Alchemy of a Soul
My new piece in Wayfare + other updates
I.
I wrote a piece for Wayfare 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:
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 Ryan Fairchild and Lori Forsyth, for shepherding this piece!
II.
I’m hosting a monthly event series called The Art of Being Human at the Imbue 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 Nicholas Paul and attention with Adam Robbert; 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.
Nabokov’s Pnin was a delight; I’m working my way through Proust’s Swann’s Way with a reading group; I just started Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.