Are you happy in this modern world?

“Tell me something girl / Are you happy in this modern world? / Or do you need more? Is there something else you’re searchin’ for?” – Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper, Shallow

“All real living is meeting.” – Martin Buber, I and Thou

On a rare Saturday afternoon alone at home, all I wanted to do was sit in bed with my thoughts. “Feeling existential,” I texted a few friends, though existential is not exactly a feeling.

How often do I really look at the stars, I was thinking. How often do we sit together without our logistics and news cycle updates and really talk?

I put on a playlist, as I often do. After a few songs faded into the background, Bradley Cooper’s voice came through the speaker, capturing my feelings better than my “existential” texts had. No, I am not especially happy in this modern world. Yes, I am searching for something. (Also, do yourself a favor and rediscover this song.)

Lots of us seem to be in the question these days of how much of our lives and jobs AI will claim. We’re scrambling to predict and to try to wrap our arms around something new and so immense that no arms can fit around it. We want there to be essential human functions.

But what if AI and robotics take everything—the functions, the tasks, all of it? A reckoning would follow, especially in our culture where doing is so highly valued. Who are we without doing and producing? Who are we if there is little left for us to do?

Sitting with these questions, I found myself thinking about Martin Buber, the German theologian I loved in college, and his enduring idea that life’s meaning is found in relationship. Not that life’s meaning comes from having relationships, like kids or friends or a spouse or parents. Buber meant a particular way of relating to anything or anyone—house, tree, sky, or person—in the moment.

What I was craving that Saturday afternoon in bed, I realized, is more of what Buber would call an I-Thou space. When we need to do and produce on repeat, we naturally relate to the world as a collection of things we can use, or an I-It space. As in, “this computer is useful for my work.” “This conversation is useful for my business development efforts.” “Sitting in this cold plunge is useful for my physical health.”

But in the space of a moment, how I’m relating can change. I can be sitting at work next to a colleague thinking of how they can help me do my job. And then I can remember that life is still basically inexplicable, and this colleague is an inexplicable person just like me. In a flash, maybe I can have an I-Thou relationship with my colleague. Heck, maybe I can have one with Bradley Cooper’s voice. After hearing it so many times before, on Saturday it crashed through me like a lightning bolt.

As an afterthought to my “feeling existential” texts, I added an offer to chat if anyone else happened to have time on a Saturday night. I deleted that part because I couldn’t imagine my current self being fun to talk to, then added it back because I knew I was wallowing. Putting out the invite to chat was at least something different.

I did not expect anyone to respond—all mothers probably busy on a summer Saturday. Within fifteen minutes, my phone rang three times. I went to bed that night no longer wallowing and with perspective I couldn’t have gotten on my own.

“All real living is meeting,” Martin Buber says. This is life’s magic, and if AI clears up more space in our days for it, even my technophobic side reluctantly whispers: count me in for that part.