> may it bring them the predictable, sterile joy they seem to dream of
AI almost definitionally generates mediocrity, which is why I like it so much: There's an amount of unspecial spackle information I appear to require in my life—to plan a workout, to cook a sausage, to communicate my market value to Suits in an economy run largely on bullshit—and there's the poetic-humor needs, which are so much about voice and point-of-view that asking a language model to do it makes about as much sense as asking someone to have my orgasm for me.
Brilliant piece, and love the postscript - will be using those points in my own arguments about AI (and I had no idea you were an early modernist by background!). Gels very nicely with something I’m posting this week too.
Excellent. I'm fully in agreement with your AI-skepticism and AI-disdain. Your statements in the last paragraph about AI technologies getting in the way of the "messy, stupid, beautiful" things is how I feel about it as well. Those cultural preferences must be acknowledged and weighed in the balance. The fact that many pro-AI people are not weighing them in the balance says much about their own cultural values, as I'm sure you agree.
Regarding artists, room for luck, and the leap: good artists know the rules, and therefore break them, thus making art. In a sense every masterpiece is at once a blind leap and an adherence to a rule which the master is aware of, but the average artist hasn't discovered yet: or, put another way, every masterpiece reveals a little more of the vast and unimaginably ecumenical shape of the Beautiful. AI, on the other hand, is only, always, and forever, just guessing. And that's not good enough.
regarding style: I've said the following in other places so forgive me if I've said it in your comment section before, but there's an old Bruce Willis movie called "Surrogates" in which the people in a future dystopian world stay at home and interact with the world through androids — "surrogates" — who of course are all beautiful and good-looking. But one character, who doesn't want anything to do with the system, doesn't have an android: he is fat, and he eats in public (something the androids can't do). He is thus able to be trusted in a way the androids can't be. Here's what must be done in today's AI-saturated world: lean into style. Write like Tom Wolfe. Write whole 2000-word essays in one paragraph. Write in such a way that the reader can't but exclaim, "this was obviously written by a human being and not a robot; therefore it's worth my attention."
Strongly agree about leaning into style, and I’m convinced this would be the right move at the moment regardless of LLMs: as Sam says, our culture was already far too pared-down, mediocritised, obsessed with homogenising and hegemonising ideas of “craft,” “competence,” “economy”. Now is the time for dazzling high-wire stunts. Never mind the 2,000-word paragraph: I want to see 2,000-word sentences!
As ever, I'm more convinced (and encouraged) by the spiritual case against AI-generated culture. Thanks for writing that case like no one else does!
I may add a complication to your main case against "soulless, risk-averse, industrial product" which prepared the way for LLM output, if we get a little more technical. AI could only imitate us at our worst, and their uptake will have us imitating their output, imitating our worst in endless recursions. Since these models are trained on billions of texts (which necessarily include the world of simplified, soulless digital communications from corporations, etc.), and since they are iterated to replicate those patterns by efficiency-first developers and their parameters, LLMs can only be imitative. (I don't know enough about agentic AI to say anything about them.) We have long been more mechanized in our words than we should've been; then we made this tool by relying on our most mechanized styles; now the bulk of our future texts can only imitate our most mechanized words.
Hey Sam, I'm a former addict that came to substack to help others that might be struggling with the analog kind of drugs. Now, because of my ICT background, I've been sucked into this cobweb of moral decay with this misnomer, artificial intelligence. I'm mostly referring to the latest generative and predictive types, cause there were some good AI, as you quite rightly pointed out. This v2.0 it's now metamorphed into a new drug, albeit digital, and if one recognises that, then everything falls neatly into place.
The drug lords we know where they ironically live in faraway "Sun Valley." The dealers we also know, they are everywhere and have fancy titles like "Minister of Digital", isn't that quite majestic? And lastly we have the junkies, raving about this new experience, totally out of this wotld, completely blown away, it is even orgasmic, according to some previously, lonely English woman that divorced her husband after twenty years.
Indeed, powerful stuff.
Love never fails 🌾
PS Thoroughly enjoyed this, restacked a few times so I hope that helps cause this needs to be read widely.
I will appreciate any support you can give for my humble efforts to write sbout this, especially given that English is not my native language.
When Altman says "A lot more people will be able to create software, and art," it means, exactly as you articulate, that many more people will be able to create the pap that passes as art. We have been reading and watching and listening to social-tested pablum for so many years that art is synonymous with production.
Great piece, Sam, but you're hanging out with the wrong people! Come join the AI haters. We're in deep agreement here, and I wrote a piece about ChatGPT a while ago that hits some similar points. Let me know what you think when you get a chance.
One similarity your discussion of print and manuscript brings to mind is that the uptake of these new technologies seems to be massively skewed towards those who already feel disempowered. As you refreshingly declare, when it comes to writing you feel confident, empowered - perhaps largely through facing your own initiations into hardship. But the back to front education most people receive in our shmulture seems designed precisely to separate them from their own innate power.
Thank you. Indeed. These things seem to me to communicate the message "I am incapable of rejecting you," which strikes at possibly the deepest collective wound. And for which people seem prepared to pay almost any price.
Not sure I follow your second argument against the idea of AI being like the printing press. If writing “by hand” survives, wouldn’t that be an argument that AI _is_ like the printing press, in the sense that it’s a technology that seemed poised to replace the old way completely, but did not?
My argument would be that AI lacks the preservationist function of print. For example, would we be reading Shakespeare’s sonnets and plays if they hadn’t been printed? If manuscripts had survived, perhaps some classicist might still be beavering away on them. But we know that manuscripts did not survive.
Consider how easily we could have lost Dickinson’s poems, simply because they were never printed in her lifetime. Those hand-bound books she made with her manuscripts? A lot of families might have just tossed them. Or Beowulf. A single flammable copy. The mind reels.
If printing is a preservative (almost Darwinian in the sense of propagation ensuring a species’ survival), then that’s a conserving, conservative function. To my mind, that’s not at all like AI.
A related question is whether Sidney or Donne would have used the typewriter. Something that produces legible copy like printing, yet like copying by hand requires considerable effort just to make a single copy.
You’re not a “technological snob” - you’re just a snob.
“…may it bring them the predictable, sterile joy they seem to dream of.”
You sound like a Victorian brat who ate too many biscuits after lunch. The one who must always find something to look down their nose at.
“Because there’s no substitute for experiencing things on one’s own, because you should never read what everyone else is reading”
There is no experiencing beyond experiencing things on one’s own. You’re saying nothing but you say it with the classic Substack-flavored fortune cookie pseudo-insightful framing that makes it seem like you’re saying something — like a classy jewelry gift box containing only tissue paper.
And — dude you’re on Substack taking about not reading what everyone else is reading. Do I need to explain the irony? Also, let’s do away with journalism! All writing from now on will be by lottery. That way no one will read what everyone else is reading. Snob Level 100.
“the real advantage I have over all of these people is that I’m a better writer than they are.”
I don’t know how you can write this without falling out of your chair laughing. I mean, the arrogance is so much that I seriously wonder if it’s a joke or perhaps AI-generated. Can humans seriously write this?
No, this/your writing is not better than the writing of entire demographics of other people. So, not just snobby, but daft as well.
The best snobs are at least quite smart and can maintain some distance from their own presentation, by which to see where they might be bullshitting themselves.
“It seems to me that the LLMs and AGIs, and whatever else we’re calling them, only arrived in our lives because at the level of culture we were already behaving like them ourselves.”
I think your sentence is missing a word or two (oh great writer), but more importantly, your argument lacks substance. Classic causation vs correlation ambiguity.
But I’ll agree with you about LLMs that “what they threatened to replace was mostly crap anyways.” I honestly think - and I’m sorry about this - today or tomorrow, with careful prompting, these word generators can write an anti-AI screed that would be nearly impossible to distinguish from what you’ve written, and would get just as much positive feedback as what you’ve written.
Unfortunately, this isn’t some kind of self-destruct Easter egg that can be exploited, because your writing will do nothing to stop AI. It’s just an opportunity to be snobby about something, to feel superior, and to exercise a writing voice that makes you feel like something you’re not. Think urban hipsters who dress like dock workers (previously train conductors, etc).
It is really if the same greater category of slop that your disparage as “industrial”. It doesn’t serve a deeper spiritual purpose. It serves the self. Ego, attention, money, escapism, whatever. In this case, some weird desire to be super snobby.
I would recommend studying some of the philosophical classics and modern theories of rhetoric, because your arguments are consistently ill-conceived.
I don’t have time to make full replies, but here’s a roundup for your consideration:
“As it turns out, the most human element of art is the fact that it’s difficult.”
Not true, and does not follow from the prior assertion.
“That’s why many people don’t like art, in the end”
Everyone likes art.
“people increasingly turn to AIs as their therapists, girlfriends, and companions. Because the real is more difficult, requiring tension, balance, thought, engagement, and hardest of all, giving up control and certainty.”
Nevermind that people are poor, illiterate about mental health care, emotionally and intellectually stunted by culture. I agree that people have hard time giving up control and certainty. You’ve proved it many times over in your writing.
“a total non-style, composed mostly of empty, ceremonial epithets and occasional “high” pronouncements meant to trick laymen into approving choruses of ooohs and ahhhs.”
A good review of your style!
“They rake through piles of ideas and words left behind from their long-dead betters, and then—without any real, embodied knowledge of practice, meditation, or form—they scramble them into new combinations, which they hope (statistics being the dull equational version of what blood and flesh call “hope”) will represent some kind of recognizable art-piece.”
It would be so exciting if you pointed this finger at yourself. Yes, it would perfectly destroy the snobby tower you’re shouting down from — but imagine where that might lead. Every death is an opportunity for something new to be birthed. Don’t be afraid to give up control and certainty.
You do have good control over the written word. The texture is very palatable. The flavor — not to my taste but I understand why others would like it. What’s missing is substance. Nutrition. Like modern processed foods that please the palette and fill the belly but hardly nourish and often leave you craving more. Reading snobby think pieces can be as hollow an addiction as scrolling social media or sniffing used panties.
This of course challenges another argument:
“the bad artist can certainly get lucky and spin the wheel onto something others might approve of. But luck never holds.”
So no we’re determined that art is good or bad based on its popularity? Be careful, because you might be undermining your snobby arguments elsewhere in this same essay!
“a genuine artist’s genuine practice has something to do with making sure that there’s as little room left for luck as possible”
Hmm. Sound like a genuine artist doesn’t like uncertainty or giving up control, by your definition. So, are you a genuine artist?
And someone let Brian Eno know that the Oblique Strategy decks are preventing genuine art from being made!
“Any artist who has reached that altitude has made the same climb as anyone else, and breathes the same cooler, clearer air. Whatever they choose to do afterwards, it can never be denied that they got as high as they did. “
This a view of art which has been infected by modern culture, games of rank and status, narcissistic anxiety, and the rugged individualist western ego.
Imagine an actual great writer thinking “ah, how high I climbed, planting a flag for all to see, my passion and skill recognized”. Or greeting another writer with “welcome to these cooler cleaner airs you superior human.”
Thing is, snobs rarely come anywhere close to great writing.
“the messy, stupid, beautiful things most of us consider the real matter of life: sex, good conversation, doodling, taking a stroll around the block, etc. If a technology makes it harder to do these things, or pulls us farther from the intimate awareness of their importance—then that is a bad technology, and a harmful one. I hear the chorus of objections rising as I write this but rest assured, friends, I don’t care.”
This is the equivalent of an idiot on Facebook when someone makes a political argument they have no response for but want to imply is stupid: Laughing emoji.
If you could turn the laughing emoji into well-written, snobby, equally empty prose — well, I think you’ve done it.
You’re right to imagine a chorus of objections because you make a terrible argument because it can be made for practically every technological innovation in human history.
Some of the Greeks thought all written word was a “bad” technology.
“I’m not here to be convinced, only to inflict you with my skepticism and my stubborn refusal. The harder people strive to convince me otherwise, the more sure I feel…”
Should be “inflict upon you” but, more important, should be the main motivator for you to figure out a deeper purpose for writing.
If everyone adopts your stubbornness, we create a world where it’s harder for people to connect.
The very reason we have shitty art and people getting wet about the possibilities of AI is because we don’t know where to find meaning, how to connect, how to change our minds. We fear uncertainty and lack of control. The fear makes us rigid. Closed off. We want to infect others with the same condition, so that we have no painful reminders of what it might feel like to be from our cursed condition.
I know. It’s scary to open up. But it’s the most important journey that one can go on.
Vita Contemplativa cannot be in one’s soul if it’s still stuck in the prison of the mind.
Speed and convenience have their place. Just not in my heart.
Well put!
> may it bring them the predictable, sterile joy they seem to dream of
AI almost definitionally generates mediocrity, which is why I like it so much: There's an amount of unspecial spackle information I appear to require in my life—to plan a workout, to cook a sausage, to communicate my market value to Suits in an economy run largely on bullshit—and there's the poetic-humor needs, which are so much about voice and point-of-view that asking a language model to do it makes about as much sense as asking someone to have my orgasm for me.
Brilliant piece, and love the postscript - will be using those points in my own arguments about AI (and I had no idea you were an early modernist by background!). Gels very nicely with something I’m posting this week too.
Oh cool I'm interested to see what you write, then, Helena! Use away. And yes, I'm doing an Early Modern Lit Postgrad at King's College London atm.
Excellent. I'm fully in agreement with your AI-skepticism and AI-disdain. Your statements in the last paragraph about AI technologies getting in the way of the "messy, stupid, beautiful" things is how I feel about it as well. Those cultural preferences must be acknowledged and weighed in the balance. The fact that many pro-AI people are not weighing them in the balance says much about their own cultural values, as I'm sure you agree.
Regarding artists, room for luck, and the leap: good artists know the rules, and therefore break them, thus making art. In a sense every masterpiece is at once a blind leap and an adherence to a rule which the master is aware of, but the average artist hasn't discovered yet: or, put another way, every masterpiece reveals a little more of the vast and unimaginably ecumenical shape of the Beautiful. AI, on the other hand, is only, always, and forever, just guessing. And that's not good enough.
regarding style: I've said the following in other places so forgive me if I've said it in your comment section before, but there's an old Bruce Willis movie called "Surrogates" in which the people in a future dystopian world stay at home and interact with the world through androids — "surrogates" — who of course are all beautiful and good-looking. But one character, who doesn't want anything to do with the system, doesn't have an android: he is fat, and he eats in public (something the androids can't do). He is thus able to be trusted in a way the androids can't be. Here's what must be done in today's AI-saturated world: lean into style. Write like Tom Wolfe. Write whole 2000-word essays in one paragraph. Write in such a way that the reader can't but exclaim, "this was obviously written by a human being and not a robot; therefore it's worth my attention."
Strongly agree about leaning into style, and I’m convinced this would be the right move at the moment regardless of LLMs: as Sam says, our culture was already far too pared-down, mediocritised, obsessed with homogenising and hegemonising ideas of “craft,” “competence,” “economy”. Now is the time for dazzling high-wire stunts. Never mind the 2,000-word paragraph: I want to see 2,000-word sentences!
https://meanjin.com.au/essays/in-praise-of-the-long-sentence/
As ever, I'm more convinced (and encouraged) by the spiritual case against AI-generated culture. Thanks for writing that case like no one else does!
I may add a complication to your main case against "soulless, risk-averse, industrial product" which prepared the way for LLM output, if we get a little more technical. AI could only imitate us at our worst, and their uptake will have us imitating their output, imitating our worst in endless recursions. Since these models are trained on billions of texts (which necessarily include the world of simplified, soulless digital communications from corporations, etc.), and since they are iterated to replicate those patterns by efficiency-first developers and their parameters, LLMs can only be imitative. (I don't know enough about agentic AI to say anything about them.) We have long been more mechanized in our words than we should've been; then we made this tool by relying on our most mechanized styles; now the bulk of our future texts can only imitate our most mechanized words.
Believe me man, I worry about that just as much as you do. You put the issue eloquently.
Hey Sam, I'm a former addict that came to substack to help others that might be struggling with the analog kind of drugs. Now, because of my ICT background, I've been sucked into this cobweb of moral decay with this misnomer, artificial intelligence. I'm mostly referring to the latest generative and predictive types, cause there were some good AI, as you quite rightly pointed out. This v2.0 it's now metamorphed into a new drug, albeit digital, and if one recognises that, then everything falls neatly into place.
The drug lords we know where they ironically live in faraway "Sun Valley." The dealers we also know, they are everywhere and have fancy titles like "Minister of Digital", isn't that quite majestic? And lastly we have the junkies, raving about this new experience, totally out of this wotld, completely blown away, it is even orgasmic, according to some previously, lonely English woman that divorced her husband after twenty years.
Indeed, powerful stuff.
Love never fails 🌾
PS Thoroughly enjoyed this, restacked a few times so I hope that helps cause this needs to be read widely.
I will appreciate any support you can give for my humble efforts to write sbout this, especially given that English is not my native language.
Thank you for this thoughtful comment! Glad it resonated.
Oh, I do love this post.
When Altman says "A lot more people will be able to create software, and art," it means, exactly as you articulate, that many more people will be able to create the pap that passes as art. We have been reading and watching and listening to social-tested pablum for so many years that art is synonymous with production.
Great piece, Sam, but you're hanging out with the wrong people! Come join the AI haters. We're in deep agreement here, and I wrote a piece about ChatGPT a while ago that hits some similar points. Let me know what you think when you get a chance.
https://derekneal.substack.com/p/oh-no-not-another-essay-on-chatgpt
Nice Derek I absolutely will
This is the refutation of "sentient" AI I've been looking for, thank you.
Interesting. This is one of the most comprehensive essays that I've read on the subject.
Thanks Gary!
One similarity your discussion of print and manuscript brings to mind is that the uptake of these new technologies seems to be massively skewed towards those who already feel disempowered. As you refreshingly declare, when it comes to writing you feel confident, empowered - perhaps largely through facing your own initiations into hardship. But the back to front education most people receive in our shmulture seems designed precisely to separate them from their own innate power.
Very well put. People are very afraid, and this stuff is perfectly designed to play on that.
Thank you. Indeed. These things seem to me to communicate the message "I am incapable of rejecting you," which strikes at possibly the deepest collective wound. And for which people seem prepared to pay almost any price.
Not sure I follow your second argument against the idea of AI being like the printing press. If writing “by hand” survives, wouldn’t that be an argument that AI _is_ like the printing press, in the sense that it’s a technology that seemed poised to replace the old way completely, but did not?
My argument would be that AI lacks the preservationist function of print. For example, would we be reading Shakespeare’s sonnets and plays if they hadn’t been printed? If manuscripts had survived, perhaps some classicist might still be beavering away on them. But we know that manuscripts did not survive.
Consider how easily we could have lost Dickinson’s poems, simply because they were never printed in her lifetime. Those hand-bound books she made with her manuscripts? A lot of families might have just tossed them. Or Beowulf. A single flammable copy. The mind reels.
If printing is a preservative (almost Darwinian in the sense of propagation ensuring a species’ survival), then that’s a conserving, conservative function. To my mind, that’s not at all like AI.
A related question is whether Sidney or Donne would have used the typewriter. Something that produces legible copy like printing, yet like copying by hand requires considerable effort just to make a single copy.
You’re not a “technological snob” - you’re just a snob.
“…may it bring them the predictable, sterile joy they seem to dream of.”
You sound like a Victorian brat who ate too many biscuits after lunch. The one who must always find something to look down their nose at.
“Because there’s no substitute for experiencing things on one’s own, because you should never read what everyone else is reading”
There is no experiencing beyond experiencing things on one’s own. You’re saying nothing but you say it with the classic Substack-flavored fortune cookie pseudo-insightful framing that makes it seem like you’re saying something — like a classy jewelry gift box containing only tissue paper.
And — dude you’re on Substack taking about not reading what everyone else is reading. Do I need to explain the irony? Also, let’s do away with journalism! All writing from now on will be by lottery. That way no one will read what everyone else is reading. Snob Level 100.
“the real advantage I have over all of these people is that I’m a better writer than they are.”
I don’t know how you can write this without falling out of your chair laughing. I mean, the arrogance is so much that I seriously wonder if it’s a joke or perhaps AI-generated. Can humans seriously write this?
No, this/your writing is not better than the writing of entire demographics of other people. So, not just snobby, but daft as well.
The best snobs are at least quite smart and can maintain some distance from their own presentation, by which to see where they might be bullshitting themselves.
“It seems to me that the LLMs and AGIs, and whatever else we’re calling them, only arrived in our lives because at the level of culture we were already behaving like them ourselves.”
I think your sentence is missing a word or two (oh great writer), but more importantly, your argument lacks substance. Classic causation vs correlation ambiguity.
But I’ll agree with you about LLMs that “what they threatened to replace was mostly crap anyways.” I honestly think - and I’m sorry about this - today or tomorrow, with careful prompting, these word generators can write an anti-AI screed that would be nearly impossible to distinguish from what you’ve written, and would get just as much positive feedback as what you’ve written.
Unfortunately, this isn’t some kind of self-destruct Easter egg that can be exploited, because your writing will do nothing to stop AI. It’s just an opportunity to be snobby about something, to feel superior, and to exercise a writing voice that makes you feel like something you’re not. Think urban hipsters who dress like dock workers (previously train conductors, etc).
It is really if the same greater category of slop that your disparage as “industrial”. It doesn’t serve a deeper spiritual purpose. It serves the self. Ego, attention, money, escapism, whatever. In this case, some weird desire to be super snobby.
I would recommend studying some of the philosophical classics and modern theories of rhetoric, because your arguments are consistently ill-conceived.
I don’t have time to make full replies, but here’s a roundup for your consideration:
“As it turns out, the most human element of art is the fact that it’s difficult.”
Not true, and does not follow from the prior assertion.
“That’s why many people don’t like art, in the end”
Everyone likes art.
“people increasingly turn to AIs as their therapists, girlfriends, and companions. Because the real is more difficult, requiring tension, balance, thought, engagement, and hardest of all, giving up control and certainty.”
Nevermind that people are poor, illiterate about mental health care, emotionally and intellectually stunted by culture. I agree that people have hard time giving up control and certainty. You’ve proved it many times over in your writing.
“a total non-style, composed mostly of empty, ceremonial epithets and occasional “high” pronouncements meant to trick laymen into approving choruses of ooohs and ahhhs.”
A good review of your style!
“They rake through piles of ideas and words left behind from their long-dead betters, and then—without any real, embodied knowledge of practice, meditation, or form—they scramble them into new combinations, which they hope (statistics being the dull equational version of what blood and flesh call “hope”) will represent some kind of recognizable art-piece.”
It would be so exciting if you pointed this finger at yourself. Yes, it would perfectly destroy the snobby tower you’re shouting down from — but imagine where that might lead. Every death is an opportunity for something new to be birthed. Don’t be afraid to give up control and certainty.
You do have good control over the written word. The texture is very palatable. The flavor — not to my taste but I understand why others would like it. What’s missing is substance. Nutrition. Like modern processed foods that please the palette and fill the belly but hardly nourish and often leave you craving more. Reading snobby think pieces can be as hollow an addiction as scrolling social media or sniffing used panties.
This of course challenges another argument:
“the bad artist can certainly get lucky and spin the wheel onto something others might approve of. But luck never holds.”
So no we’re determined that art is good or bad based on its popularity? Be careful, because you might be undermining your snobby arguments elsewhere in this same essay!
“a genuine artist’s genuine practice has something to do with making sure that there’s as little room left for luck as possible”
Hmm. Sound like a genuine artist doesn’t like uncertainty or giving up control, by your definition. So, are you a genuine artist?
And someone let Brian Eno know that the Oblique Strategy decks are preventing genuine art from being made!
“Any artist who has reached that altitude has made the same climb as anyone else, and breathes the same cooler, clearer air. Whatever they choose to do afterwards, it can never be denied that they got as high as they did. “
This a view of art which has been infected by modern culture, games of rank and status, narcissistic anxiety, and the rugged individualist western ego.
Imagine an actual great writer thinking “ah, how high I climbed, planting a flag for all to see, my passion and skill recognized”. Or greeting another writer with “welcome to these cooler cleaner airs you superior human.”
Thing is, snobs rarely come anywhere close to great writing.
“the messy, stupid, beautiful things most of us consider the real matter of life: sex, good conversation, doodling, taking a stroll around the block, etc. If a technology makes it harder to do these things, or pulls us farther from the intimate awareness of their importance—then that is a bad technology, and a harmful one. I hear the chorus of objections rising as I write this but rest assured, friends, I don’t care.”
This is the equivalent of an idiot on Facebook when someone makes a political argument they have no response for but want to imply is stupid: Laughing emoji.
If you could turn the laughing emoji into well-written, snobby, equally empty prose — well, I think you’ve done it.
You’re right to imagine a chorus of objections because you make a terrible argument because it can be made for practically every technological innovation in human history.
Some of the Greeks thought all written word was a “bad” technology.
“I’m not here to be convinced, only to inflict you with my skepticism and my stubborn refusal. The harder people strive to convince me otherwise, the more sure I feel…”
Should be “inflict upon you” but, more important, should be the main motivator for you to figure out a deeper purpose for writing.
If everyone adopts your stubbornness, we create a world where it’s harder for people to connect.
The very reason we have shitty art and people getting wet about the possibilities of AI is because we don’t know where to find meaning, how to connect, how to change our minds. We fear uncertainty and lack of control. The fear makes us rigid. Closed off. We want to infect others with the same condition, so that we have no painful reminders of what it might feel like to be from our cursed condition.
I know. It’s scary to open up. But it’s the most important journey that one can go on.
Vita Contemplativa cannot be in one’s soul if it’s still stuck in the prison of the mind.
You have a lot more subscribers than me so you must be right. Gave me a lot to think about.
As an occasionally chastened but ultimately stubborn lover of the old dinosaur Bloom, this is a huge compliment, Michelle. Thank you!
Pretty sentimental for a prompted piece. I'll let you know in advance, I'm gonna remove this.