to be impacted by this, me, us; unashamed and surrendered to this changing your life, because it can’t not, because your life will always become something other than what it is in each new moment of the forward march of time?
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