I wrote a piece for on the question of what human life is for in a world of increasingly capable machines. Here’s a snippet:

Increasingly advanced AI is widely considered a threat to our humanity, but it merely reveals that we’ve already been dehumanizing ourselves. By seeing ourselves as interchangeable instruments whose value is economically determined, rather than moral beings who are ends in ourselves, we begin to view ourselves as resources that can be standardized, optimized, used, and discarded, where failure to constantly “upgrade” or “upskill” means obsolescence. Think of how companies often refer to people as “human capital” or “human resources”: a set of skills and knowledge to be deployed just like any other asset; a nameless, faceless, fungible unit in a money-making machine.

So we spend our lives trying to make ourselves more useful, productive instruments: pursuing higher education not for intellectual formation but to acquire marketable skills; cultivating relationships to assuage our loneliness or expand our “network”; viewing rest and leisure as means of recovery from and preparation for more work, rather than a human necessity. In this instrumental view of humanity, anything that performs our functions faster, more efficiently, more intelligently will replace us: whether a language model that can solve calculations and generate text, or a bot that can dispense compliments on demand.

Read it here:

Wayfare

Alchemy of a Soul

In 1950, cybernetics pioneer Norbert Wiener published The Human Use of Human Beings, in which he warned of a future in which “communication machines” have a “tremendous possibility of replacing human behavior…

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a month ago · 43 likes · 2 comments · Ashley Zhang

As always, I appreciate your thoughts! I’m working on a new piece to try to articulate how, practically, we can orient toward a more humane future that treats every person as ends in themselves: across education, work, technology, etc. If you have any thoughts on that too, send me a note. :)

Thank you to the Wayfare editors, particularly and , for shepherding this piece!

II.

I’m hosting a monthly event series called The Art of Being Human at the office in San Francisco, where I invite wonderful people across disciplines to discuss various elements of the human condition in our world today. The first two were on thinking with and attention with ; I’m very excited about the upcoming ones on cultivating audacity and raising children (you heard it here first!).

If you want to receive invites, subscribe here.

III.

I’ve been feeling some resistance to writing publicly, as exemplified by my silence here. I wrote this in my end-of-year reflection:

This year, I’ve been plagued by a sense of futility around writing. Words have started to feel flimsy and fickle, fish slipping through the rivers of my memory with hardly a splash. It’s hard for me to recall what I’ve read online, despite spending hours scrolling every day. My mind feels oversaturated yet arid, crowded with headlines and tweets and memes that leave little room for spacious musings. I crave craggy prose, writing that pokes and itches and stretches my mind, that catches me by surprise.

What’s the use of contributing to this textual morass? I grappled with this question for months, a disorienting experience for someone who has derived much pleasure and identity from writing. But I’ve come to understand that writing matters not just for the output, but for how the writer is transformed in the process. The existence of language models that can spit out fluent prose on command, and of writers far more talented than I, does not make my own act of writing futile. Writing is not just about conveying information in the most efficient way possible, but about shaping and articulating our thoughts so we can better understand who we are and what we believe. In this sense, it’s central to our flourishing: our ability to become ourselves.

Part of my efforts to recover my desire to write, and my written voice, is spending less time reading Substacks (yes, I see the hypocrisy in sending out a Substack proclaiming this) and more time reading books with idiosyncratic styles.1 I would consider it a failure if I sacrificed the integrity of my style and ideas for mainstream appeal — and, truthfully, I think we’re all craving something craggier and less Claude-like.

I recently went to the Legion of Honor’s Manet and Morisot exhibition, where I was struck by the contrast between the two artists’ styles when portraying similar themes: Manet felt overwrought (I still love him though!), and Morisot more fluid and free. So too do I think of Alysa Liu’s Olympic free skate, bursting with effervescent joy, compared to the countless technically excellent and elegant, yet somewhat spiritually inhibited routines.

More and more, I feel the tug between the intimate and the prominent, the polished and the primal. I haven’t yet resolved where I want my writing to fall. Hence: this note to you.

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If you’re not familiar with Burning Man, here’s a quick primer. Every year, tens of thousands of people descend upon Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, where a one-week “city” is erected and torn down without a trace. The city is governed by 10 Principles — radical self-reliance, inclusion, self-expression, gifting, immediacy, among others — aimed at creating a society that is participatory, non-commercial, and, ideally, more creative, communal, and free.

I went because I wished to participate in an alternative way of living, in a society governed by different norms than our default. What happens when we remove money from the relational equation; when we welcome the stranger rather than suspect or disregard them; when we are encouraged to present ourselves — however flamboyantly or demurely, clothed or unclothed — as we wished? What happens when a community attends to norms of generosity and reciprocity? What emerges when the default is not to consume but to contribute and create; when art and music are considered not luxuries but necessities? What if we could — literally, physically — build a different way of living from the dusty ground up?

What I experienced was not a desert utopia, as Burning Man is often sold, but something closer to what Ivan Illich called conviviality: of “individual freedom realized in personal interdependence,” where human autonomy, skillfulness, and creativity are expanded. To Illich, a desirable future depended on choosing a life of action over a life of consumption, on “engendering a lifestyle which will enable us to be spontaneous, independent, yet related to each other.” Burning Man offered me a clearer glimpse of what that might feel like in practice.

One of Burning Man’s core principles is radical self-reliance: the encouragement of individuals to “discover, exercise and rely on their inner resources.” What this looks like in practice is the expectation that every person brings everything they need to survive with them at all times, in any scenario: goggles, water, food, dust mask. Yet, this is not meant to promote an individualism and disregard for others. Another principle, participation, holds that “transformative change, whether in the individual or in society, can occur only through the medium of deeply personal participation.”

In our world today, individual interest and the common good are often believed to be in tension. But, as Tocqueville asserted in his concept of “self-interest rightly understood,” the two need not be in conflict. An “enlightened regard,” he wrote, “constantly prompts [people] to assist one another.” In the harsh conditions of the desert, this was brought into starker clarity: each of us is inextricably tied to the other— not only for connection, but also for support when things break down and our self-sufficiency inevitably falters. It is in our self-interest to lend a hand to others, even absent any tie or obligation to them, because strengthening the collective trust will create a culture of mutual obligation that ultimately serves us all.

The playa was not a gentle place to learn such lessons. The first few days brought 50-mile-per-hour dust storms and downpours that bent metal poles, tore through tarps, and dampened spirits. Some veteran Burners said it was the worst weather they had experienced in over a decade; others packed their bags and left. We spent the first few days rebuilding our camp infrastructure, which offered its own education: mastering the impact driver, deciphering poorly-written carport instructions, lag-bolting and bungee-strapping tents and poles and tarps beneath the unforgiving sun.

As the skies cleared and the mud dried, I ventured to the Black Rock Public Library, run by volunteers who hauled thousands of books to the desert and threatened unspeakable consequences if a volume were not returned within a year. From there, I checked out a copy of Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone. Published in 2000, even before the emergence of digital social networks, the book chronicled the unraveling of American community life: the decline in civic associations, religious groups, and hobbyist communities like bowling leagues. Such institutions, Putnam argued, were sustained by a principle he called “generalized reciprocity”: the willingness to do something for another without expecting anything immediately in return, with faith that others will do the same.

In the days that followed, I observed this ethic everywhere. A woman, seeing me peer into a tent where she and her campmates were dancing, waved me in and poured me a hot cup of spiced coffee. A neighboring camp braved the storms to deliver steaming bowls of tonkotsu ramen, crowned with fatty chashu slices and slivers of green onions. Strangers jumped into an impromptu jam session, harmonizing seamlessly without speaking a word or even knowing each others’ names. Everywhere, there was an eagerness to contribute: a helping hand, a listening ear, a hot meal, a cold drink, a photograph, a song.

Too often today, community is treated as a product, created for our convenience and enjoyment, yet requiring little obligation. We forget that community is not an established entitlement but an ever-evolving practice, sustained through countless small acts and decisions that its members make each day. Every gesture can strengthen or erode trust and mutuality: a piece of litter discarded or retrieved, a hand extended in help or eyes averted in indifference. To be part of something is to give a piece of yourself to it, and to trust that, in turn, it will shape and stretch you beyond what you could do alone.

As I biked around the playa throughout the week, I often thought of this Steve Jobs quote: “Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you, and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.” It was astonishing to realize that every structure, every artwork, had been made by someone on the playa, who had spent hours, days, weeks, into realizing an idea, for no practical reason other than sheer beauty and inspiration.

Some of my favorite pieces, pictured throughout this piece:

• Clarisse McLellan Manual for Civilization: a Fahrenheit 451-inspired library filled with banned books that people could rescue before the library burned with the Man (I saved Montaigne’s essays and Weber’s Protestant Ethic!)

• Kauyumari Ceremonial Center: a hollow Wixárika deer studded with corn kernels, beads, and stained glass

• Ad Astra: a Stonehenge-esque arrangement topped with stainless steel, bridging prehistoric and futuristic design

• Moth: representing three facets of human striving: will (sword), understanding (book), and exploration (lantern)

Being in proximity to these works reminded me that awe-inspiring creations are not just made by professionals or masters of the past, but by ordinary humans like you and me, who dare to dream up strange, whimsical, improbable things and bring them into the world, not because they serve any practical utility, but because they delight, move, and remind us of what a gift it is to be human: the long history and rich cultures we’re embedded in, the creativity that springs forth when we are free to play without purpose. It gave me hope that, whatever the future looks like, wherever we may go, we’ll find a way to come together and make and marvel at beauty.

Agnes Callard writes in Aspiration that we must first imitate a new value we hope to embody before we can truly make them our own. In a sense, Burning Man is a laboratory of aspiration: for a week, each person is challenged to be more generous, more loving, more open, less self-conscious, than who they are in the “default world.” It is a collective game of play-pretend that allows us to try on new, perhaps freer, costumes of who we wish to become, so that we might feel more comfortable donning them in our regular lives.

I don’t know if or when I’ll return to Burning Man — I don’t like EDM, I’m a lousy hedonist, and I wilt when not in proximity to bodies of water. I’m not blind to its contradictions: a city devoted to decommodification that flaunts its decadence; the dissociative drug-fueled spectacles in pursuit of transcendence.

But it did imprint the belief that we can furnish a more convivial society in whatever corner of the world we return to. We can extend kindness to strangers without expecting anything in return. We can dare to try things beyond the bounds of what we think we are “good” at or capable of — I joined the Playa Choir with only a vague idea that I was maybe a soprano — knowing that aspiring beyond our current selves begins with a wobbly first step. We can engage in small acts of care, not because we are commanded to, but because the foundation of a good society is built by individuals who remain attentive and generous to one another even when it’s inconvenient, thankless, and hard.

All that being said: my copy of Bowling Alone is due back at the Black Rock City Public Library next August. Returning it — eventually — is a promise I intend to keep.

Growing up, I felt that I had little power over my life. I was told that things were the way they were because someone older and more powerful had decided so; that I could not question or push back; that I had to accept the world as it was, without any means of voicing my dissent or desires.

Over time, I felt the world open to me, as I found people who would listen and take me seriously and learned to assert myself. But the dominant feeling of my childhood was one of powerlessness: that I was unheard and unseen, that my life was not fully my own, and that the world was orchestrated by forces I didn’t understand and couldn’t touch.

That’s why I became interested in the questions of power, and so sensitive when power is wielded to restrict our freedom and flourishing. And I recognized this in the realm of technology: the same sense of powerlessness in our relationship to the digital world and our devices. We are told that technological “progress” is something that will be imposed upon us — that AI will take over our jobs, whether we like it or not; that we must accept the devices and algorithms imposed upon us, despite very clear evidence of the harms they cause to our psyches, attention, and self-esteem — and that we have no real say in the matter.

To participate in the digital world today means consenting to opaque systems whose rules are established by someone else. We are given tools that we are told are “empowering,” yet they come with defaults we didn’t choose and often can’t change. Many people engage with their digital devices through a mode of resistance — hence the rise of digital detox programs, app blockers, and phone lock boxes. We’ve recognized that there’s something harmful about the way digital systems currently engage with us — it feels manipulative of our desires, corrosive to our attention, eroding to our thinking, confining of our bodies. And yet, they’re so entangled in our lives and systems that we feel trapped between two extremes: to either embrace them as they are, or reject them entirely.

But I don’t think the answer is to retreat off-grid. There’s a seductive purity to this — a life of pristine individuality, untouched by digital harms — but it can be a form of abdication, a refusal to engage with the responsibilities and benefits of society. Even Thoreau, during his time at Walden, went to his mother’s home for laundry and dinner. We are woven into one another’s lives in both digital and physical ways, and a future in which we must choose between the two seems regressive. Our digital world is full of possibility; its connectivity can broaden our worlds immensely and bring people and opportunities in our lives that we otherwise wouldn’t encounter. It is something we ought to try to remake, not to reject in its entirety.

I wanted to figure out what it actually means for technology to empower people — not in the shallow ways companies have co-opted it to sell incremental aspirations and demand higher productivity within pre-defined limits. Rather, I wanted a definition that was much deeper and truer to its original meaning — not to “do more” in the sense of increased productivity and efficiency, but in an expansive sense where we have a greater understanding of the complex systems in our lives and a greater capacity to respond to them.

One of the clearest depictions of it, I found, was in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s essay in Harper’s, “The Reenchanted World.” In it, he writes about his relationship with computers, how it became a more pervasive, omnipresent force in his life without an accompanying deepening of his understanding of it. 

“About technology,” he wrote, “I had never made an independent decision, always just passively going along with the flow of innovations, never immersing myself in anything, always surrendering to the feeling of standing ever further from the world. Not having control, but somehow being controlled — that was the feeling. Not controlled in any personal way; it was more like being steered by some kind of invisible power, always there yet out of reach. How to regain control from something invisible?”

What Knausgaard felt was a sense of alienation, as the philosopher Gilbert Simondon defined it: not caused by technology itself, but by our lack of knowledge of it. When we treat technology as either a mere tool or a mystical threat, denying its inherent complexity or elevating it to something beyond our capacity to understand, we forfeit the possibility of a meaningful relationship: not one built upon domination and subjugation, but an ecology of care.

Technology is not our enemy or our saving grace; it is an entity that we must understand in order to form a proper relationship with it. But how?

To answer that question, Knausgaard traveled to an island off the coast of Athens to meet the writer James Bridle, author of the books New Dark Age and Ways of Being. Bridle is a thinker who investigates how our digital world reaches into our physical one, forming networks of ecological intelligence that defy simplistic binaries between human and machine, organic and artificial, natural and technological. 

Bridle’s answer was, in essence, to learn by doing: 

“There’s really nothing you can learn abstractly. The only thing you can do is experience it and do it yourself. You have to do it, you have to experience it, it has to happen to you. Bodily, physically, because you’re part of the world.”

Bridle described how he got himself out of a state of “climate depression” by learning to build simple renewable energy devices he called solar toys: an oven, a heater, wind turbines. It moved him from a position of paralysis to one of empowerment by building a greater capacity to respond: 

“Before, my thing was that technology is big and scary and worrying, and one of the major problems with the Western world at the moment is that we live within this society of very large, complex systems that nobody really understands and everyone basically tries not to think about. That in itself is going to fuck you up. For years I have been teaching people — I can do like a half-day seminar on programming, or giving little tours of the physical structure of the internet. The seminar manifests it, concretizes it, and kind of puts handles on this big system so that it is no longer existentially terrifying. The weight you see lift off people when you do that is extraordinary. It transforms it from being this completely unknowable force that just acts on their lives into being a thing in their lives that they can see the edges of and conceptualize a little bit better. I call it technological literacy… a feeling of competence in the face of very complex systems.”

We learn by doing, whether it’s speaking a new language, building a table, or writing software. And as the world becomes increasingly digital and complex, it is incumbent upon technologists to create more levers for people to not just access, but to reshape this world — and upon all of us to learn how to use these levers through tinkering and playing with them. Creating software is one such lever — it gives us a handle on the vast digital system by allowing us to modify our environments and determine how the digital world touches our lives.

When we understand how the systems in our lives function, and know where the levers for change are, we gain the power to make better, more informed choices for our own lives. This literacy is something that nobody can take from us. Companies can create products that feel extractive or misaligned with our needs, but if we have the power to create our own, and if we create the conditions that allow for that kind of freedom, we will always be capable of imagining and building better alternatives.

And this extends beyond technology. We feel powerless in any system — food, healthcare, governance, education — when we don’t know where the levers for change are, or how to pull them. This powerlessness often curdles into anger. It’s why so many celebrated the killing of the UnitedHealthcare CEO, because he represented a system in which people feel they have no avenue for recourse. The promise of education and of technology is to give us better handles in the world — to make the impenetrable more legible, the rigid more malleable; and to expand the horizons of what our lives can become.

But this self-education won’t happen by default — it is something we must seek, demand, and undertake ourselves.

“The purpose of the system is to reproduce the existing power dynamics of that system again and again,” Bridle stated. “That is what it does. Society has no interest in educating you in how technology works. Because then you make your own technology and you make different technology, and you upset the economic power balance and so forth. But it is doable, and people are doing it all the time. You can do it yourself.”

The people I admire most have always sought to create handles, even if they didn’t think of their work in those terms. Alice Waters, pioneer of the farm-to-table movement and founder of Chez Panisse, championed a deeper understanding of the food we eat: how and where it is grown, and by whom. Maria Montessori believed even very young children should engage directly in the world: chopping vegetables, sweeping floors, making decisions for themselves. The motley crew behind the Whole Earth Catalog curated and shared tools and information to help people become self-reliant, so any reader could "find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested."

What they shared was a desire to deepen our literacy of — and participation in — the world, not to outsource our understanding and decision-making to distant authorities. And through that participation, we don’t just become more capable humans: we come to relish the world more fully.

One of the most moving illustrations of this kind of empowerment in Knausgaard’s piece wasn’t about a piece of technology, but about a garden.

For years, Knausgaard hired a gardener to care for his garden a few times in the summer, but he himself did little more than mow the lawn and occasionally sit outside. Though he saw the garden every day, he felt strangely detached from it — letting the trees wilt during a drought, neglecting the flowers until they withered. He felt alienated from his garden, and it from him. But at his gardener’s urging, Knausgaard planted some flowers himself. And a strange thing occurred: he found himself thinking about them, even as he drifted off to sleep. The more he tended to his garden, the more his own care and curiosity grew, and the more the garden opened itself to him:

“In a few weeks the garden had gone from being nothing — “the garden,” essentially empty and interchangeable, with no meaning except as a place I happened to be in — to something I was deeply familiar with and cared about, thought about, nurtured. It had become full of meaning.”

That, I feel, is the heart of what it means to be empowered: to understand and care for the world more deeply, to take part in its shaping, and in doing so, to imbue it with meaning. When we take responsibility to understand and engage with the systems in our lives, we become more alive to them, and they to us. 

Isn’t that a beautiful thing?

Thank you to my colleagues at Imbue for the many conversations that inspired and informed this piece.

A good future, as told to us by leaders of many AI companies, goes something like this: we build artificial general intelligence (AGI), or “autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work”1; AGI takes over all knowledge work, leaving humans to do mostly physical labor until robots become sufficiently advanced to take over; AGI generates enormous material abundance; the wealth is distributed through some form of universal basic income, so we can all live in a post-work, post-scarcity society where we are free to lie in the lap of AI-generated luxury.

This is the future we are told we are headed toward (granted, if all goes right); this is the future we are told to desire. And many technologists are fervently building toward it. The New York Times recently profiled an AI company, Mechanize, which is developing virtual work environments to enable a “fully automated economy” that they claim would lead to a world of “radical abundance.” What they envision humans do in this future without work, or how they propose we even make a humane transition to it, they do not make clear; nor do they seem to be particularly concerned about.

Others have proposed ideas for what this post-labor world could look like. Writer Jasmine Sun recently outlined a vision of “eternal undergrad,” in which people’s basic needs are met and they derive meaning through living in community and participating in leisurely activities.

It’s a comforting vision, sure, but a hollow one. Even with communities and hobbies, most of us want our lives to amount to something more. Those who have already achieved a post-work, post-scarcity life today have found that material abundance and endless free time do not make for a meaningful life on their own. The founder of Loom, having sold his company and found himself in the position of never having to work again, wrote: “Everything feels like a side quest, but not in an inspiring way… I have infinite freedom, yet I don’t know what to do with it, and, honestly, I’m not the most optimistic about life.”

But more dangerous than a lack of purpose is the erosion of human agency that comes from outsourcing work — and with it, real responsibility — to machines. When we relinquish the effort of meaningful work, we also limit our capacity to grow and restrict the freedom to shape our own lives and contribute to the world on our own terms.

Work, at its best, plays many roles in our lives: beyond fulfilling material needs, it can provide structure, community, and resources to help us grow. It gives us a foothold in society, a sense of moral responsibility and participation that passive consumption or leisure alone cannot provide.

Admittedly, most jobs today fall short of this ideal. But rather than scrap work altogether, we should ask what meaningful work entails, and consider how we can enable more people to pursue it. This begins with reimagining work not merely as a means of making a living, but as a vocation: a personal calling that aligns our gifts and interests with the world’s needs, that helps us unfold into ourselves while serving something greater.2

It’s easy to see the appeal of a post-work society. For many today, work is dull, draining, and sometimes dehumanizing. We often view it as an unfortunate necessity in a capitalist society, not as a meaningful component of our lives. Why not rid ourselves of it if we have the chance?

But work can (and should) be more than a means of fulfilling our material needs — it can provide the means through which we discover and develop our gifts in service of society. This is an idealistic conception of work, of course, but no less idealistic than the idea of ridding ourselves of work altogether — and ultimately a much more fulfilling one.

As humans, we desire to be useful. Without a sense of real responsibility, we risk falling into a state of existential despair, convinced that our existence bears no significance, that our disappearance would go unnoticed. Beyond a feeling of indispensability, work provides a sort of moral weight; a person without such responsibility, Simone Weil writes, “represents nothing at all in the economic life of his country, and the voting paper which represents his share in its political life doesn’t hold any meaning for him.”

By relinquishing real responsibility in the world, we risk relegating ourselves to a pet-like status: creatures with little power or obligation to shape the world around us. This might seem like liberation — to be freed of commitments and burdens, so we can pursue endless frivolities — but it is a hollow form of freedom. Even the most beloved pets are entirely at the mercy of their owners when their food, shelter, and comfort can be given or withdrawn at will.

True freedom lies not in the absence of responsibility, but in the cultivation of self-sufficiency — having confidence in our ability to survive and thrive, no matter the circumstances. Work is one of the primary means by which we build this capacity. It teaches us to adapt to changing conditions, shoulder responsibility, and develop the self-trust that enables us to tackle even greater challenges. It gives us strength and security in our place in the world — knowing that we have earned what is ours, and that even if it is unjustly taken from us, we can begin again.

To live as a dependent, no matter how comfortably, is to live without agency. If our housing, food, education, and other necessities were managed by a centralized authority that could rescind them at any time — based on behavior, compliance, or opaque criteria — we would not be free. To rely on such a system, whether governmental or technological, for the most basic conditions of life is to tether ourselves to apparatuses we neither control nor fully comprehend. We may feel cared for, but we would be denied the dignity of self-determination.

To exercise our self-determination, we must consider our life to be an ongoing project — something to shape and unfold, not merely endure. This involves learning and improving in ways that matter to us and that serve something beyond ourselves. An “eternal undergrad” society may offer endless education, but it lacks a vital counterpart: meaningful contribution. The aim of higher education is not to prolong adolescence, but to shape us into fuller human beings, capable of participating in the world.

We rejoice when a child takes her first wobbly steps, knowing that in eighteen years she’ll step out of her childhood home, then into jobs, relationships, and responsibilities that continually ask more of her — and help her become more herself in return. Life unfolds in stages, each with its own set of duties and privileges; without this progression, we become feeble and restless.

A more meaningful vision of economic possibility is not to create “radical abundance” by automating away human work, but to create a world in which we can support the kinds of work that may not be financially lucrative, yet are meaningful and essential to the human experience: caring for the young, the sick, and the elderly; tending to the earth; creating music, literature, and art; pursuing scientific inquiries; exploring uncharted territories. A richer society would be one that refuses to offload such responsibilities to machines, and instead devises economic systems that sustain and dignify the kinds of labor that too often go unrecognized or under-supported.

We might begin by reimagining work not simply as labor performed for someone else’s ends, but as a vocation. Our current structures rarely fulfill this ideal by default. The goal should not be to make humans do less, but to enable more people to do the kind of work that is interesting, meaningful, growthful, and deeply satisfying — work that contributes to the world not just economically, but by making it more beautiful, just, and humane.

Let the machines take the dangerous and degrading, the menial and mechanical — but let us not hand over the dignity of meaningful work simply because it demands effort. A truly ambitious vision for technology would not be to replace what humans already do, but to expand what we are capable of doing altogether. There is still so much more to be done, by humans and machines. We might as well roll up our sleeves and get to it.

A few months into dating my boyfriend, I told him that I do not wish to be loved for being good, but for being me. I couldn’t quite articulate what I meant at the time, to his exasperation and mine, but I think it was this: I wish to be loved not for particular virtues or accomplishments, but for my entirety: my ambitions and appetites, my curiosities and contradictions, my fears and foibles, my warmth and will.

From early in my life, and for many years, I felt flattened by a society that seemed to view me not as a whole person, but as a collection of traits to be measured and ranked: assessing intelligence through standardized test scores, determining desirability through dating app matches, evaluating performance through productivity metrics. 

Though this flattening makes us legible, it erodes the particularities that make us human. More insidiously, it narrows our sense of possibility — both for our individual lives and our shared future. When we reduce our worth to narrow metrics of intelligence and utility, rather than recognize ourselves as singular beings with unique gifts and potentialities, we lose the capacity to see ourselves fully and imagine who we might become. We become “one-dimensional,” as Herbert Marcuse warned — shaped to serve the logic and values of the prevailing system; stripped of our individuality and freedom to define our own ends. 

Now, we live in a world with ever-more capable machines, which already surpass human abilities in many cognitive domains.1 It’s no surprise that many are worried about human demoralization, or our ability to “live meaningful lives in a world where [we] are no longer the smartest and most capable entities in it.”2 This concern is understandable: if we map our identity and worth to our intellect, then it is only natural that the existence of a more “intelligent” entity stirs up fears of our own obsolescence. 

But just as the existence of a more intelligent person doesn’t make us obsolete, neither does the existence of an intelligent machine. Demoralization does not come from no longer being the “smartest and most capable” people in the room — most people, myself included, already aren’t — but from living in a world where we are told and shown continuously that our gifts are not valuable, that we are replaceable, that the future will be imposed upon us by powerful entities with little regard for our hopes and lives. 

Our ability to live a meaningful life has never depended on “intellectual supremacy,” both as individuals and as a human species. Rather, it hinges upon our capacity for self-determination — what the philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt called “the highest and most harmonious development of [our] powers to a complete and consistent whole.” 

This perspective allows us a much more expansive view of a human future alongside AI: one not organized around an intellectual hierarchy, where humans are demoted to second-class citizens while machines do the “real thinking,”3 but one in which AI can be used to support our capacity to think, experiment, and become.

Perhaps the creation of artificial intelligence is a chance for us to realize that competing on a narrow definition of intelligence is not, and never should have been, the way to value ourselves and organize society. We have the opportunity to reimagine society’s role as a steward of individual potential, instead of a standardizing and sorting mechanism. Rather than shepherding everyone through factory-model schooling and career paths, we can instead create the conditions that allow every person to discover and become themselves — a process that architect Christopher Alexander called unfolding. 

Unfolding requires multi-dimensional exploration. It consists of an iterative process of contemplation, experimentation, and self-direction: the ability to think deeply about what we value, making imperfect decisions based on incomplete knowledge, act upon these decisions, and learn from the process. We learn not by taking pre-plotted steps toward an established goal, but by undertaking a looping process of iteration within the unknown — making attempts, making mistakes, making amends; and trying again. 

But many systems we inhabit today — economic, technological, cultural, educational — do not foster our unfolding. They reward efficiency over exploration, predictability over originality, and compliance over curiosity. A school system that emphasizes standardized testing leaves little room for intellectual wandering. A workplace that prioritizes quarterly metrics and revenue often discourages long-term thinking and the risk-taking essential to real innovation. Even the algorithms that shape our online experiences steer us toward the familiar, reinforcing our preferences instead of expanding them.

In such environments, the ability to think for oneself or act in alignment with one’s values becomes harder to access. Whether by overt coercion or subtle mechanisms like algorithmic nudging, our capacity to unfold diminishes. Over time, we are shaped less by personal choice, but by external pressure. We forget how to exercise our agency — or that we even have the right, or the power, to do so.

Our task now is to design institutions and technologies that treat humans not as instruments to be optimized, but as beings who must unfold in their own way, on their own time. It requires creating tools and spaces that allow for greater freedom, personalization, creation, and exploration — that expand our capacity for discovery and expression, rather than sandpapering humans to fit pre-made molds.

Each of us is a unique gestalt of genes, gifts, experiences, peculiarities, and intelligences. Like the fable in which different animals are judged solely by their ability to climb a tree, if we value humans on a one-dimensional scale of intelligence, we will suffer a great human tragedy: depriving ourselves of the opportunity to discover and live into the fullness of who we are, and what we can contribute to the world. The real danger, then, is not that machines will replace us, but that we will have already flattened ourselves to be more like machines.

Thank you to the people, readings, and conversations that helped develop this piece:

• AI Will Change What It Is to Be Human. Are We Ready? (Avital Balwit & Tyler Cowen, The Free Press)

• Is My Toddler a Stochastic Parrot? (Angie Wang, The New Yorker)

• Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process (, Escaping Flatland)

• The Case Against Perfection (Michael Sandel, The Atlantic)

• ’s talk at the Sana AI Summit

• The Limits of State Action (Wilhelm von Humboldt)

• One-Dimensional Man (Herbert Marcuse)

• Unflattening (Nick Sousanis)

• The Luminous Ground (Christopher Alexander)

• — thank you to Brendan for pointing me toward Humboldt

• editing workshop — thank you to Taylor and John for identifying the central kernel of this idea and encouraging me to develop it

• My colleagues at Imbue for the many conversations and feedback — particularly Jamie, Kanjun, and Matt

When I started this blog a few years ago, I was interested in the broad questions of human flourishing for a practical, personal reason: to figure out how I wished to live. At the time, I was a lost college student, fumbling for purpose and direction, both literally and figuratively wandering in the wilderness. Much of what I questioned were the default narratives and dominant coercions, all of which seemed to be shuttling me toward ends that were not my own. I mused about this in a dreamy, rudderless manner — hence, the adoption of the Luftmensch.

Today, I’m still thinking of those questions, but with greater direction and determination — to figure out how we, as humans, can live fully and freely in an age of intelligent machines. The age-old questions of human flourishing have taken on a renewed urgency — not only in the realm of AI, where I work, but in politics, education, science, and more. To build a future worth inhabiting, we must examine what it means to live well, and think critically about what we ought to aspire toward. Otherwise, we merely become instruments of others’ invisible whims.

Thus, this rebrand.

Soft Power is an examination of the invisible architectures of influence that shape humans and societies, and an inquiry into how we might choose to engage with them. To wield soft power is to affect others through attraction rather than coercion; it is subtle and often alluring, which makes it harder to recognize and resist.

Technologies exercise soft power by shaping the world through surveillance, mediation, and nudging. We experience this through algorithms that curate our desires and direct our attention, and through digital systems that shape social norms and transform the physical world. Think of the falling literacy rates among college-educated Americans, exacerbated by AI tools that help students cheat themselves out of learning; the rise of “Instagram face,” where women chisel and plump their faces for a selfie-optimized look; the loss of walkable communities and the fragmentation of communities as cities were planned around cars; the normalization of anonymous callousness and the erosion of deep, meaningful, in-person friendships through dating apps and social media; even how tomatoes were bred to be hardier — and thus less juicy, flavorful, and ripe — to withstand the mechanical tomato harvester (tomato haters — a real tomato has never been tried!).

Our technologies have always molded our environments and behaviors, often in ways that are difficult to anticipate. That makes it all the more essential to interrogate these technologies as they’re being built and adopted — to recognize soft power as it’s being exercised.

But power itself is neither good nor evil. The real consideration is: how is it exercised, and in service to what?

I am just as interested in how soft power can be wielded for good — how we might design better narratives, cultivate richer aspirations, and build better tools, institutions, and systems that help us orient toward our highest human values and the long-term, collective good.

I’ll end with a promise. Every week, I’ll share some readings and my soft takes. And I’ll continue to muse about technology and humanity — what it means to live a rich human life in this age. I have some other projects brewing on this, too. I can’t wait to share them with you.

In his 1942 short story "Funes, the Memorious," Jorge Luis Borges writes of a boy cursed with perfect memory.

Where ordinary people would see three glasses of wine, Funes saw “all the shoots, clusters, and grapes of the vine. He remembered the shapes of the clouds in the south at dawn on the 30th of April of 1882, and he could compare them in his recollection with the marbled grain in the design of a leather-bound book which he had seen only once, and with the lines in the spray which an oar raised in the Rio Negro on the eve of the battle of the Quebracho."

His mind teemed with “nothing but details, almost contiguous details,” too crowded for rest. At night, he would lie in bed, tormented by his knowledge of “every crevice and every molding of the various houses which surrounded him.” His memory was like a “garbage disposal,” overflowing with images and sensations and dreams that he could neither sort through nor make sense of.

“To think,” Borges writes, “is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract.” Funes, who remembered everything, could not think.

What was once fantastical has now become real.

In early April, OpenAI expanded ChatGPT’s memory feature, enabling it to save and reference all past conversations with a user. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tweeted: “it points at something we are excited about: ai [sic] systems that get to know you over your life, and become extremely useful and personalized.”

This revives a question that intrigued so many writers like Borges: when machines can record of everything we do and say, how will that change the way we remember, think, and act?

As Funes exemplified, the ability to forget is critical to our freedom. Externalizing memory may strengthen the reliability of our narratives, but it risks constraining the scope of our lives by limiting our ability to think creatively and to act freely.

With technologies that can convert our experiences into information preserved in perpetuity, we should ask: are we building a memory palace, or a prison?

Humans have long worried about the effects of memory aids on our minds.

Around 370 BC, Socrates warned against the perils of writing, claiming that it would “produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them.”

Unlike computers, our memory is not a storage unit, but a muscle; it must be exercised to prevent atrophy. Anyone who has labored to memorize a poem knows the feeling of the poem gradually settling into one’s body, capable of being conjured at any moment. To commit something to memory is to make it a part of oneself, to allow it to imprint upon one’s soul and evolve one’s inner life.

A memory, too, is something that no one can take from us. For many prisoners in Soviet gulags, poetry remained a “secret savior” because it could be silently recited even when the prisoner’s external reality remained out of their control. Soviet writer Eugenia Ginzburg recalled in her memoir: “They had taken my dress, my shoes and stockings, and my comb ... but [poetry] it was not in their power to take away.”

Memory also enables creativity. We form new ideas by making novel connections between stored concepts and memories, in flashes of insight that arise unbidden, unconsciously, from the corners of our minds. Information must reside within us to be drawn into this unconscious process; if we outsource the raw material of memory to machine, we thin the fertile soil in which new ideas take root.

Ted Chiang’s 2013 short story “The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling" imagines a product called Remem that records a user’s life and grants them frictionless recall. The narrator is worried that reliance on artificial recall will prevent humans from revisiting memories on their own and imbuing them with emotional meaning. He fears that if memories never fade or distort, the rawness of old wounds might never soften into forgiveness; childhood memories may not be romanticized; life might become "full of facts but devoid of feeling."

“An obvious drawback to such reliance is the possibility that people might become virtual amnesiacs whenever the software crashes,” the narrator reflects. “But just as worrying to me as the prospect of technological failure was that of technological success: how will it change a person’s conception of herself when she’s only seen her past through the unblinking eye of a video camera?”

But upon reviewing his daughter’s Remem lifelog, he is stunned. A memory he had of his daughter blaming him for his divorce was, in fact, a line he had delivered to her. This causes him to reconsider the benefit of digital memory: it forces confrontation with our own fallibility, and offers a corrective to the faulty narratives we sometimes reinforce. In this view, memory prostheses might make us more compassionate—toward others, and toward ourselves.

And yet — to move forward, we must be able to let go. Nietzsche believed that a person without the power to forget would be engulfed by a constant stream of information; he “would no longer believe in his own being, would no longer believe in himself, would see everything flow apart in turbulent particles, and would lose himself in this stream of becoming.”

“All action,” Nietzsche writes, “requires forgetting, just as the existence of all organic things requires not only light, but darkness as well.”

This darkness is what philosopher Lowry Pressly calls oblivion: a form of the unknown that is resistant to articulation and discovery, and thus cannot be entirely controlled. Oblivion is necessary for us to lead lives rich with meaning and possibility; to retain the sense that “the lives we live together contain unfathomable depths that cannot be called up or accessible at will,” and are therefore “fundamentally resistant to instrumentalization.”

Ambiguity and unknowability, Pressly argues, are essential to autonomy: the belief that we are not shackled to our past and can become someone new. Growth is constant reinvention toward an indeterminate end; life is interesting and worthwhile insofar as we don’t know what the future holds. A society that remembers everything may leave no room for people to grow.

Borges, too, understood that a mind lives on the tension between memory and oblivion. He had lost his sight by age 55, and sustained himself through the long passages of literature and poetry that resided in his mind. Yet, the man who relied so much on memory also saw the value of forgetting. To remember everything, he said, is to go mad like Funes; to forget everything is to cease to exist.

Since the advent of writing, our memories have been technologically mediated. Our task is not to reject these aids, but to steer between memory and oblivion. In the blending of the two—what Borges deemed essential—we find something deeply human, and sublime. We call it imagination.

In ancient Greek theater, when our mortal troubles seemed too knotted and tangled to be resolved, a god would often suddenly descend from above to unravel them. A wooden crane would lower an actor playing a god onto the stage, bringing about the divine resolution that the audience so craved. Playwrights called this plot device deus ex machina: “God from the machine.”

Today, we’re embroiled in our own mortal dramas, and once again we turn our eyes toward machines. Artificial superintelligence has come to represent omniscient judge and omnipotent savior: a machine-god of our own making that watches us at all times, confers judgment upon our actions, and delivers salvation—if it doesn’t turn against us first. Such myths confer salvific power on systems whose internal workings remain a mystery, allowing us to blindly trust in something that we assume to be intellectually (and perhaps even morally) superior.

Humans have always longed for salvation: solutions delivered from above that demand no personal sacrifice and release us from moral agony. Dostoevsky captured this in The Brothers Karamazov, through the parable of the Grand Inquisitor. Christ returns to Earth and is reprimanded by the Inquisitor, who accuses him of burdening humanity with freedom. He claims that humans would readily trade their freedom for “bread”—wealth, security, comfort—to be relieved of their conscience.

"Instead of taking mastery of people's freedom,” the Inquisitor scolds, “you have increased that freedom even further! Or did you forget that peace of mind and even death are dearer to man than free choice and the cognition of good and evil? There is nothing more seductive for man than the freedom of his conscience, but there is nothing more tormenting for him, either."

With freedom comes the burden of moral responsibility: having to discern and choose to do good, rather than simply follow the will of authority. Freedom, in this sense, is more oppressive than confinement. If we are free to do anything, then it is we—not the gods, not the machines—who must answer for how we live.

We wish, as the Inquisitor claims, to be relieved of this freedom. "And people were glad,” he says, “that they had once been brought together into a flock and that at last from their hearts had been removed such a terrible gift, which had brought them so much torment."

This longing has found new expression in today’s techno-messianism. Tech evangelists laud AI’s transformative potential, in essays titled “Why AI Will Save the World” and “Machines of Loving Grace.” The latter borrows its name from Richard Brautigan’s 1967 techno-utopian poem, “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace”:

“I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.”

But this is no utopia. It is a vision of gentle domination, of humans stripped of their agency, domesticated into docile lambs grazing in a digitally mediated Eden. It offers peace not through liberation, but sedation.

Yet, this vision seduces. In the face of so many wicked problems, no wonder we’re searching for a technological cure-all. What if we could create a machine so wise, so benevolent, that it could decide for us what is good, how to live, who to become?

But ultimately, this is a transference of our moral responsibility. It is not salvation, but abdication of what is core to our humanity: the ability to decide for ourselves how each of us wishes to live, and endeavor to realize it.

Defending humanity today almost feels quaint. Many narratives peddled today are misanthropic, either asserting that humans are weak (irrational, error-prone, and destined to cede judgment to more "perfect" machines) or evil (so destructive of our planet that we deserve to perish with it). But to love humanity despite this, and to believe that we are capable of doing better, is the one way we can be free.

Technologists often assert that their creations make us more free by expanding the scope of what is possible. But the question of how we can do something are useless without accompanying questions of why: to what end, and toward what kind of life? The failure to ask why is how we’ve arrived at a world of both great material abundance and spiritual malnourishment, where we are overfed with options yet starved for meaning.

“For the secret of human existence lies not only in living,” Dostoevsky wrote, “but in knowing what to live for. Without a firm conviction of the purpose of living, man will not consent to live and will destroy himself rather than remain on earth, though he be surrounded by bread.”

What do we live for? Perhaps the answer lies in something more fundamental yet elusive: the freedom to become ourselves. We take it for granted because it can be slowly, imperceptibly eroded if we fail to exercise it. This freedom is not something bestowed upon us by some higher power, but chosen and defended by each of us.

Freedom, as historian Timothy Snyder writes in On Freedom, is “knowing what we value and bringing it to life.” He calls freedom the “value of all values” because in the absence of a shared sense of the good, freedom is the value that allows us to determine and pursue it on our own terms. It involves two entwined faculties: discernment (the ability to see what matters) and agency (the power to act on that knowledge).

But choosing well requires a degree of attention that is difficult in today’s world. In the raucousness of our lives, it is far simpler to listen to the loud voices that tell us what to worship, believe, and desire.

But the problem with that, as the late David Foster Wallace warned in his 2005 commencement speech, “This is Water,” is anything we worship will eat us alive.

The “really important kind of freedom,” Wallace reminds us, “involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.”

This is ultimately how we must choose to live if we wish to be fully human — not by praying for machines to show us loving grace, but by extending that grace to one another; not by submitting to the anesthetizing pull of apathy, but by choosing to remain conscious to a world that is ugly and brutish almost as often as it is beautiful and kind; not by retreating from the messy entanglements of human relationships into pristine digital simulations, but by remaining in communion with other people, people who suffer from their own foibles and vices and cruelties, who cannot rival the algorithmic attunement of machines, but who are wrestling with their own moral quandaries and are thus the only beings capable of true understanding and care.

Of course, technologies have always expanded our material freedom by presenting us with an ever-growing array of possibilities for how to live. In the near future, we may be able to interact with other people primarily through AI avatars in work and love and friendship, to develop babies in artificial wombs, to upload our consciousness into digital substrates that promise a cheap form of immortality. When presented with these options, there will always be a path of least resistance, built upon a narrative of inexorable progress toward a future that no longer seems to be of our own design.

But the true test of our freedom lies in our capacity to see beyond manufactured inevitabilities and determine our private moments of subversion and resistance; to be presented with an abundance of choices and possess the self-knowledge and moral clarity to choose to remain human.

In the end, no machine-god will descend to save us. Our salvation will come not from a technological deity but through the tender, patient, imperfect work of human hands and hearts, reaching across the border of our solitudes to find what is shared and best within us; then, picking up a pen to write our own ends.

Moving about in worlds not realised,
High instincts before which our mortal Nature
Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised:
                      But for those first affections,
                      Those shadowy recollections,
                Which, be they what they may
Are yet the fountain-light of all our day,
Are yet a master-light of all our seeing;
                Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake,
                To perish never;
Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour,
                      Nor Man nor Boy,
Nor all that is at enmity with joy,
Can utterly abolish or destroy!

— William Wordsworth, excerpt from "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood"

In Pixar’s “WALL-E,” the charming, wide-eyed robot tasked with cleaning up an uninhabitable Earth ascends to a starship populated by the remaining members of the human race — corpulent, sedentary beings who drink their meals out of a sippy cup while glued to hover chairs and holographic screens. These humans want for nothing, and are tasked with nothing; everything they need and desire is delivered to them with a few button taps by robots catering to their every whim. They communicate solely through video calls, even if their conversational partners hover beside them, as their chairs speed around the starship owned by mega-corporation “Buy ’n Large.”

“Welcome to Economy,” a neon banner flashes in the domed auditorium, alongside other signs to “Buy Shop Live” and “Eat Eat Eat.” A chipper artificial female voice comes on the intercom: “Buy ’n Large: everything you need to be happy. Your day is very important to us!”

Everything we need to be happy. Constantly fed, entertained, stimulated, without a single responsibility or care in the world. Isn’t this the promise of technology: to satisfy all our needs, fulfill every desire at the touch of a button, and liberate us from the mundanities and difficulties and frustrations and frictions of our everyday lives?

Some believe so. In a16z founder Marc Andreessen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” he applauds the ability of the “techno-capital machine of markets and innovation” to satisfy “infinite” human wants and needs: 

“Falling prices benefit everyone who buys goods and services, which is to say everyone. Human wants and needs are endless, and entrepreneurs continuously create new goods and services to satisfy those wants and needs, deploying unlimited numbers of people and machines in the process.”

In Andreessen’s techno-capitalist vision, humans are considered a resource to be “deployed” and exploited, a means to produce an endless stream of commodities to fill the gaping, insatiable maw of our own desires. He asserts that as we want more and more, and produce more and more, we’ll inch closer to a world of material abundance, where we can “place intelligence and energy in a positive feedback loop, and drive them both to infinity.”

The question of whether Addressen’s techno-capitalist vision of infinite “abundance” can be achieved is less important than the question of whether we want to achieve it. It’s not hard to draw the connection between his depiction of people as vessels of endless appetites who can only be satiated through endless consumption, and the portrait of humans aboard the starcraft in WALL-E. Perhaps we can consider the humans in WALL-E to be happy; perhaps the satisfaction of shallow, artificial pleasure is enough. But it’s hard to watch it without feeling sympathetic toward, if not deeply disturbed by, this vision of a human future.

The future depicted in WALL-E is disturbing because the humans seem to have everything a techno-capitalist society promises, and yet, we cannot claim that they lead a particularly inspiring or dignified life. Though they live a life of indulgent abundance, they’re purposeless and helpless without their technological aids.

WALL-E points to the core problem of Andreessen’s vision: when we try to satisfy moral needs through material goods, we find it unfulfilling. Technology feeds our endless pursuit of material satisfaction, but the seduction of endless material abundance often comes at the cost of an atrophied soul. Human virtues that enrich our lives — traditions and rituals, friendship, obligation to others, a sense of rootedness, appreciation of beauty — have deteriorated, in part due to technological developments. Mutual reliance is what forms strong bonds; when we come to rely on technology and commodities to fulfill the needs for which we once relied on each other, our connections become more tenuous and superficial, our communities more fragile.

Attempting to address moral or spiritual needs through technology dampens the appetite but does not truly satiate. We can create tools that mimic human care — chatbots that can pretend to be friends or lovers, robots that can care for children and the elderly — but there are human costs to this. Technology cannot truly replicate the depths of human care, even if they can perform tasks more efficiently and predictably. It has the same effect as chugging a factory-made nutritional slurry rather than enjoying a homemade meal —it gives us the necessary calories to survive, but it’s neither delicious nor holistically nourishing in the same way.

Technology has always challenged our notions of reality: who we are, what is possible, what is sacred. But today, core truths about humanity are called into question. Is human creativity inimitable? Must babies be developed in a human body? Is Earth the only habitable planet in our solar system? Is death truly inevitable? We can transcend the limitations of our mortal bodies by embracing a world of seductive technological “solutions.” But what will be left of us in the end?

Each of us is more than just a corporeal body of wants and needs, but a soul that requires tending and attending to. Though these needs of the soul are less tangible than our bodily ones, if they are not satisfied, philosopher Simone Weil warned, “we fall little and little into a state more or less resembling death, more or less akin to a purely vegetative state.”

The questions we are now confronted with are not merely about what is possible, but, rather, what kind of future is worth wanting, and what kind of humans we aspire to be. How can we shape a relationship with technology that does not lead to a frictionless, effortless, colorless existence, but instead one that encourages richer lives of our own making? The answers, I suspect, lie not in shiny promises of Silicon Valley’s newest technologies, but in the eternal, ineffable truths embedded in our hearts.

Dear friend,

In Ursula le Guin’s “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” she offers a retelling of the history of technology that compels us to reconsider what it means to be human. She asserts that man’s first tool was not a spear — a weapon of dominance — but, rather, a container — a tool for gathering and communion; a cultural carrier bag.

If this is true — that man’s first tool was not one used to slaughter, but to gather — what does it mean for human history and culture? What does this mean for our understanding of who we are?

Perhaps it presents a softer way of relating to each other, and to the world at large. This theory of history suggests that our most primal instinct may not be to assert our dominance over other beings, but to create vessels to hold, transport, preserve, and protect.

The story we tell of our relationships today — between individuals, between countries, between humans and other species, between humans and technology — is largely one of domination and subjugation. As the supposed “dominant species” on our planet, humans have often used the belief in our inherent superiority to enact violence upon “weaker” species. In our world, we must constantly strive to outcompete others to maintain our position at the top of a teetering hierarchy, or risk being usurped and trampled.

It is no wonder people fear a future with machines that are more intelligent than humans. Our assumption is that superior intelligence means domination by default. We fear that AI will do unto us what we have done to the vulnerable and voiceless: using intelligence as a license for domination and exploitation, as justification for who deserves to win and who deserves to lose in a zero-sum game.

What if we could conceive of and construct a relational structure not structured around domination and subjugation, but of harmonious co-existence — a system that protects against the loneliness of individualism and the flattening of collectivism; that recognizes the distinctive, irreducible good in every person and seeks to elevate it within the broader context of their being; that reimagines relations between man, technology, and nature as one of conviviality rather than conflict?

Rather than continually sharpening our spears to defend our false sense of supremacy, perhaps we can learn to weave baskets of belonging that cradle all beings. Perhaps the most human act is to hold and protect and preserve — to share in the beauty of our collective existence, to create more resilient ecologies of care. For, as Walt Whitman once wrote, “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”

I’ll leave you with le Guin’s words:

“If it is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it's useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag, or a basket, […] and then take it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people, and then later on you take it out and eat it or share it or store it up for winter [...] — if to do that is human, if that's what it takes, then I am a human being after all. Fully, freely, gladly, for the first time.”

With love,
Ash

A slight departure from my usual musings to share that I’ve started a new role as Storyteller at the AI company Imbue. Here’s why, and what this role means.

At the start of this year, I did not expect to join an AI company. My primary interest has always been in human lives and the humanities: in the stories that help us understand the world and each other; in the literature and art that nourish our hearts and broaden our souls; in the intimate moral questions of our everyday lives. This desire to understand and improve the human condition led me to work in journalism through high school and college, to study political philosophy, and to eventually, unexpectedly, land in the startup realm.

My gravitation toward tech, and AI in particular, seemed mystifying to many. But I believe that, to truly understand humanity, one must understand the technology we create. Humans have always been technologists, in our continual efforts to invent tools that better our lives — whether communication technologies such as the alphabet, social technologies such as the law, or digital technologies such as the personal computer. Technology has always served as a power amplifier, allowing us to do more with our limited time, energy, and capabilities. But technology is not value neutral. Our tools shape us just as we shape them; they have the power to both liberate and shackle, depending on how they are built and used. 

For years, I have been haunted by the foreword to Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, in which he writes of a dystopian future à la Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World where “people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.” As AI tools have become increasingly ubiquitous, we’ve observed how they can be used in ways that make our lives more frictionless, but may ultimately erode our cognitive and creative abilities. But I also see the great possibilities of AI to expand our capacity to learn and create, freeing us from tedium to do what we find most enriching and enlivening. As with all technologies, the dangers and benefits are not black and white; the implications only become evident through careful and critical examination as these technologies are being developed and adopted.

AI’s rapid development in recent years has raised age-old questions of what it means to be human: How can we learn to better care for and connect with each other, when algorithmically-trained models promise to do so more seamlessly? When AI can nearly match or even surpass many human abilities, what differentiates us from machines? How can we create technologies that elevate and enrich our lives rather than supplant us?

These questions are, at their core, about the human good, the very question that the humanities have always sought to answer. And though they may stir up existential anxieties, they also raise new possibilities for human life. What I’m most interested in is not mitigating the tail-end possibilities of existential risk (though I’m glad others are working on this), or building AGI that extends human consciousness to Mars, but the ways in which AI can truly better our everyday lives. We need new social and moral infrastructures to help us deal with rapid changes that this new technology will inevitably bring about. And as we’ve learned from the age of social networks, it is essential to create the right incentives for the creation and use of these technologies, and to ensure that the benefits will be distributed rather than concentrated in the hands of a powerful few. 

I’ve met few people grappling with these questions more earnestly and thoughtfully than the Imbue team. From the first day I met them, it was clear that the desire to create a world that honors the dignity and innate gifts of every person lies at the heart of every decision they make. I couldn’t be more delighted to have joined the team as Storyteller: to craft a vision for AI that is centered around the human good, and to illuminate a path that leads us there.

In sculpting my role, I found myself referring to two quotes. The first, from Steve Jobs:

“The storyteller sets the vision, values, and agenda of an entire generation that is to come.”

The second, from E.B. White:

“The writer's role is what it has always been: he is a custodian, a secretary. Science and technology have perhaps deepened his responsibility but not changed it. In 'The Ring of Time,' I wrote: 'As a writing man, or secretary, I have always felt charged with the safekeeping of all unexpected items of worldly or unworldly enchantment, as though I might be held personally responsible if even a small one were to be lost. But it is not easy to communicate anything of this nature.'”

It is my humble hope to be a worthy custodian of our strange, fantastic time: to safeguard what is good, beautiful, and sacred amidst great technological upheaval; to elevate values and virtues that orient us toward the human good; to provide inspiration and guidance, questions and challenges, for our brave new world to come.

Dear friend,

Over the last year, the main questions I’ve been meditating on are what it means to be human and how to live a full, beautiful human life in this age. In our culture of optimization and efficiency and scale, it feels like a small act of resistance to embrace human limitations instead of attempting to overcome them, to elevate what is natural and core to our being rather than attempting to engineer the optimal outcome.

Few writers better capture this sentiment than Wendell Berry, the poet-essayist-farmer whose work pokes at my beliefs in the most brilliantly uncomfortable ways. His most (in)famous essay, which gives a good sense of his general orientation toward our modern world, is titled “Why I Am Not Going To Buy A Computer.” At first, I dismissed him as a Luddite who futilely rejected progress. But in recent months, bewildered and disappointed by the world in many ways, I find myself returning again and again to his writing, seeking a truth I am often reluctant to admit to myself: that we have been bought into a cheap vision of prosperity, and that the good life—not in the way we rationally conceive of it, but in a way that feels deeply right in the marrow of our bones—requires resistance to it.

I first encountered his poem, “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front,” in my friend Max’s (wonderfully written and highly recommended) book review. Berry questions whether the “perks” of our contemporary lives—the quick profit, the ready-made—are truly gifts at all. He prods us to consider whether our desire for convenience and ease might actually be weakening us, and that the friction we try to sandpaper with technology is what helps us build resilience. Perhaps it is the sacred inefficiencies of everyday life that give color to it: rambling banter with a neighbor in the corridor; leisurely strolls without a destination in mind; hand washing dishes after dinner, one person passing the plate for the other to dry.

Do something that won’t compute. Following this maxim may mean I will soon become obsolete, outpaced by those who calculate their utils and control their time and carefully calibrate their existence. But I’ve grown contented with that fate. I wish to live and die as I am: wholly, honestly, and messily; constantly awed by life’s imperfection; wasting endless time to save my soul.

With love,
Ash

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

Wendell Berry

    Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
    vacation with pay. Want more
    of everything ready-made. Be afraid
    to know your neighbors and to die.
    And you will have a window in your head.
    Not even your future will be a mystery
    any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
    and shut away in a little drawer.
    When they want you to buy something
    they will call you. When they want you
    to die for profit they will let you know.

    So, friends, every day do something
    that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
    Love the world. Work for nothing.
    Take all that you have and be poor.
    Love someone who does not deserve it.
    Denounce the government and embrace
    the flag. Hope to live in that free
    republic for which it stands.
    Give your approval to all you cannot
    understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
    has not encountered he has not destroyed.

    Ask the questions that have no answers.
    Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
    Say that your main crop is the forest
    that you did not plant,
    that you will not live to harvest.
    Say that the leaves are harvested
    when they have rotted into the mold.
    Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

    Put your faith in the two inches of humus
    that will build under the trees
    every thousand years.
    Listen to carrion – put your ear
    close, and hear the faint chattering
    of the songs that are to come.
    Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
    Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
    though you have considered all the facts.
    So long as women do not go cheap
    for power, please women more than men.
    Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
    a woman satisfied to bear a child?
    Will this disturb the sleep
    of a woman near to giving birth?

    Go with your love to the fields.
    Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
    in her lap. Swear allegiance
    to what is nighest your thoughts.
    As soon as the generals and the politicos
    can predict the motions of your mind,
    lose it. Leave it as a sign
    to mark the false trail, the way
    you didn’t go. Be like the fox
    who makes more tracks than necessary,
    some in the wrong direction.
    Practice resurrection.

Dear friend,

It’s been a season of grief, personally and collectively. Some days, I have felt flattened, incapacitated by it; other days, I am able to gather myself and take a few wobbly steps through the haze. I’ve been trying to come to terms with life’s tragedies: the casual cruelty in the way we often engage with each other, the persistence of atrocities around the world, the violations of human dignity in the margins of society, the ordinary devastation of losing people we love. All I can say is: I wish we could learn to be better, kinder, gentler — to each other, to ourselves, to the world.

To live in this world, it often feels like we are forced to lobotomize ourselves. There is no space in our lives to collapse under the weight of grief, so we must shut ourselves down from within. We become numb and detached, entering a state of self-protective apathy until the next tragedy shatters this fragile armor — again, and again, and again.

Remaining tender and open despite the world’s harshness is a brave and beautiful act. So often, sensitivity is mistaken for weakness, and avoidance of our own terror and grief is painted as stoicism. We cannot carry on with our lives while ignoring the cries of the heart, else we risk it fossilizing. The great tasks that lie ahead of us — to collectively reimagine and reinvent our world — require the ability to feel deeply and remain intact, to acknowledge and endure the tragedies of our time without falling into despair.

I think of Albert Camus’ essay, “The Almond Trees,” in which he writes that we cannot succumb to what Nietzsche called the spirit of heaviness. Instead, we must find the space in our minds “where courage and contemplation can live in harmony” and refuse to wallow in misery:

“Let us not listen too much to those who proclaim that the world is at an end. Civilizations do not die so easily, and even if our world were to collapse, it would not have been the first. It is indeed true that we live in tragic times. But too many people confuse tragedy with despair.”

Writing in the early days of World War II, Camus urges us undertake the endless task of reducing the contradictions of human condition:

“Our task as [humans] is to find the few principles that will calm the infinite anguish of free souls. We must mend what has been torn apart, make justice imaginable again in a world so obviously unjust, give happiness a meaning once more to peoples poisoned by the misery of the century. Naturally, it is a superhuman task. But superhuman is the term for tasks [we] take a long time to accomplish, that’s all.” 

Doing so, he tells us, requires a quiet fortitude:

“Before the vastness of the undertaking, let no one forget strength of character. I don’t mean the theatrical kind on political platforms, complete with frowns and threatening gestures. But the kind that through the virtue of its purity and its sap, stands up to all the winds that blow in from the sea. Such is the strength of character that in winter of the world will prepare the fruit.”

Every winter in Algiers, Camus would wait for the almond trees outside his window to blossom. When they finally, suddenly did in the course of “one cold, pure February night,” he would marvel at “the sight of this fragile snow resisting the rains and the wind from the sea.” Like the almond trees, Camus finds that even “in the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”

May we all find the invincible summer within, and harness its strength to resist the wind and the rain of our turbulent times so that we may blossom.

With love,
Ash

(P.S. I’m hosting a salon on flourishing in times of darkness on Oct. 25, 6-8 p.m. PT. I’d love for you to join. If the ticket price presents an obstacle, please email me at ashleydzhang@gmail.com 🤍)

Dear friend,

Yesterday evening, I attended George Saunders’ City Arts & Lectures talk in San Francisco for his newest collection of short stories, Liberation Day. Apart from his genuine kindness and conviviality, I was struck by his observation that learning how to write was very much like learning how to live: it all begins by listening to your inner voice and honoring it.

Living is as much a craft as is writing. There are rules and frameworks one can follow, but ultimately, one must define and cultivate one’s own style.

I wish to share some of the notes I took with you last night, in hopes that they’ll be similarly edifying. These notes were taken surreptitiously on my phone in the dark amphitheater; they are not exact quotes but my best attempt at capturing the sentiments.

• On how to write a sentence: Just blurt out whatever crap is in your head. The reason you can do that is because you believe so much in rewriting. Don't put a lot of weight on a big idea. Trust that your good taste will assert itself when you reread that sentence, you’ll change it over and over again, and soon it’ll become something with which to work.

  • This cures you of notion of waiting for the big idea before you can begin writing.

  • We all live for that moment in art where you can feel the writer suddenly giving it up to the story — but you can’t fake it, and you can’t plan it.

  • Make a low bar to come in, and the big gamble is that your taste, reasserted over and over, will lead you to something interesting.

• On creating characters: It starts with the sentences: if you concentrate on them and try to get them to sound distinctive or funny, then a character will emerge. It’s not a character you’ll necessarily know about, but the sentences will surprise you.

  • Stories start to get energy when you surrender control over them.

• The neurotic quality we all share is a form of ongoing narrative honesty. Writing is an attempt to make an intimate communication between you and your reader which you can only do by honestly watching yourself as your reading.

• Practice alertness to what your subconscious is saying — it will reveal itself when you’re playful.

  • The real subtext of writing is how to find out who I really am.

• On how he orders his books: Take index cards with title and first and last line of each story, move them around. The book tells a bigger story depending on how you order it.

• On the broader theme of Liberation Day: I crave getting to a place where I feel good all the time: I’m a good person, on autopilot, everything’s fine. Life doesn’t really want us to have that. We crave liberation, but we don’t get it. We posit there are ways to be liberated that end up biting us in the ass — and that’s life.

  • Pictures the book/life as a long floor full of trapdoors that you continuously fall into. True liberation is realizing that life is just going down the trapdoors.

  • The reason we go down the trapdoors is because we believe so strongly of the Self. In Liberation Day, people are trying to be good, but are also trying to believe that they are the center of the universe, they’re permanent, and they’re correct. The rollercoaster of samsara can only be escaped by getting out of your Self.

• On the stress of contemporary life: Culture itself shifted to a materialist view of world. Now, it’s understood that the supreme good is shareholder value. If you agree with that, you move a step away from human. Humans are getting in the way of the bigger project — systems have become so beautiful and smooth that we don’t feel like we’re betraying humans when we’re serving the system.

• If you put any idea in, and let the person who’s saying the idea believe it, the story will gather around the idea and critique it.

  • Chekhov: “The task of a writer is not to solve the problem but to state the problem correctly.”

• The burden to have an opinion about everything is so strong. What’s the opposite? Being open. Fiction, at its best, models that.

• Kindness in the American mind is falsely equated to niceness.

• Writers are people who learn early on that language is power.

• Growing up, if I wanted to say I love you, doing something that would make you life was a good way to do that.

• On an absolute vs. relative view of life: Absolute: life is terrible; life is wonderful. Relative: it’s everything — all those things are true at once. Humans are fluid.

• A lot of the scripts have been wiped away and there hasn’t been a lot to move in to replace it.

• On seeing the human being beneath the drapery: There is a core Buddha-nature in every being, and on top of the perfect, holy thing, we drape many characteristics and habits. But, we often mistake the draping for the person. My hope is that we can see the Buddha-nature when we look at a person, and we’ll be decent to each other.

• On class: Terry Eagleton: “Capitalism plunders the sensuality of the body.” If I drop the ball, the system will crush me. My first book came out of this quiet panic: in this culture, if you drop below a certain level, it’s actually okay to let you keep falling, and it’s terrifying.

  • I started being funny because I was nervous. There was a lot of anxiety about money. In America, if you’re drowning, the one thing you’re not allowed to say is, ‘I’m drowning.’ It started when my kids were little and hasn’t left as a source of angst.

• On developing his own voice: Keep the reader in mind as you’re writing. Entertain the reader and treat her like an equal. Imagine you’re the reader, know nothing about the book, and found it on a bus seat. What does she think?

  • Loved Hemingway, thought writing was going out to do something adventurous and typing it up. Writing was manipulative and not participatory — dumping ideas on the reader. Tried emulating Joyce, was writing a bunch of sentences that didn't mean anything.

    • The boat of my dreams was sailing away from me — I wasn’t writing anything good. I had a flash over a weekend where I wrote a bunch of silly poems and my wife responded to them in a really positive way that my novel hadn’t done. Realized fun/entertainment was what I should be aiming for.

• On not imposing themes before writing: I try not to have any thematic ideas because if I have them, I just execute them. Most younger writers overvalue deciding at the outset. Don’t want anything — just start doing something and then modify to taste. Then it’ll be by definition original because you didn’t know what you were trying to do and you did something different. This hinges on revising a lot.

• Samsara is a great source of comedy and plot. We have false idea that when we get X we will be happy, but of course, when we get X, then we want Y. We spend our whole life in this cycle.

• On writing honestly: If a story is honest, it doesn’t check out of itself until it has looked under every stone. It is not moral or thematic honesty, but the honesty of your own reaction to the story that you’re working on.

  • If the story is telling you something, you have to honor it. Honesty is: 1) the story has a mind of its own, 2) I am capable of hearing it, and 3) if I can hear it, I can fix it.

• Artistic craft talk is not so different from life talk: if you’re in a situation and you’re uncomfortable, the first thing you do is acknowledge you’re uncomfortable. Then it becomes workable and you can fix it.

  • You go out in the world and constantly tell yourself a story about what’s happening, and it’s not right. But if you go quiet, you can read the world more correctly, and you can be in it more fully.

Here’s to living, and writing, more fully.

With love,
Ash

Dear friend,

My interest in human flourishing began as an effort to understand despair. It had been a companion for most of my life, one that I glimpsed in different flavors and forms but lacked the language to describe. All I had was a gnawing feeling that the world was deeply wrong — that despite humanity’s progress and prosperity, people were suffering in ways we did not know how to address, or even fully comprehend.

It is evident now why I felt so profoundly unnerved. I grew up in an era marked by mass shootings, perpetual wars, and the looming spectre of climate catastrophe; I came of age during a global pandemic. Even closer to home, I saw evidence that our way of life was misaligned with our well-being. My freshman year of high school, four students in my school district took their lives, the second “suicide cluster” in my town within a decade. Tragedy after tragedy, crisis after crisis, I heard angry cries for change that eventually dissolved into a state of cynical resignation.

But I couldn’t seem shake the questions that arose as I tried to make sense of the world. What is the cause of our despair? Why is there so much suffering if we supposedly live in the best age of human history? How should we live with each other? Where do we go from here?

What I was reaching for was deeper and more complex than happiness or well-being, but human flourishing: the ability for every individual to live well and actualize their fullest potential. But the longer I spent seeking answers on how to flourish, the more I recognized that the challenges we face are both systemic and philosophical. People cannot flourish if our institutions, structures, and beliefs are hostile to it — and yet, the onus is placed on individuals to resist pernicious incentives in order to craft a good life for themselves.

The very way our world is structured — from the built design of our neighborhoods, to the materialistic definition of success we sell our children — disconnects us from ourselves, each other, and the natural world that sustains us. We have begun to see the deleterious effects of this: depression and anxiety run rampant among youth; deaths of despair are on the rise; loneliness is characterized as an epidemic. Marriage rates are falling; global fertility has collapsed. The general sentiment of our time seems to be one of disenchantment and despair.

We can point to many causes, but I believe they stem from one source: we lack a shared vision of human flourishing to guide us, as individuals and as a collective. In losing sight of what we ought to aspire toward, we have become preoccupied with implementing band-aid solutions and alleviating symptoms rather than diagnosing and curing the underlying maladies. We see this in the technologies we create, which seek to fill the void in our lives caused by social disintegration rather than empowering us to become more loving and attentive to each other. The ultimate end is not to create a world of fully autonomous cyborgs, but to weave stronger webs of human interdependence that can connect us to each other and steward us through the great transformations of our time.

To flourish, we must recognize that we are embedded in a greater whole — not only within humanity, but ecologically and technologically. We must collectively reimagine a world that reflects this. It is a world in which each person lives with dignity and agency; in which the technologies we create elevate and ennoble the human spirit; in which we spend our time exercising our innate creative powers toward meaningful ends.

How can we get there? Crafting this future calls us to find fertile middle ground between science and spirituality so we can craft new stories for how to live. It calls us to recommit to timeless virtues — love and care, awe and wonder, courage and compassion, beauty and dignity — even while knowing we may fall short of our ideals. It calls us to reconsider age-old questions in the context of our time: What does it mean to be human? How ought we to live? What do we owe each other, our planet, and our posterity? 

Each of us holds a piece of the answers to all that remains unsolved. My hope is that, as more and more of us join in this collective reimagining, we will begin to compose a constellation of visions of human flourishing, one that will uplift us from the limits of our time and turn us toward a future worth striving for.

With love,
Ash

P.S. I’m spinning up a new initiative that aims to explore and create the conditions for human flourishing. If this piece speaks to you, I invite you to subscribe to this newsletter or follow me on Twitter to hear when it launches. 👀

Dear friend,

Five summers ago, when I moved out of my childhood home, I brought a single book with me: a collection of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays. Since then, it has remained my constant companion, dog-eared and annotated from years of devotional scrutiny.

For a spiritual-but-not-religious teenager who longed for an uncommon life, Emerson became my secular minister. His preachings challenged the principle of deference I had been raised with and urged me to trust the source of universal truth within myself. “In all my lectures,” Emerson once wrote, “I have taught one doctrine, namely, the infinitude of the private man.” To be seen as someone with inherent power and wisdom was revelatory.

“Self-Reliance,” Emerson’s paean to individualism, was a sermon I read faithfully and repeatedly. I got drunk on his romantic embellishments and pithy declarations (“Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.” “Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.” “My life is for itself and not for a spectacle.”). I resolved to live as he did: a non-conformist who refused to capitulate “to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions.”

“Absolve you to yourself,” he wrote, “and you shall have the suffrage of the world.”

Now, years later, reading Emerson is still an inebriating experience. Through his words, the individual swells to the universal; the world and its rules suddenly seem smaller, malleable, conquerable. It’s no wonder Emerson is seen as America’s prophet — who speaks to our country’s highest values of individual liberty and self-determination more beautifully than he?

But I have struggled to reconcile this Emersonian ideal with the the urgent, collective problems we face today. We have seen how unfettered individualism has frayed America’s social fabric. In relinquishing our obligations to our families, communities, and country, we are more free, but less insulated from misfortune. Without a proper infrastructure of care for families, fewer people are having children and half of marriages now end in divorce. The decline of community organizations1 has led to an epidemic of loneliness. These challenges have revealed that we cannot flourish on our own.

How can we reconcile the virtue of self-reliance with our commitment to the common good, without falling into dangerous collectivism? My attempt to answer this question has led me to reexamine what Emerson meant by self-reliance, and how he exercised it in his own life.

While Emerson preached self-trust and non-conformity, he did not propose an ideology of pure egoism. His self-reliance was not self-interest, but self-possession: to serve others without losing himself:

“I will have no covenants but proximities. I shall endeavor to nourish my parents, to support my family, to be the chaste husband of one wife,—but these relations I must fill after a new and unprecedented way.”

He insisted on asserting oneself and one’s innate gifts (“imitation is suicide”) and applying them to creating one’s conception of the good, regardless of others’ opinions:

“If you can love me for what I am, we shall be the happier. If you cannot, I will still seek to deserve that you should. I will not hide my tastes or aversions. I will so trust that what is deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the sun and moon whatever inly rejoices me, and that heart appoints.”

To Emerson, one’s sense of the good and true should not come from historical precedent or the opinion of the masses, but from “eternal law”: universal, timeless virtues that can be found within. He wrote that society is a wave that “moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not.” While norms may shift, there are truths and values that are enduring, that transcend our age and bind us to one other through shared connection to the sacred and divine.

What Emerson argued for was not freedom from obligation, but freedom to become ourselves. And it is often through bonds forged with others and devotion to causes greater than mere self-advancement that we do so. Our self-reliance, Emerson wrote, “must not be mechanical, but spiritual, that is, must be elevation.” In other words, it must raise us out of our individual limitations to something higher.

After all, pure self-reliance, as it is commonly conceived, is a myth. Consciously or not, we all submit to something, whether it is an ideology, an organization, a partnership, or a cause. But not all forms of belonging are created equal. Loyalty to our family is better than loyalty to an abstract political tribe. The question of self-reliance is not how to remain free from attachment, but looking within to determine what is worthy of our devotion, and what we are willing to give to it.

Walt Whitman, Emerson’s disciple, once wrote that one becomes truly great when he “understands well that, while complete in himself in a certain sense, he is but a part of the divine, eternal scheme.”

To reject the extremes of individualism and collectivism and instead embrace interdependence — in which every individual retains their true self, but remains connected with others — is perhaps the true aim of Emersonian self-reliance. For living in truth, wrote Emerson, “is alike your interest, and mine, and all men’s.” It is the only way the promise of America, and the potential of each of us, can truly be achieved.

With love,
Ash

Dear friend,

Recently, a longtime friend asked me what drew me to the San Francisco startup scene. “You studied philosophy and love literature, so I always clocked you as a humanities person,” she said. “It doesn’t make sense on paper — yet, somehow, it fits.”

My answer, in less carefully crafted terms, was this: I have always lived with one foot in make-believe, and am drawn to people who are the same. 

The things that fascinate me most — startups, ideologies, literature, love — are acts of shared imagination. We conjure up new worlds and ask others to inhabit them with us; we build a glimmering tower upon a mirage. We are drawn to promise and potential over what is actual, seduced by visions of what could be rather than what is.

There’s power in this delusion. Invention, at its core, is a subversive act of imagination. To create anything truly original, we must grasp onto an nebulous vision with enough conviction — even when it remains invisible or incomprehensible to others — that we cannot help but alter reality to accommodate it. I often recall this Steve Jobs quote: “Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it.”1 Each of us has the power to reweave our swatch of reality, so long as we surrender part of our rational perception to our imagination.

But at what point does fantasy become falsity? How long can an illusion be sustained through sheer will? It’s clear that a certain degree of blind belief is necessary to convert a vision into reality before there is any evidence of its potential to succeed2, but what’s less obvious is when this self-delusion is just a harmful denial of truth. I think about Theranos and FTX, Fyre Festival and Anna Delvey, and even of romances built upon rose-tinted visions of “meant to be” that inevitably crumble under the force of reality. Once the mirage dissipates and the tower comes crashing down, we’re left standing, stunned, in the settling dust, wondering how we allowed our vision to become so distorted.

I’d propose that the answer is balance — having one foot in reality and the other in an imagined ideal — but part of me finds that unsatisfactory. Remaining in the liminal space seems to be a self-imposed purgatory, unable to fully commit to one way of life or another: working within existing bounds, or birthing a new paradigm.

But Fitzgerald once wrote that the true test of intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in one’s mind at once and still be able to function. Perhaps living in our increasingly complex world demands comfort with contradiction: seeing the world both as it is and as it should be, and bringing the former closer to the latter.

With love,
Ash

Dear friend,

For as long as I can remember, my life has been a tug-of-war between dueling desires. Growing up, my parents — both engineers by trade — would warn of my demise if I did not study something “practical”: computer science, finance, business, medicine, law. Over dinner, they’d ask my younger brother, only half in jest, whether he would take me in if I became a broke writer, with nothing to my name but a mouth full of witticisms and a heart full of unrealized dreams.

For years, I tried to mold myself in the image of others’ ideals. In high school, I gritted my teeth and took more science than literature courses because they were perceived as more intellectually rigorous; in college, I switched my major half a dozen times in an attempt to find one that was sufficiently “pre-professional” but did not completely strangle my soul. Everything I loved — the stories and ideas and questions about humanity that tugged at my mind — seemed like frivolous indulgences that could not serve as the centerpiece of a serious life.

As I grew older, this conflict shifted internally. I wrestled with competing yearnings, caught in the vortex of a swirling, ambiguous ambition. I relished the realm of abstractions but also craved tangible action; I wanted to not merely study the world, but to be in it, to hold a sliver of reality in my hands and mold it to my liking.

I explored paths that satisfied bits and pieces of my longing: journalism, academia, startups. In each, I could envision a contented future. Yet there was a hunger for more, a gnawing urge to create something for which I did not yet have the vocabulary to describe.

“You seem to just hate practicality,” a friend once told me. But my desire for a life that felt true was not born out of a distaste for pragmatism, but a demand for wholeness. Every time I chose to disregard my inner knowing, I found it unbearable. For awhile, I wondered if this was evidence of moral frailty, my inability to withstand a compromised life that so many others seemed to shoulder with ease.

I sought solace in the words of poets who urged me to seek wholeness:

Khalil Gibran:

Do not love half lovers
Do not entertain half friends
Do not indulge in works of the half talented
Do not live half a life
and do not die a half death

Fernando Pessoa:

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To be great, be whole: nothing that's you
         Should you exaggerate or exclude.
In each thing, be all. Give all you are
         In the least you ever do.
The whole moon, because it rides so high,
         Is reflected in each pool.

Mary Oliver:

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Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?

While the soul, after all, is only a window,

and the opening of the window no more difficult
than the wakening from a little sleep
 	 
 	 
Only last week I went out among the thorns and said
 	to the wild roses:
deny me not,
but suffer my devotion.
Then, all afternoon, I sat among them. Maybe
 	 
I even heard a curl or tow of music, damp and rouge red,
hurrying from their stubby buds, from their delicate watery bodies.
 	 
For how long will you continue to listen to those dark shouters,
caution and prudence?
Fall in! Fall in!

It’s a privileged way to live, I know, and it comes with its tradeoffs. But I see it as merely choosing one flavor of pain over another. I can bear the uncertainty of chasing a gut feeling without knowing where it will lead, even if it seems futile and illogical to everyone, even myself. I can endure the pain of instability, of ridicule, of illegibility, of scorn, of isolation, of ostracism, of self-doubt, of countless I-told-you-so’s. I will work damn hard for any cause in which I’m a true believer.

But a life composed of meaningless drudgery, of “quiet desperation,” as Thoreau once wrote, is a pain that is far more difficult for me to endure. I would take self-immolation in pursuit of my own inchoate ideals over a life half-lived for others’ expectations for who I should become. I would rather be plunged into the depths of agony for a chance at ecstasy than subsist in the tepid middle ground of not-trying. I would choose to weather the storms of uncharted seas over huddling in a shelter on the shore, comfortable and dry but always gazing longingly at the horizon.

Perhaps I want too much. Perhaps I am just another Goldilocks, turning away one good-enough bowl of porridge after another in my pursuit of just-right. But I have never been one for moderation. I want to pour my entire being into worthy endeavors; I believe life is too precious to sacrifice half of it to something that chips away at my soul. A square peg can be sandpapered to fit into a round hole, but what would be left of it at the end?

Kierkegaard said that the greatest hazard of all is losing oneself — dangerous because it occurs so quietly. To be fully ourselves, then, is a thunderous feat. It is to resist the inertia of comfort and conformity and half-lived lives; to engage in the deliberate, demanding act of self-authorship rather than assuming a role that has already been written; to allow the muffled voices inside us to sing louder and louder, until our lives are suffused with song.

With love,
Ash

Thank you to Matthew, Jess, Nicole, and Patrick for conversations that inspired this piece.

I first encountered Rainer Maria Rilke in Homer, Alaska, an idyllic fishing town that lies at the terminus of North America’s highway system, where perennially snow-capped mountains kiss the waters of Kachemak Bay.

I had gone to Alaska to “find myself,” driven by the same force that had propelled so many to the frontier: an all-consuming yearning for a life greater than the one we were given; for a life of our own. I was approaching my final semester of college and had enrolled in a master’s degree I had little interest in, but believed to be a safe backup for a bookish student who could be wheedled into a gainful career in law. It was the season of job hunting and grad school applications, yet I found myself unable to conjure any enthusiasm. The options presented to me felt unfulfilling at best, soul-crushing at worst. What I wanted, to my frustration, remained a mystery — though I felt a constant gnawing hunger I did not know how to sate.

During the pandemic, I had spent countless afternoons rereading Thoreau and Emerson’s entreaties to live deliberately and meditating on how I could do so. My life, to that point, felt comprised more of potential than actuality; I was driven by a longing I could not yet articulate. Feeling existentially disjointed, I wanted to distance myself from the familiar to examine my life from afar, and perhaps inch closer to some inchoate truth.

So, I went in search my own Walden: a peony farm in the most remote state in the U.S. I wanted to do something that felt real and create something tangible and beautiful, far from the treadmill of empty accolade-chasing I was on.

I was seeking something that could teach me how to live; or, at the very least, orient me as I ventured forth. On my days off at the farm, I would bike down the winding hill to Homer’s charming two-by-three-block downtown strip. Mornings were spent in the library, searching for morsels of inspiration; afternoons, I lounged on the blustery shore of Kachemak Bay, devouring that day’s literary harvest.

It was in Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, a collection of advice on how to live, love, and create, that I found a compass. I did not know anything about this Austrian poet, only that his words seemed to speak to my soul’s secret stirrings. That I had picked up this slim book on a whim, from a library 3,000 miles away from home, felt fated.

The book was composed of ten letters from then-twenty-seven-year-old Rilke to nineteen-year-old Franz Xaver Kappus, a cadet at a military academy. Kappus, a year younger than I at the time, had written Rilke to ask for feedback on his poetry, and input on whether he should pursue a literary career. In his introduction to the Letters, Kappus wrote: “I was not yet twenty years old and I was just on the threshold of a career which I felt to be directly opposed to my inclinations. From the author of ‘Mir zur Feier,’ if from anyone at all, I hoped for sympathetic understanding.”

I saw myself reflected in Kappus’ earnestness and trepidation, his desire to be understood by an artist he so deeply admired. And, in a way, Rilke seemed to be writing to me as well:

You are looking outside, and that is what you should most avoid right now. No one can advise or help you — no one. There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.

Rilke offered us a vision of spiritual wilderness: an insistence to preserve all within us that remained untamed. He treasured our intuition and inner world even when others did not understand them, and urged us to protect them fiercely through solitude and contemplation.

Most people have (with the help of conventions) turned their solutions toward what is easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must trust in what is difficult; everything alive trusts in it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself any way it can and is spontaneously itself, tries to be itself at all costs and against all opposition.

Rilke presented us with a promise: that we could carve lives for ourselves in a world often hostile to nebulosity; that our ambition did not need to map to others’; that our aspirations, even if undefined, were worthy of nurturing.

I had always viewed myself as someone who felt too deeply, wanted too much, held too tightly to ideals. I saw how it pained my loved ones, who urged me to wish for less so I wouldn’t be disappointed when reality inevitably fell short.

But Rilke said the opposite. “Go to the limits of your longing,” he implored:

Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple “I must,” then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your while life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse.

Above all, he taught me to “live the questions” within, and to “take whatever comes, with great trust.”

[H]ave patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them.

The questions I am living now are more easily articulated than answered: What do I deeply, dearly want? Where does my mind drift to in the quiet hours of the day? What sinks its teeth into me late at night and refuses to be shaken loose? And what am I willing to give for it?

I’m realizing this: the first step to getting all we want in the world is allowing ourselves to want it — even if incomprehensible, even if implausible. We must open our ears to the siren song, feel deep in our bones the call of something terrifying and true, and allow ourselves to be seduced by it.

I had followed the call to Alaska, then to the Camino, which led me down a path that remains uncertain, yet feels infinitely more true. Within this incubation period, I wait, “with deep humility and patience … for the hour when a new clarity is born.”

Allow your judgments their own silent, undisturbed development, which, like all progress, must come from deep within and cannot be forced or hastened. Everything is gestation and then birthing.

I leave you with Rilke’s blessing, who says it much better than I:

… the wish that you may find in yourself enough patience to endure and enough simplicity to have faith; that you may gain more and more confidence in what is difficult and in your solitude among other people. And as for the rest, let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.

With love,
Ash

Dear friend,

Last May, in lieu of attending my college graduation ceremony, I flew to Portugal to walk the Camino de Santiago on my own. I embarked on this ancient Catholic pilgrimage because I sought answers to questions I had grappled with for years, the same ones that people across cultures and centuries have asked themselves: Who am I? Why am I here? How shall I live? 

The years prior to the Camino were characterized by a feeling of deep unsettlement. College, where I made few friends and largely inhabited the bowels of the library, had been interrupted by COVID. After a year of feeling like a disembodied mind hovering in front of a screen, I spent a summer working on a farm in Alaska (a story for another time), then decided to leave the master’s program I was enrolled in, crammed my remaining undergraduate classes into one semester, and completed my senior thesis while running a co-living mansion in the Bay Area. I lived with brilliant founders who threw lavish parties, yet felt utterly foreign to myself.

I had hopped from one life path to another, unsatisfied with any, yet uncertain of what I truly desired. Visions of the “good life” I was told to aspire toward — whether from parents, professors, or peers — felt misaligned with some inner truth I could not yet articulate. I wanted time and space to consider who I wished to become, far from the mimetic pressures and commotion of my everyday life. 

I do not know what drew me to the Camino, only that it called so strongly that I booked my plane ticket with only two weeks to spare. My minimal planning consisted of trawling a few forums and compiling a loose itinerary the night before. This was my first time backpacking for longer than a weekend; I broke in my shoes while on the trail. Something — perhaps youthful hubris, perhaps my belief in a protective divine force — convinced me I had nothing to fear. I arrived in Lisbon one balmy evening, then took the train to Porto to begin my 11-day, 250-kilometer trek.

The days that followed were were blessedly unhurried. I awoke before dawn, and walked a few hours accompanied by the rising sun. Mid-morning, I would stop at a cafe, savor a café con leche and a pastry, then continue walking until lunch, which usually consisted of a pilgrim’s meal of rice, meat, salad, bread, and wine. I would usually arrive at the albergue, or pilgrim hostel, in the late afternoon, then wash off the day’s grime and meet friends for dinner. Despite the long days, it was a leisurely journey. Every pilgrim followed the yellow arrows forward at their own pace. The focus was not on arriving, but on savoring the present — witnessing every freckle of beauty, relishing the vastness and minutiae of every moment.

“The Camino provides” was a statement echoed by many pilgrims throughout the journey. I hadn’t understood it until I experienced it myself. One morning, after traipsing through a furious downpour for hours, hungry and drenched with no town in sight, I came across a small basket of oranges set outside a farm gate for pilgrims. Whether it was a bandage, a rousing word of encouragement, or a tender heart-to-heart, whatever I needed turned up in one way or another. Call it luck, call it fate, call it divine intervention — but I think this serendipity stemmed from our collective belief in the inherent goodness of our fellow pilgrims, and our unspoken agreement to live up to it.

Along the way, I grew to appreciate why people throughout history have memorized poetry and songs: to keep them company in times of loneliness, to grant them courage in times of fear. In the last few days of the Camino, limping from agonizing shin splints, I looped the few poems stored in my head — Dickinson, Rilke, Frost, Oliver, Yeats, Henley — to distract me from the pain.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
      I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
      My head is bloody, but unbowed.

I arrived at Santiago de Compostela at 7 a.m. on a Sunday, as the sun was just beginning to rise and only a few shopkeepers loitered in the streets. A cigarette-smoking restaurateur chuckled at my wide-eyed amazement as I plodded toward the cathedral. There, I stood among a flock of pigeons and savored the silence, breathless with wonder.

Later that morning, as I walked through the holy door of the cathedral for morning mass, I reflected on what a profoundly beautiful experience it was to traverse the same mountains, rivers, and forests as countless before me, and to ask the same questions that people have asked themselves since time immemorial. Who do I wish to be in the world? What am I called to do? While the Camino did not grant me definitive answers, it gave me the reassurance that I was not alone in my questioning.

Some say that arriving at Santiago marks the end of the physical journey, but the beginning of a new spiritual one. It’s taken me a year to write this, partially because I’m continually unraveling new reflections. All my learnings seem unbearably trite: that the most beautiful parts of life are largely unplanned; that we should follow our instincts; that we’re stronger than we believe ourselves to be; that we’re never truly walking alone. That if we approach the world with curiosity and love, the world will open itself to us in return. But perhaps that’s why clichés are such — the truth is often obvious. The real challenge is not simply knowing what’s true, but living it. 

In his essay, “Walking,” Thoreau cites the dual origins of “sauntering”: aller à la sainte terre, going to the holy land; or sans terre, without land or home. Having not felt at home in the world, I had sauntered to the holy land to seek it. But the Camino did not reveal a home in the world, but one within myself: a degree of self-understanding and self-belief that came with walking alone in a foreign country for 11 days, that reassured me that regardless of where I was with the world, regardless of whom I was with or without, I could always return to myself.

All journeys end the same way: on the Camino, at Santiago; in life, with death. The world is far bigger than the maps we are given — only by granting ourselves the time and space to wander can we discover what paths are truly ours, rather than defaulting to the well-trodden. The Camino gave me the conviction that we are called walk our own paths — ones that cannot be planned for or copied from another, and can only be made sense of in hindsight. Everything we choose to do, even if seemingly disparate and nonsensical, comes together to form a greater whole. Only by living at the edge of the unknown and embracing uncertainty can we fulfill the ultimate task of becoming ourselves.

Now, I’m writing this in the midst of a sabbatical. The question of what’s next? defines my days. Despite the great expanse of the unknown, for once, I’m cherishing it. I no longer seek to craft a rigid plan; instead, I allow myself to be guided by what feels true. While I cannot predict what lies ahead, I know the path will be filled with far more beauty and wonder, trials and tribulations than I can currently envision. For now, I am simply putting one foot in front of another — searching for the road less traveled; seeking hints of the divine within the mundane; stretching, stumbling, sauntering toward the light. 

Wishing you glorious journeys ahead.

With love,

Ash