More photography here.
Caught this ornate fountain sculpture in Middleton, WI, in the perfect morning light:
Specters of autumn at our local park:
Will never get enough of the two year old’s chubby hands:
And the two year old will never get enough of playing fetch with his fur cousin:
Spotted this heart-shaped root on my sister-in-law’s land:
The six year old loves being in the wilds of nature but also loves making orderly piles:
A rare trampoline adventure for the boys:
Joan Westenberg on the absurdity of trying to future-proof your life:
We’ve all seen the LinkedIn exhortations: learn the right skills before the machines take your job, invest in the right companies before automation hollows out the market, anticipate the right policies before artificial intelligence rearranges the political order. Etc.
But the more we live in that posture of anxious fortification, the more absurd it feels. Every week there’s a new prediction, every week there’s some new vision. A Greek chorus of confident forecasters seem to dominate every social platform, declaring that AI will erase half of all jobs by 2030, or 2040, or it will create more jobs than it destroys, or it’ll go bust and we’ll all move on, or AGI will arrive…
We keep repeating the same hubris. We keep praying to the oracle of prediction, hoping we’ll be spared the storm. But the storm always comes. And it never looks like the forecast.
In his book Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again, Johann Hari quotes former Google strategist James Williams about what he classifies as three types of focus.
1. Spotlight:
This is when you focus on “immediate actions,” like, “I’m going to walk into the kitchen and make a coffee.” You want to find your glasses. You want to see what’s in the fridge. You want to finish reading this chapter of my book. It’s called the spotlight because as I explained earlier—it involves narrowing down your focus. If your spotlight gets distracted or disrupted, you are prevented from carrying out near-term actions like these.
2. Starlight:
This is the focus you can apply to your “longer-term goals—projects over time.” You want to write a book. You want to set up a business. You want to be a good parent. It’s called the starlight because when you feel lost, you look up to the stars, and you remember the direction you are traveling in. If you become distracted from your starlight, he said, you “lose sight of the longer-term goals.” You start to forget where you are headed.
3. Daylight:
This is the form of focus that makes it possible for you to know what your longer-term goals are in the first place. How do you know you want to write a book? How do you know you want to set up a business? How do you know what it means to be a good parent? Without being able to reflect and think clearly, you won’t be able to figure these things out.
He gave it this name because it’s only when a scene is flooded with daylight that you can see the things around you most clearly. If you get so distracted that you lose your sense of the daylight, James says, “In many ways you may not even be able to figure out who you are, what you wanted to do, [or] where you want to go.” …
You can only find your starlight and your daylight if you have sustained periods of reflection, mind-wandering, and deep thought. James has come to believe that our attention crisis is depriving us of all three of these forms of focus. We are losing our light.
I’ve been to many concerts in my life. But I noticed the ones I remember most keenly have a specific song or moment that locked into my consciousness. Here, in chronological order with their venue and specific date (thanks internet!), are the ones that have stuck with me the most.
“The City, The Airport” by Loney Dear
The Metro. Chicago. April 13, 2007. My former bandmate and I had a connection with Matt and Seth of Anathallo (see below), and they invited us to go see Low. We arrived during the opener, a Swedish group called Loney Dear, as they were playing this propulsive bop. I found Low’s show to be slow and forgettable, but I’ll never forget Loney Dear.
“On the Safest Ledge” by Copeland
The Bottom Lounge. Chicago. October 30, 2008. I went with my friend Whitney to see one of my favorite bands at the time (and one I’ve been writing about since this blog’s beginning). You Are My Sunshine has just come out and I was really steeped in Eat, Sleep, Repeat so getting to see them live was a real treat, and this particular song was absolutely electric.
“Why Can’t It Be Christmastime All Year?” by Rosie Thomas
Schuba’s Tavern. Chicago. December 7, 2008. This was a Christmas-themed show, with Rosie and her bandmates dressed in ugly holiday sweaters and pajamas and playing festive tunes—including this bouncy original that’s become a staple in my annual Yuletide listening. I emerged from this concert into the unrivaled winter wonderland vibes of Christmastime in Chicago with its snow and cold and twinkling lights.
“All the First Pages” by Anathallo
The Union. Naperville. February 20, 2009. This is what inspired me to do this list. I’d seen them before, but this particular song played by an eight-piece group packed snugly onto a small stage in an intimate venue with a standing-room-only crowd… well, let’s just say when the bridge explodes into the final chorus, it felt like the roof blew open and confetti was flying everywhere. Transcendent.
“You Should’ve Seen the Other Guy” by Nathaniel Rateliff
The Pabst Theater. Milwaukee. May 25, 2010. About to graduate from college, I drove up to Milwaukee with my friends Steve, Tim, and Andrea to see The Tallest Man On Earth. He was a great show in itself, but Rateliff and his band (not yet “& the Night Sweats”) were a wonderful surprise as the opening act. I could feel his primal yell in this chorus even from the nosebleeds.
“Hey Jude” by Paul McCartney
Wrigley Field. Chicago. August 1, 2011. Technically I didn’t go to this concert; my friend Brian and I just joined the crowds gathered right outside the stadium to listen to legendary music reverberating out into Wrigleyville. But that didn’t matter—it was basically a free Beatles show, and singing this song live with thousands of people is an experience I’ll never forget. (The photo at top captures our freeloaders’ view—the big white light is the giant screen in the stadium.)
“Emmylou” by First Aid Kit
Lincoln Hall. Chicago. April 6, 2012. My now-wife and I had just started dating when we went to see this Swedish duo who had blown up with the release of The Lion’s Roar, so it’s no wonder hearing this buoyant song about love and winter and music stuck with me. Just as good: watching Emmylou Harris tear up hearing it live.
“She Lit A Fire” by Lord Huron
The House Cafe. DeKalb. July 23, 2013. Their album Lonesome Dreams had been my personal soundtrack the previous winter, so it was a thrill to see them live—with a bonus of my friend Kevin Prchal as the opener. As with First Aid Kit, this song’s lyrics (“she lit a fire, and now she’s in my every thought”) spoke directly to my burgeoning feelings for my soon-to-be-fiancée.
“Miami 2017 (Seen the Lights Go Out on Broadway)” by Billy Joel
Wrigley Field. Chicago. August 11, 2017. Back at Wrigley with my sister to see one of our mutual favorites as an early birthday outing, we’d planned to hang outside like at the McCartney show but then out of curiosity checked the box office when we arrived. Tickets weren’t exorbitant, so my sister decided to spring for them and we went in, this final song from Turnstiles leading off the show as we found our seats for what became a magical evening.
“Send My Love (To Your New Lover)” by I’m With Her
Thalia Hall. Chicago. January 6, 2018. We didn’t know it at the time, but this ended up being the last concert my wife and I went to together before our first child was born. And while their original songs were delightful, their a cappella cover of this Adele song was so unexpected and brought the house down.
As a certified typewriter person, of course I’d be interested in Marcin Winchary’s magnificent book Shift Happens: A Book About Keyboards. But I didn’t think I’d actually be able to read it since it was a popular Kickstarter project that went for a cool $150 for the two-volume set before selling out.
That is until I thought to check if I could borrow it through interlibrary loan, and sure enough I could. (Libraries to the rescue, baby. As always.) The only catch was I had to read it at the library instead of bringing it home, presumably to prevent a pricy book from disappearing. Which was fine: I just brought my six year old along and he perused his favorite graphic novels while I dove into this wonderful work of art, history, and typewriter glory.
It’s hard to overstate just how beautiful the book is, both as an object and how the content is laid out. Everything is thoughtfully designed, all the way down to the footnote symbols:
The book’s two volumes focus on the two major epochs in keyboard history: the origins and development of typewriters, and the keyboard’s advancement into computers and smartphones. (There’s also a bonus making-of booklet wherein Winchary goes into greater detail about the project’s conception and implementation.) Along the way there’s some really great writing on the burgeoning business of typewriters in the late 19th century, the QWERTY vs. Dvorak drama, and other delightful details die-hard typists will dig.
I appreciated this bit of context-setting on Christopher Latham Sholes, one of the inventors of the typewriter:
Sholes worked in a relative vacuum of technology. There were no tall buildings, and the few business offices that existed were coarse. Weller described them as having “rough, bare floors, box wood stoves, sawdust cuspidors and Windsor chairs and smoke-blackened walls.” The most complex object in most people’s homes was a manual sewing machine. The main source of entertainment at home was typically a piano; home radios were still half a century away, with television to follow twenty-five years after them. The telegraph allowed the flow of Morse code across continents, having crossed the Atlantic a few years earlier. But the first successful test of a telephone was nine years away, the Edison lightbulb another twelve, and electrification of cities and factories decades ahead.
There’s also this passage from the chapter on touch typing about the equivalent terms for “hunt and peck” in different countries, which, as a hunt-and-peck typist myself, I found delightful and even inspiring:
The Dutch call it “poking.” In Portuguese, it’s “key-per-key typing.” Germans have the most complicated word, of course: Adlersuchsystem, which translates as “an eagle search system,” imagining an eagle circling above the keys, striking from up high once in a while. In Hebrew it’s not uncommon to refer to casual typing as “doctor’s typing,” and in Slovak as “the police method,” singling out the professions apparently unable to learn touch typing. In Colombia, touch typing comes with a beautiful term, mecanografia, which for simple typing mutates into the colloquial chuzografia: “poke-o-graphy.” Some languages recognize even non-touch-typing technique as something to admire. Brazil’s catar milho can be translated as “collecting corn.” The Swedish call it pekfingervalsen – or, the index finger waltz. And then there’s the Japanese 雨だれタイピング、which means “raindrop typing.”
(See the rest of my notes and quotes.)
I doff my cap to Winchary’s dedication and care for every aspect of this endeavor, and am simply grateful for its existence. Consult WorldCat and your local library to see if it’s nearby or could be delivered to you. It’s definitely worth the postage.
We were heading out the door to meet some friends at a playground and our six year old was rarin’ to go. While my wife was still gathering things, he wanted to go outside and wait in the driveway until we were ready to depart.
“It’s a head stop, papa,” he said. “Like a head start but we’re still stopped.”
What a genius term! Here’s hoping he continues to pursue word nerdery like his old man.
The Naked Gun (2025). Cheers to a movie that knows exactly what it is and how to be that for just the right amount of time. Still giggling about random bits from this days later.
Weapons. I’m typically a matinee guy but I stayed up past my bedtime to go see this in a theater, and I’m glad I did. We were in whatever you call this thing together.
A Little Prayer. The kind of movie that inspires you to listen more intently to the birds singing outside your window in the morning, or linger longer at a park bench. ‘Twas a pleasure chatting with the writer/director Angus MacLachlan about this movie, Jane Levy’s knockout performance, and more.
Lost in the Stream: How Algorithms Redefined the Way Movies Are Made and Watched by Jeff Rauseo. Wrote a review of this over at Cinema Sugar.
The Assessment. It’s been a minute since a movie gave me as many belly laughs of recognition as chills up my spine like this one did.
Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering by Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell’s acquired a bit of a divisive reputation, but he remains a great writer with unique and insightful perspectives. Not to mention a great podcast guest.
Eephus. Gonna be a great autumnal rewatch.
Sinners. This has several A+, capital-C Cinema sequences that had me thinking “Here we go, hell yeah.” It also had a lot of stitching around them that perhaps a rewatch will feel more seamless but on the first go seemed to stick out a little. Overall though, an absolute pleasure to see an original film by an amazing auteur and inspired creative team.
I think I might have found the most Chad thing on the internet: a database of the most obscure words in movies.
This is hardcore but also admirable: “I deleted my second brain.”
Shoutout to these guys who hated Comcast so much they built their own ISP.
Can’t wait for this iceberg-based Arrival sequel.
Happy 30th anniversary to Apollo 13, a celebration of competence.
The other day this line popped into my head:
When despair for the world grows in me
It’s the opening line of the Wendell Berry poem “The Peace of Wild Things”. I’m sure there were many reasons it surfaced from my subconscious (*gestures at everything*), but regardless I was grateful it did because brought to mind the rest of the poem, which was one of the first I memorized.
Then it dawned on me: Poetry is artificial intelligence.
What is poetry if not a large language model comprised of vast amounts of text created by humans about every conceivable topic? And what is a poem if not a response to a specific prompt that can be summoned for whatever question or trouble you have?
I’m being cheeky, but the power of the arts and humanities is no joke. They’re reliable companions that can enrich our lives and help us understand and contextualize and prophesy if we just ask them to.
The sequence of events this morning:
In what’s becoming an accidental yearly tradition, here’s a selection of creatures big and small I’ve captured.
A tree frog:
A milkweed tiger moth:
An oriental beetle:
A zebra spider:
An ovenbird just chillin’ on our front porch:
A great blue heron:
It always blows my mind when I see people of all ages biking around with no helmets on.
Teenagers, I get it—they’re too cool for school and have undeveloped prefrontal cortexes, so they’re dumb by design. And motorcyclists without helmets? They clearly have a death wish. Good luck to them.
But grownups? Especially parents riding with their kids who are also without helmets? What are you doing?
Are you afraid of looking dorky? Because when I see someone without a helmet, I don’t think “Whoa, that person looks totally rad.” I think, “I hope their health insurance is good enough to cover the hospital bills coming their way.”
And if you’re thinking, “Why do I need a helmet when I’m not on the road? I’m just going on a leisurely ride through the park.” Good question—do you know how many times I’ve been biking on a bike path and had a squirrel or bird zoom past and force me to suddenly swerve away? Or witnessed another biker get T-boned by a car despite riding on the sidewalk? Not zero!
If you wear a seatbelt in a car, you should wear a helmet on a bike.
But don’t just listen to me. Listen to the “Every Day is Helmet Day” PSA that aired nonstop throughout the mid-’90s in the Madison area and remains burned into my brain:
Derek Thompson on why science is a special kind of faith:
We owe our electric age to scientists who were crazy, ignorant, or both. In his book The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, Richard Feynman writes that “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.” I used to hate this quote for its entreaty to conspiratorial thinking. After all, if scientists automatically distrusted every expert opinion, how would truths coalesce? How would knowledge accumulate over time? Wouldn’t we all just claim our own private reality in the face of expertise? But it’s the following lines from Feynman that make his point clear. “When someone says ‘science teaches such and such’, he is using the word incorrectly. Science doesn’t teach it; experience teaches it.” In other words, science is the opposite of blind faith. It is a reflexive skepticism toward received wisdoms or arguments from authority. It is the conviction that our own experiments, if carefully constructed, can reveal once-obscured truths. Science is a special kind of faith—a belief before evidence that the previous generation’s “truths” are, at best, half-truths, with half-lives, which will one day pass away and make room for the next generation of even more useful half-truths.
More photography here.
Life finding a way through a tennis court:
Exploring the ice rink at our local sports complex:
Angles at my parents’ house:
Summiting the little hill at my childhood park:
More angles and shadows at the library:
The six year old just kickin’ a brick wall while we waited for the splash pad to open:
Reaching, always reaching:
Originally published at Cinema Sugar.
What do you do when you encounter the impossible? Something that doesn’t compute with your understanding of reality and drastically challenges your worldview?
You can ignore or deny it, confident the existing story you tell yourself can render any mystery or inconsistency meaningless to your everyday life. You can resent it and lash out in anger, yearning for the time before this thing crashed into your conscience and caused irrevocable change. You can also lean into it, treating it not as a threat but as a thread that needs just the slightest tug to unravel.
On my journey away from the religion of my youth, I did all three pretty much at the same time. And not only that, but I saw those very same dynamics play out among the three core characters in Max Barbakow’s 2020 film Palm Springs—a terrific time-loop comedy (and one of the best movies of the 21st century) with a lot on its mind.
There are many reasons I fell for Palm Springs when I first saw it. The rock-solid execution of a smart, cohesive script. The magical combination of goofy comedy, heartfelt drama, mind-shifting philosophy, and a soupçon of sci-fi. The kickass cast with great chemistry keeping a high concept grounded in humanity, all within a 90-minute runtime.
Its obvious inspiration is Groundhog Day, which has Bill Murray’s Phil repeating the same day over and over again until he learns to be a better person, falls in love, and then manages to escape the loop for reasons just as mysterious as how he got stuck in the first place. But Palm Springs takes this concept deeper in two ways.
First, there’s more people in the loop. Nyles (Andy Samberg) has been stuck for a long time when we first meet him as the underdressed, overserved, and clearly jaded boyfriend of a bridesmaid at a Palm Springs resort wedding. Then there’s Sarah (Cristin Milioti), the equally jaded maid of honor who hits it off with Nyles but accidentally follows him through the loop’s mysterious portal. And there’s also Roy (J.K. Simmons), another wedding guest Nyles had clumsily invited into the loop while under the influence. How these three deal with each other and their circumstances is the core of the movie, and a pleasure to watch unfold.
The other way Palm Springs sets itself apart is how it treats the time loop. More than just a setting for the characters’ self-discovery or catalyst for conflict, it becomes a force unto itself—something that both teaches and torments the film’s triumvirate of trapped time travelers, and ultimately gives them meaning even as they attempt to escape it.
In other words: the time loop is a religion.
In the book Life’s Too Short to Pretend You’re Not Religious, the writer David Dark explores one etymology of the word religion (fitting there isn’t One True Meaning of the word), which comes from the Latin religare, meaning “to bind fast” or tie together. Dark uses this understanding to interpret religion as a “controlling story”—something we bind or devote ourselves to that provides boundaries to our beliefs and gives our earthly existence greater meaning.
That’s what Christianity was for me. Growing up in a conservative Christian household, I went to church regularly and lived out the staples of a Christian upbringing: weekly youth group, summer camp, Bible studies, mission trips, See You At The Pole (Google it), True Love Waits (don’t Google it).
I didn’t do all of this reluctantly—I was a true believer. From childhood all the way through adolescence, college, and into my mid-twenties, the Jesus story provided the foundation of how I understood the world and myself. It was the lens through which I saw and interpreted the things I loved doing like reading, writing, listening to and making music, and watching movies. Even as I wrestled with the inconsistencies of the Bible and grew frustrated with the hypocrisies of religious figures and church doctrine, I maintained an earnest devotion to the notion that faith superseded all other earthly forces and permeated everything we understand about existence.
For Nyles, Sarah, and Roy, the time loop has in effect become their religion, their controlling story. Not only because they’re literally controlled by its parameters and seemingly powerless to escape, but also in a larger sense in that they all come to discover a kind of teleological understanding of the loop and the meaning they’ve derived from it. Nyles shares his with Sarah in one exchange:
NYLES: I don’t know what it is. It could be life, it could be death. It might be a dream. I might be imagining you, you might be imagining me. It could be purgatory or a glitch in the simulation that we’re both in. I don’t know. So I decided a while ago to sort of give up and stop trying to make sense of things altogether, because the only way to really live in this is to embrace the fact that nothing matters.
SARAH: Well, then what’s the point of living?
NYLES: Well, we kind of have no choice but to live, so I think your best bet is just to learn how to suffer existence.
Each of them suffer their existence in different ways, all of which felt exquisitely familiar to me because I lived out all of them during my long journey out of my original controlling story.
Nyles has surrendered to his circumstances, comfortable in the literal and metaphorical pool he’s been swimming in for so long that he doesn’t even remember his life from before, or fathom the possibility of leaving his present one. Likewise, I’d grown so familiar with the beats and boundaries of my controlling story that the thought of forming a new one felt inconceivable, even dangerous.
In contrast to Nyles, Roy feels tormented by his circumstances and takes out his anger on Nyles as retribution for trapping him in an ever-presence he can’t escape. And while I wasn’t perpetrating vengeful acts of violence like Roy, I often felt disturbed by the destabilizing effects such deep-seated change had on my worldview and resented losing the comforts a controlling story provides. “I’m not going to see my kids grow up,” Roy later laments to Nyles at his home in Irvine, revealing that his anger was just grief in disguise—his way of dealing with the pain of being severed from his own life and concept of reality. Yet now, awash in contentment with his fate, Roy implores Nyles to seek out a similar peace: “You gotta find your Irvine.”
Sarah, meanwhile, is wracked with guilt over a haunting mistake she now has to relive over and over again, and despite coming to enjoy her time in the loop with Nyles she eventually hits a breaking point and resolves to figure out the mechanics of the time loop (which she later determines is “a box of energy”) in order to escape it. Similarly, as I grew more claustrophobic within my own metaphysical box, I ultimately found a way beyond it through curiosity. I entered a period of voracious reading, when I was drawn to books about psychology, science, human history, and other topics that spoke to the big-picture questions I was pondering. Slowly but surely, the discoveries I was making gave me new lenses to look through and see what had been there the whole time, like the Benjamin Franklin spectacles in National Treasure.
I wasn’t trying to destroy my existing worldview, and there wasn’t one particular thing that pushed me over the edge. Just a long series of small nudges that only when I looked back after a long while had accumulated into a big distance from where I’d started: a book here, a revelatory podcast there, the small epiphanies and paradoxes compounded slowly over years until they proved too overwhelming to ignore.
There’s an idea in cognitive science that human consciousness is merely a story the brain tells itself. Humans are meaning-making machines—we crave relief from the chaos of existence and will find or create meaning however we can as a way to make sense of the nonsensical.
Palm Springs features three people who lived a nonsensical new story together, day after day, trying and failing and giving up and trying again to find meaning in the messiness. It’s the kind of movie that inspires me as a work of art and as a cri de coeur for a better, more wholehearted life.
(It’s a cruel irony indeed that a movie about purgatory remains caught in a different kind of purgatory, where “streaming exclusives” can’t break free from their digital dungeons into the freedom of physical media. #ReleaseThePalmSpringsBluray!)
We all have a controlling story. It could be ancient (Christianity, Islam, Judaism) or au courant (hello Peloton partisans, Bitcoin bros, and Disney Adults). Mine has changed, and yours probably has too. It has to, or else I don’t think you’re really living.
Ideally you have someone who can change with you too. I was fortunate to have a life partner throughout this journey who had shared a similar controlling story yet was just as ready as I was to, like Nyles and Sarah, take a scary step into a new one together.
“At least you have each other,” Roy tells Nyles about Sarah’s entry into the loop. “Nothing worse than going through this shit alone.”
Dark makes a similar conclusion in his book: “People come to consciousness in relationship. This is the phenomenon—oh, how it enlivens a heart!—of shared meaning.”
I’ve found my Irvine.
That’s me at our local No Kings rally back in June. It’s the energy I’m bringing to Fourth of July this year, what with the United States government having been taken over by orcs, goblins, and all manner of Mordor-worthy villainy. May we the people soon topple their treachery and an Aragorn-esque leader one day unite the forces of good against such reckless hate.
(Yes, Tolkien nerds, I’m aware “Forth Eorlingas” is a Rohirrim rallying cry and thus not an Aragorn thing, but I couldn’t turn down the title pun.)
Fellow millennial Chloé Hamilton on how millennials became uncool:
In recent years, millennials, the former hip young things that once seemed so cutting edge when cast side-by-side with the out-of-touch baby boomers and the rather nondescript generation X, have become, well, a bit cringe. …
But, I’ll confess, being part of a generation that felt so progressive compared with its predecessors, bridging the gap between analogue and digital, felt significant, essential, and yes, bloody cool, actually. It’s a shock, then, to wake up one morning and realise you’ve been usurped.
The first thing I thought of while reading this? June George from Mean Girls:
I can’t for the life of me track it down, but there was a tweet long ago that stuck with me that said basically: cool doesn’t exist, it’s a made-up concept that makes people act dumb and it’s pointless to chase after.
Just be yourself, like what you like, and forget about trying to impress strangers on the internet or IRL—especially people younger than you.
‘Cause you know what’s cool? A billion dollars Not obsessing about what’s cool, what’s cringe, or whatever the latest Gen Z slang is. Embrace the freedom that aging and earnestness provide.
Gracy Olmstead is back with another excellent issue of her Granola newsletter, this time on mundanity, the mind, and AI:
While doing the mundane, we lose ourselves in process and place. The mundane roots us in the present, stubbornly refusing the demands of clock or calendar. It will take as much time as it requires. And so we pull at a thread of argument, uproot weed after weed, or sweep every nook and cranny until the room is clean. We sink into a new experience of time and place, in which everything diminishes but the now and here. Ironically (and sometimes, maddeningly) we may have to do it all again: Sit down to rewrite, hone, edit, and polish. Return to the nasty weeds that pop up day after day. Tackle the dust and grime of another week.
Yes, the mundane is not always pretty. What these experiences shape is not always a finished product that we can hold up and boast about. Sometimes, yes. But not always. What is always true is that these processes are shaping and honing us. They are showing us who we are, how to be, and what it means to think and live. The work of the mundane tethers us to place, to our bodies, to the people we love and live with, and—perhaps in a way I never realized before AI—to our minds themselves.
If the mundane elements of our lives show us who we are, how to be, and what it means to think and live, then what will become of us when we outsource that being, thinking, and living to AI or other ideologies? We sacrifice those essential elements of existence and become their opposite: nothing.
And as it becomes ever more evident that relying on AI degrades your critical thinking skills and cognitive abilities, putting your mind to work matters even more. But why? Olmstead nails it here:
Because it’s the process of slogging through an argument—feeling out its contours and edges, remolding and reshaping them like a potter—that teaches us how to think. Strong arguments do not spring fully formed from the mind. They simmer and stew. They emerge half-formed, and have to be reshaped. Essays materialize when you start to write, and realize you did not yet know what you thought. In the process of verbalizing thoughts, there is room to grow, stretch, and challenge the mind. There is even room to change your mind. AI short circuits this opportunity—in giving us what we ask for, it in fact steals opportunities for growth. It cheats the process of becoming that the mundane offers.
This really spoke to me in relation to writing specifically, whether for this blog or Cinema Sugar. Some writers bemoan the writing process itself, slow and tedious and frustrating as it can be. “I love having written something” goes the trite phrase. And it’s indeed satisfying to finally arrive at the end product. But I also love being in the weeds of the thing. Thinking and rethinking, writing and rewriting, arranging and rearranging, rinse and repeat—that time spent with my hands in the metaphorical dirt, in the mundane, is where the real magic happens.