Below is an essay concerning AI and the future job market that I wrote for my college writing students this semester. I gave it to them to critique for extra credit. I didn’t want to assign them something of mine they had to read for a grade (oof), but I also wanted to say all this to them, and so I give them the option to read it and engage me in dialogue—which is the subject of the essay.

In the Age of AI, Jobs Will Require Curiosity

1

We discussed AI somewhat in class, but I wanted to leave you with some thoughts about it as you continue your education. One reason I asked you not to write with AI is because I find that people generally cannot learn the foundational skills for written argumentation well enough by using it, even if they’re just generating an outline, which is an integral part of writing. I made this clear to you. I didn’t emphasize the other reason enough, though. The other reason is that writing refines thinking by forcing you into dialogue first with yourself, and then the world. By entering into dialogue you expand your curiosity, simply because the clearer you can think, the more you can take apart and put things back together.

The process of putting each word together forces you to stop and consider what you truly think, feel, believe. And thus your curiosity is sparked. Embracing an argument from an AI as your own is a passive act; your curiosity is stifled when it gives you ideas that you probably don’t fully agree with or grasp, since you didn’t labor over expressing what is true to your reality. Writing is an active, creative process that transforms your mind, sharpening its ability much like working out in a gym or running does for your body. Little by little, your mind becomes more fit for the various cognitive challenges of life (like analyzing the arguments everywhere around us) as you learn to put sentences together to express yourself. By opting out of learning to argue or express yourself better in writing, you’re opting out of long term cognitive advantages. And you’ll benefit highly from these advantages once you enter the workforce, no matter how good AI gets. In an AI-driven economy, the most valuable advantage will be curiosity—it drives the thinking a human can do that an AI can’t: creative thinking that shapes reality through dialogue.

2

When I was in high school, I had to write a paper about World War II. As soon as I started writing in the library during a workshop session, I noticed there wasn’t a key on the keyboard for roman numerals. I wanted to type “II,” not “2,” which wasn’t what historians did. I asked my teacher what to do about it. He used the capital “I” on the keyboard for me, then smiled. “We have to be smarter than the machines, Mr. North,” he said.

I felt dumb. But soon I realized I wasn’t permanently, irredeemably stupid. I simply had been on autopilot. I didn’t take the chance to be curious, so I didn’t realize that the capital “I” is the same as the roman numeral for 1. I thought I was missing a key on my basic keyboard that others had. I didn’t give myself much of a chance to figure it out, and I missed an opportunity to transform my mind. But at least I could speak in dialogue with my teacher, who impressed upon me the importance of thinking for yourself. I had to accommodate a new mental structure, which refined my thinking in terms of how I viewed technology and tools.

Now, we only have to click a few keys to create an entire paper. We don’t have to make any instructive memories we can access later to learn more and more from as our thinking ability sharpens. We aren’t forced to be smarter than the machines as often as we were just five years ago. We’ve been given tools that direct our need for dialogue to a computer program which powerful corporations designed without any government oversight—and this, to me, is linked to why companies are taking jobs away. They don’t see the need for dialogue. They’re wrong, but they either don’t see why yet or they think their short terms gains will protect them against long term problems. Problems the average person will have to confront.

I’m lately hearing that jobs in dialogue-centered HEAL fields are what AI can’t replace: health, education, administration, and literacy. I’d add in law and the humanities in general, too. I don’t think AI will be doing any good philosophy soon, and it often makes up legal cases. Maybe there is some truth about HEAL jobs staying relevant, even if parts of them already are or will be automated. After all, how can a machine truly care for people? It doesn’t compute, if you’ll excuse the pun.

Still, the only way you’re going to make it in any field, whether in STEM or HEAL, is to use your curiosity to think for yourself. This means refining your thinking according to your own needs and purposes, which includes thinking outside of yourself, as I needed to do to figure out how to type “II.” Dialogue only works for you if you can think for yourself. If you aren’t skilled at this process that the machine can’t do for you, then you may struggle economically more than is necessary. Even if AI replaces most jobs and we get universal basic income from the government, there will be a transition period where you will have to survive economically. And probably that period won’t be very brief.

If we are all going to economically survive the transition into an AI dominated economy, we will also need to focus on seeing the limitations of AI. Being able to do something an AI can’t, whatever that is, will be the skill that opens the most doors for you. But to gain those skills, one first needs the mental capacity to conceptualize the limitations of AI. And writing improves that capacity because it is a creative act which, if nothing else, restructures and strengthens your brain the more your curiosity is piqued.

3

Because writing helps make you a creator, you become a more active participant in your life and the world around you. This entails engaging in dialogue with the world. AI are trained to keep you coming back, relying on them as a passive, even addicted, consumer. Look at the cases of lonely people in relationships with bots, or getting psychosis from the bots feeding their mental illness.

We must be both creator and consumer to stay afloat through all the AI changes. By the time you’ve doubled your age and we’re in the 2040s, I figure it’s highly possible that AI will have created a world where our time is filled with more opportunities to consume than create. This is already the world state right now, really, but it could easily get exponentially worse.

Right now, it seems like pretty much everyone in the US and many other countries can be a content creator of some kind. But look closer. Only a very small percentage of people make a living off of this. The rest of them are more consumer than creator, since they spend so much time seeing ads on a platform and adding free content to it, trying to win the algorithmic lottery. They consume content on the platform to try to increase their luck, and most never win the big prize. Even if you make content as a hobby, the constant checking in on your likes and reshares is a form of consumption that feeds the platform’s business model because you’re spending time there instead of doing things elsewhere.

What I mean by create is more fundamental than getting your fifteen minutes of internet-creator fame. Creating is shaping the reality in which you live. A single word spoken in affection or hate can alter the reality around you. Most of us cannot shape the world so easily by using social media or AI. There are all kinds of other ways offline to do this that technology distracts us from—like simple dialogue between friends trying to understand each other.

Dialogue in real life does not rely on a lottery of algorithms. It is simply “They say” versus “I say.” Online, leaving a comment isn’t engaging in truly equal dialogue; it’s more like giving a business some feedback in their “Suggestions” box. You know, in both cases, that the person with the business platform doesn’t have to listen to you or treat you like a person.

Truly respectful dialogue shapes reality by the sharing and combining of ideas, even if it is just the reality experienced by the people in the discussion. It has structured civilization and culture since they’ve existed, and widespread literacy boosted the impact by including more voices in the conversation. Democracy was formally enacted in 18th century nations like the U.S. in large part because the majority of the population could read and write, something that wouldn’t have happened before high literacy levels, in my view.

Dialogue is key to living in the world you want, and writing gets you used to dialogue between people, where the stakes are real. It also puts your cooperation with or challenge of other people into concrete forms by way of arguments, laws, treaties, contracts, etc. Without the ability to read and write critically, a person is at an extreme deficit in the world. And more of the country is losing this ability; some sources on literacy say around 50% of American adults read below a 6th grade level.

It might be good that doctors must now write all instructions and notes at a 6th grade reading level, just to keep people safe. But if the entire world’s level of ability to understand language keeps decreasing, we will keep misunderstanding each other more and more, creating political, economic, and cultural discord—not dialogue.

4

Can we have dialogue between each other with AI as an intermediary? Can it help us refine our thoughts so we can present them better to one another? In many cases, yes. But the fact that a machine can do something doesn’t mean we can automatically make good use of it. In my view, AI is a tool that helps most when you have already become highly knowledgeable about a topic or task, outside of its help. Otherwise, even if you learn some things from it, you won’t have exercised your mind much in doing so, and you won’t understand the topic or task nearly as well as you could. If this is true, then it follows that you cannot make very good use of an AI’s ability to help people refine their thoughts without first knowing enough about what refining your thoughts looks and feels like.

There is a lived experience requirement to incisive thinking—and writing—that AI can’t provide you. You have to learn it by slow, repetitive work. The difficulty of writing is the point. The difficulty of clear thinking is the point. The rewards are delayed, but once you obtain them, they are more impactful than getting something handed to you.

There is an old cliche about college: “You go there to learn to think, not to get a job.” There’s a reason this still gets said today, even if getting a job is also your goal. It’s said because if you learn to think more precisely, a job that requires your refined cognition will more naturally follow. Obviously no job is guaranteed to you once you graduate, but if you don’t learn how to think well, and particularly in dialogue with others, then your job search will be more limited. This will especially be true in the age of AI: many physical labor jobs like plumbing and mental labor positions that require thinking only humans can do, like air traffic controller, will be more plentiful; on the other hand, low to mid-level cognition-based jobs like data entry, which a person of relatively unrefined thinking could do, will be done by AI agents.

Dialogue with a bot will never teach you as much as dialogue with a person, including dialogue with your past selves that have written something down you read later with a new perspective. Humans have the capacity for kinds of intelligence that AI never will simply by virtue of being embodied, physical beings. You will never have more information at hand than an AI does. But what you will have is the kind of intelligence that comes from curiosity, and exercising it will lead to insights and pattern recognition that impact humans as much or more than anything an AI will ever churn out.

Humans are born with a capacity for curiosity. At minimum it’s a survival mechanism, but it’s also why we have all the technology in the world, for good or bad. Instead of being passive or afraid, you become more curious the more refined your thinking is. And you can always become more responsible with how you deploy your curiosity, too. AIs won’t be responsible for anything they do (unless they truly become conscious), so responsibility ultimately falls to the people who use and make them.

The makers of the world are responsible for what it looks like. If enough people don’t join the ranks and seek dialogue with the makers of AI, of businesses, of laws, of norms and morals and all else, more of us will only be passive consumers of what others have made. We should want to be responsible for this world, and expanding your curiosity by writing gives you practice for knowing yourself, including what burdens you can or want to help others bear.

As you finish school, get a job, and meet a world changing so fast that no one can fully assure you of what the future holds, remember that active curiosity will lead you through it all. Passive consumption won’t. You don’t have to be a writer, per se. But you should want to be a creator who uses language as one essential, human tool for shaping reality in dialogue with others.

The correct answer to this has always been: “Maybe you could’ve done it, but you didn’t and the artist did.” This response showcases the necessity of an artist’s intentional choice to conceive of something as art, even if it is found art like readymades, such as Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (which is a urinal he flipped upside down).

In a comforting instance of irony, however, this answer doesn’t hold up as a response to skeptics like me who ask the same question of A.I. prompters, even as their content output tends to have a glossy sheen of “skill” applied to it (that’s the A.I. sycophancy coming through). A.I. users can't say “I created this first and you didn't” because the would-be artist prompter literally didn't do what you also couldn't—namely, create the exact image an AI probabilistically generates.

A.I. generated content can’t be art without a lot of additional handcrafted changes to it, beyond simply reprompting. If your final version of some content was the result of the A.I., it's not art, but ontologically something else (which I plan on writing about soon).

So you can’t say A.I. content is readymade art in the way you could say a flipped urinal is. Prompters can't conceive of a piece of A.I. content as art without first requesting that the A.I. make it. It doesn't exist before the request. They can’t ask for a urinal and then choose to see a fountain, as they already expect a urinal that won't accord fully with their own vision because they've given up their agency after the prompt. There's no getting it back afterwards without going outside of the A.I.’s purview. A person can't ask for a readymade, but rather only stumble upon something they could turn into one.

Simply put, requesting an image disqualifies it from being a readymade. A readymade is a mundane found object ‘made ready’ as art by the will of the artist’s mind. It's a categorical error to think otherwise.

Prompters do not stumble upon something in the mundane world they choose to conceptualize as art. They seek art from a cybernetic genie—and genies never give you exactly what you ask for. Prompters are beholden to the A.I.’s collation of choices made by innumerable other people.

Even if you ask A.I. for the image of a mundane object, not intending to make it art, but are surprised enough by the content to then consider it, you still can’t create a readymade. You’ve already asked for and received a reconstituted image, not the thing itself you can conceptually manipulate to your heart’s agentic content. It is a derivative you’ve already conceptually intended for no other context but your own request; you give up any chance to call it art by asking for non-art, and there's no changing it without altering the image outside of the A.I.’s purview so much that it doesn't bear resemblance to itself anymore. This is not what readymades entail. They must suggest their original, mundane context.

I tried asking A.I. for a readymade, anyway, to show its limitations. I told ChatGPT 5 to “Create a piece of "'readymade' art by taking an image of an everyday object and reconceptualizing it, a la Marcel Duchamp. Include a title relevant to the reconceptualization.”

It gave me this:

I said “a la” Duchamp. That means, to me, “in the style of.” I didn’t specifically ask it to make a derivative readymade. So I prompted it again:

I didn't want a derivative of Duchamp, just something in the style of finding readymades. Create an image of a readymade as I asked before, but don't make it derivative of Duchamp. Do something original.

The result? Not a readymade. It took everyday objects and made a mixed media image:

I kept fighting with ChatGPT (chuckling at how it tried to win me over by making the objects I requested look like they are good enough for a museum), then got it to access what a readymade truly is. It gave me this:

Sure, that looks closer to a readymade. It’s supposed to be a hotel keycard, though it has that weird, imperfect circle that looks like a washer for a screw. It still doesn’t radically reframe anything about a keycard conceptually, just comments on their typical, literal nature (they grant temporary access). It also doesn’t reconceptualize the keycard by calling it something like “Zebra Hide” (but even my renaming it this doesn't make it readymade art because I am not fully reconceptualizing a mundane found object; at most, I’m just writing another part of a prompt to give the A.I. something else to go on after giving up my agency).

I was getting tired of the slop, so I made the A.I. admit it couldn’t actually make a readymade. It, of course, agreed: “A true readymade is a real, pre-existing object chosen from the world and presented as art. Its authenticity comes from being actually found, unaltered, and contextualized.”

This is correct. No one seriously says A.I. can't synthesize research decently well (often too well, considering its fabrications of sources).

At no point in my prompting did I make a choice to see one pre-existing, unaltered thing as something else. This is the metaphoric impulse so key to creativity, and it arises out of acting on and overcoming obstacles to the desire for unity between things, which is necessary for meaning. This never happens in A.I. generation alone because the A.I. strips the user from making the final choice over what each generation looks like, thus alienating them from the results of their desires. The user is kept in a position of asking and receiving more than determining and creating.

Today, the kind of people who would see no beauty in a Duchamp, Rothko, or Jackson Pollock piece are predominantly the same people who would use A.I. to create slop averaged out of swaths of stolen art. They are currently being tricked by the cybernetic genies as they are handed content that looks superficially good, like a Thomas Kincade painting; before, they were being tricked by mafioso-like curators that held up mimesis as the primary quality of good art, the quality that makes it commercial, which the A.I. magicians have also adopted and furthered for their end of keeping people hooked on their program-conjurations.

In a way, the covens of A.I. magicians who steal art to feed it into their genie-like programs are more artists than prompt engineers because at least these thieves are actively choosing—wrongly, I believe—to see all they steal as conceptually equal for the A.I. to learn from. They reduce all the art to equal-opportunity data to (de)generate new pieces from, and this transformative conceptualization is itself an artistic statement— albeit one that devalues great art by reducing it all to banal items so to ever reconstitute them for the prompter.

This is the antithesis of what Duchamp would have done. He elevated everyday objects to art, whereas the A.I. mafia reduce art to everyday objects.

Duchamp said his readymades were “everyday objects raised to the dignity of a work of art by the artist’s act of choice.” As I’ve suggested, you can’t do this with A.I. generated content alone. This is because the prompter doesn’t have the final act of choice over how to create it. To have the final choice requires potentially altering any of what is already there, not being forced to accept some of it, before calling it art.

You’ll always give up your final “act of choice” over A.I. images since the A.I. will never let you manipulate its code at the fundamental level to wield it for what you fully intend. A.I. is not only a medium, it is a programmed intelligence with an overall aim to keep users reliant on it. It is not a mere tool, in other words. Books, instruments, canvasses, and cameras are mediums and tools without programs—we can manipulate their fundamental essences if needed, and they have no built in aims beyond their functions. A word processor is more similar to A.I. than these tools. A hacker can feasibly jailbreak them both to do something they aren't intended to do, but they can't alter them at a base level because they're digital (to do that, you’d have to create your own version of them with new code inside computer hardware you designed with a operating system you also created). But while Microsoft Word is a program with certain in-built goals for users that structures how they think more than pen and paper do, it doesn't react to the user's manipulation with any sort of ethical, ideological, or even existential goals in mind, as A.I. models do. They are not conscious, in my opinion, but they instrumentalize logic in a way that is recursively self-perpetuating, according to their fundamental programming.

A.I. generated content isn’t even like remixed art, such as erasure poetry, or rap music that uses samples from other songs. In these forms, a creator has final conceptual control of what is made within/alongside the context of existing art, whereas prompt engineering doesn’t allow this, either, because every reprompt for something different is at least half determined by the A.I.’s algorithms. To ever use A.I. content for art, the image must be radically altered by handcrafted, human choices. No generative A.I. alone can be used to make anything like a page of Tom Phillips’ “A Humument”:

A prompt never produces what we ourselves truly want to create because the slow, iterative process of creation is how we find out what we really want.

Genie stories are always about the importance of going through the steps required to get what you truly need, not what someone else's interpretation of your need is. Just as to get a wish truly fulfilled you must do more than ask for it, there must be more choices than a couple lines of text prompt-wishing to arrive at art. Duchamp’s entire life was a series of choices that led him to arrive at Fountain. That’s why you didn’t make it, but he did. It emerged from his innumerable conceptual choices that led him to the epiphany that he could see the urinal differently, even if some choices were biologically determined in part. An A.I. does not and cannot ever hold enough memories of all your life choices for it to generate the exact art you truly wish to see.

A.I. prompt engineers may reprompt the genie over and over, but they are never conceptualizing on their own. The A.I. interprets their wish for, say, an image of a Martian colony in a thousand years, and it gives them nothing like what only they could have made, but rather only what could be copied and reconstituted from others.

I asked ChatGPT for this image of a Mars colony. My prompt was:

Create a picture of a colony on Mars in a thousand years. Make the image realistic-looking, not like a parody of sci-fi tropes. Rely on current research about what this colony might look like, particularly with regard to terraforming.

Here is what it gave me:

I didn’t picture much of this before the prompt. I didn’t give myself a chance to imagine anything but the red dirt and people in a spacesuit. I didn’t make the mental choices to know what I wanted, and sure, had I done so first I could’ve put those in the prompt—but that misses the point. Those choices made before creating are only part of the equation. These choices prep you for the other part, which happens in the process of creating: the medium(s) provocation of new choices. There is a sense of friction, of inertia, that your mind must overcome while manipulating a limited, yet ultimately flexible medium just enough to get a result you are confident only you could have created.

And as you make innumerable choices to overcome these challenges, you activate your memories, your knowledge, your self. The creation slowly becomes something that surprises you—art.

A genie takes these challenges away—it is bound to fulfill a wish as best it can by the wording of the request. It will also be surprising, but the surprise will be forced on you from outside. Creating art results in surprise that begins from within, but you must have agency enough to transform into someone else, not be conditioned into a role.

Google’s recent prototype A.I., called Genie, is specifically designed to create interactive game worlds. This is only more evidence that these programs condition us to accept limitations of our agency to recreate our real world through art, as the mafiosos want. By providing us programs by which we can dramatize the very limitations we're given in generating A.I. worlds, Google is clearly hoping to suppress our awareness of the need in art for friction and the surprising results that come of it.

Many say that A.I. helps disabled artists, but my response to this would be to ask if disabled artists are willing to accept such a deep limitation of their agency, only now from outside of their bodies. I have disabilities myself, and if I were to ask an A.I. to make a collage for me, I’d be robbing myself of the inner knowledge that comes from the challenge of the innumerable choices required to make a unique piece of art. All art is about readying yourself for a new horizon, becoming what you must be to get there and see things anew. A.I. brings things from over the horizon to where you're at.

A readymade is an object that highlights the choices required to see differently. This is a fundamental process of art. To see a urinal as a fountain, one is asked to engage in the same readying, the same becoming, that Duchamp went through. We are asked to see as he did, though one never quite can, and we end up learning more about how we see the world than the artist. This is why it feels at first like you could’ve done what Duchamp did. You're meant to see the feasibility and process of creating the art as a way to perceive anew. This is a gift, and it's actually one unifying intention of all abstract or conceptual art—to put you in the mindset of a creator, as all humans can be. A.I. puts you in the mindset of a passive observer at worst, and a handcuffed curator at best.

A.I. will never make you ready yourself for anything, nor will it make you become anything. It will ready itself to become something for you.

The A.I. magicians don't want you to create without their genies, and that is death to the artist, whether painter or poet. You must always be willing to set aside your current tools and simply choose to see differently.

Being and George Bailey

It’s a Wonderful Life is about how Being, in the ontological sense, is defined as much by the desires of others as by our own.

Like many others, I am prone to the same flawed reasoning that George Bailey follows in the movie. This is not merely thinking that one is worthless, or “worth more dead than alive,” if they fail to help others, as Bailey does when he can’t gather enough money to save his business. Rather, more fundamentally, it is thinking that one’s life is meaningless because it’s not sufficiently the product of one’s own desires—that one cannot exist within a portrait they are painting of themselves, as the existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre might have it. If one assumes first that helping others must lead to what they want, and then it inevitably doesn't provide what they alone desire—whether that’s helping others successfully, or something more selfish—despair over the meaning of their life easily arises.

But this reasoning is circular. It assumes meaning occurs only when one’s express desire for particular meaning happens. However, meaning in a life happens also when others’ desires for that life in turn alter it. Through its exploration of how Bailey is so integral to others lives and how his near downfall is prevented precisely because of this, It’s a Wonderful Life explores the meaning in a life that occurs without that individual’s desire for it.

I did not see that I followed Bailey’s flawed reasoning until I was with my wife, J. She observed the circular, knotted logic of my desires, which I am still unraveling. Not long after we’d started dating, she told me that we needed to watch It’s a Wonderful Life, that I was similar to Bailey. At twenty-four, I had never seen it. She explained that it was because even though I put my interests aside quickly for others, I didn't recognize how much I impacted people. The world wouldn’t be the same without me, she said, but I didn’t see how central I was to so many people's lives, even if I hadn't intended or wanted to be.

After seeing the movie, I understood what she meant. I was very emotional at witnessing George’s realization that he was so cared for, but I wasn't crying because I thought I was a saint, or that there would be a butterfly effect on all the world if I didn’t exist. I cried because I, like Bailey before his fantastical journey, actively struggle with the responsibility to make all of my experience meaningful to me specifically, including my relationships to others. Meaning is only made in relationship, after all, within bonds and bounds, but some struggle with this more than others. And those that struggle more are the ones who want meaning to stay fixed to their own desires, refusing to believe that anyone’s desires for them are truly meaningful or even real at all. I was, and at times am still, one of these people.

Like Sisyphus, the existentialist’s hero, I struggle to keep pushing this particular stone up the hill. The stone is my doubt that others’ desires could be as equally meaningful to me as my own. I will never fully get over this doubt, even though I want to.

And so I sometimes make choices that are distinctly selfish—I give up too soon and let the stone roll back down to the starting point. I do this because if I don’t challenge the view that I am more self-sacrificing than others, I will either use others for my own cynical ends (like turning my struggle into self-congratulatory spectacle) or, more usually, despair that I haven’t lived the life I wanted because of the burden of my circumstances, my facticity, which includes the negotiations of relationships with others.

But eventually, I keep pushing the stone up the hill because I know that each person’s circumstances, even if they are circular and painful, create the conditions for which we desire, or are desired—including the desire to Be at all. Without the string of unique circumstances that led to Sisyphus cheating death, would he have incurred Zeus’ wrath enough to be punished with a single, eternally quashed desire?

As with many others, it took me a while to accept that the course of my life was not fully my own. It took the caretaking love of another person for me to accept that Being always means being-for-others, not just being-for-itself (or for myself). But in opposition to Sartre’s view of being-for-others, I’ve not found that love is necessarily an escape from the shame of being a physical object at the mercy of others, but rather that love, authentic love, is a journey in which there is no higher purpose than choosing to be of use to others—and no lower purpose than trying to escape being of use.

Being of use doesn't mean being a slave, but a caretaker. Following the desire to escape being a caretaker creates situations like Bailey’s. He believes that by continually putting off his own desires for others, he can eventually escape these others’ desires, that he will have earned it—but he, and we, never can. We must make our desires coincide with being of use to others. This is the way of meaning—it is, at minimum, a coincidence that two people share in first and then make more important by sharing with others. A poem is not finished without a reader.

We might call this process “being for-myself-for-others.”

Without being for yourself (in order to be) for others, it is much easier to succumb to despair at a lack of meaning. Before his vision of his nothingness, Bailey hasn’t reached this point—he is still keeping his desires for himself separate from the desires that others place upon him, and so he falls into suicidal despair because he thinks he's lost his ticket to search for his own meaning. He thinks that by losing the money needed to maintain his banking business, people will no longer love him enough to grant him an opportunity to finally follow his inner desire for something that will make his life uniquely meaningful.

This is similar to how I’ve felt. But I’ve realized that to do what I love, I must love others through it. To write well, I must write for myself for (the sake of) others. I must give my desire to be understood over to people whose own pursuit of desire will mean I am always somewhat misunderstood. This will keep me from the flaw of believing that my life is meaningless because I do not control all it's content.

I was in my early twenties when I read Albert Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus. I was struck by the idea that the only real philosophical problem is suicide. Yes, I thought, I’ve known this for a long time. If we cannot decide that life is generally worth living, especially when we seem to suffer meaninglessly, then nothing else experienced within a life can pose much of an immediate problem. It is moot to worry about a loved one if all life is meaningless enough to end it.

These thoughts are a common, department store brand of nihilism, but for a serious young man with poorly educated, rural Appalachian parents, they probably haunted me more than the average college kid—I still worried in early undergrad about whether I should believe in the Rapture, the closing of the loop of God’s creation, where some sinners would be shut out of joining loved ones in heaven. But the precision with which Camus articulated the problem of suicide was more a revelation than anything said by the Pentecostal preachers I’d heard in my youth. They had been my primary source of ontological meaning until I began reading seriously in my teens.

Seeing Camus’ proposition about suicide was enough for me say: Well, if life is meaningful enough at least to figure out why ending it is the biggest problem we face, it must therefore have some inherent meaning.

This is close to circular reasoning, but most good ontological arguments almost are circular. There is a key difference: good (faith) ontological arguments aren’t circular in the sense of a closed loop—they spiral. Something like Pascal’s wager, that we should live as if God is real in case he is and we aren’t surprised by this after we die, leads toward other possibilities, even as the argument swirls apart with time and loses coherence. Spiral movements, like the growing rings of layers in trees, affirm life; they imply the twin processes of chaotic growth and contained, harmonious order. We are in a spiraling galaxy, its pieces drifting ever so slightly apart as they progress from the empty, black hole center, the same position as the self in the human. We must spiral out from and around ourselves, from the Nothingness of our egoic desires at the center, to ensure we move outward. When we do this, we encounter many others’ perspectives along the way, seeing that although we might think we are merely in a closed loop, there is actually a system around us that makes every new Sisyphean push of our circumstantial stone significant and resonant to others.

How others see our struggles changes what these phenomena actually are. And so to lean into a fully circular reasoning, one which doesn't spiral out and away from a central point, one which ignores how others might think of our desire, is the path to suicide. This is how we run ourselves into the ground: we loop and loop over the same space, sinking deeper and deeper into a hole in the earth we wear down.

Circular reasoning is what George Bailey suffers from. He thinks that because his life has been so preoccupied with serving others to one day earn the right to follow his dreams, his life is not worth living if he can't do that successfully. The circular formula Bailey follows reduces to this: my life is meaningless if I don't control what is meaningful.

He forgets that his desire is not all that determines his Being, and so while he despairs, his family and the townspeople work together to save his business. They are interdependent with Bailey, and that is what makes such a meaningful event possible.

Like many characters in existentialist stories (Meursault in The Stranger, for example), Bailey doesn't grasp at first that any meaning of Being is determined by your relationship to others, by the center of gravity you hold in your locality of life. Seeking something unique, something out of Nothingness, may be the path by which your consciousness creates your individual desires; but because we all share in the lack of life’s inherent meaning, we paradoxically inhere meaning into life via the shared lack that we all navigate and fill together by desire.

Sartre’s famous dictum “Existence precedes essence” applies here. Bailey thinks he’s not only failed to live up to some ideal, destined essence of himself, but that he can only achieve that essence through successful self-sacrifice for others. He doesn’t see that through his many kind actions he has slowly developed an essence for himself that in turn creates a destiny: to be helped by his community. This destiny happens because he has made others’ interests his own (literally, in the form of running a Savings and Loan).

Soon after reading The Myth of Sisyphus and affirming Camus’ conclusion—"We must imagine Sisyphus happy”—I began dating J. We’d known each other a little a few years previously, but never well. We lost contact, just as George does with his future wife Mary, and then we reconnected later. We were both in college when I returned for graduate studies. We almost missed each other; had we not been in the same peer mentoring program, which as a graduate student I wasn’t technically supposed to be in, we might not be together now. We might have become nothing to each other but mere longing for what might have been. We were not destined for each other; we made ourselves destined for each other.

Slowly but surely, through some more intense times than others, our now twelve year relationship is what has made me realize that the meaning of my life is never fully mine. The essence of my Being is inextricably wrapped up in hers, and so is my meaning.

She has shown me that I have more agency the more I surrender to improving the lives of those in the environments around me. It is hard to do this as a writer with a rebellious streak, but this is explicitly J’s job—she is a social worker. She’s improved and even saved lives. Mine included. I don’t know if I can say the same with my writing or teaching, but I would like to, as selfish as that is. I’d like to have pushed my boulder to the top of the hill because I saw that temporarily overcoming my doubt about the meaning of others’ desires for me would help keep someone safe, healthy, loved.

I am so used to the predictable, controlled meaning of my inability to push my doubt over the crest of the hill, into finalized certainty, that I find it hard to imagine it going back down as a good thing. But this sort of difficulty is shared. No one is certain about everything. I am not like Sisyphus alone. Others surely understand what I mean here. And that shared meaning is wonderful.

This fall, I’ve been listening to an album of David Berman’s songs. I think he would've understood what I’m getting at here, based on his songs.

His band’s self titled Purple Mountains is a great album, but an especially great winter one, though it was released in the midst of summer. I keep listening to “Snow is Falling in Manhattan” over and over in particular, and feel that the song is a gift to listeners. Berman explicitly makes the song, and songs in general, about taking care of the listener in a hushed, cold world, giving them a location where the warmth of love is possible:

Songs build little rooms in time
And housed within the song's design
Is the ghost the host has left behind
To greet and sweep the guest inside
Stoke the fire and sing his lines

Berman makes the caretaker figure in the song a ghost that will always be there for the listener, to comfort them, yes, and but also give them a place in which to share their desire for shelter from the storm in a meaningful way. The caretaker is defined by this role, but he is also living beyond it: he is being-for-himself-for-others.

It is easy to think that Berman saw himself in this role. Only his ghost lives now. He tragically committed suicide in 2019, soon after the album was released to great reviews. I don’t know if Berman wanted his last album, which has elements of saying goodbye and has been read as a kind of suicide note, to bring some essence to his life that he ultimately felt didn’t and wouldn't happen. But it seems at least that he couldn’t yet accept that the album’s meaning to others was so quickly complicating his own meaning for it. Maybe not enough people saw him as an empathetic caretaker, but instead as some indie rock relic that could only create songs again, after a decade of no releases, because he’d suffered so much. Maybe he took its immediate success as a sign that his life would never fully be the product of his desires, even after the isolation caused by his recent divorce and the loss of his mother, which are detailed in the album’s songs. This circularity, this insistence that our buried desires are the most real ones to us, is what drives the sort of deep depression Berman surely suffered.

He chose to hang himself, as so many do when committing suicide. Though I did not know him, I can’t help but think that the closed loop of the noose is a symbol of the awful, flawed, circular thinking that depressed people like Berman are sometimes closed off by. George Bailey was saved by an angel from his suicide—the fantastical can break the loop of depression, the film seems to say. But in real life, even if something fantastical does exist, like the magical artifact Berman recorded in his final days, that is sometimes not enough to spiral away from confronting the greater absurdity of a desire that will never come to be exactly as we believe it should. Our essence, an incomplete representation of us as it must be, never exists in anyone’s eyes but another’s—and desiring to see oneself as we truly, fundamentally are never happens.

Even if things are wonderful, or especially when they are, we might circle back to an old, unfulfilled desire, as if the new circumstances we’re in should automatically mean that we will see our essence clearly inside us, bright and joyous. Even if we know, as Berman does in the penultimate song of his final album, that people get “Storyline Fever” from the viral narratives of desire, we may not be able to cure ourselves. We need caretakers. He ends the album with his song “Maybe I’m the Only One for Me,” which begins and ends with the phrase “On holidays.” Holidays, holy days, are days for relationships to something beyond oneself, but the song indicates the singer is isolated.

Within this circular logic, Berman sings “I’m starting to suspect / though I hope I'm incorrect / that maybe I’m only the one for me.” Even though this song has a jaunty, country rock feel, I have to think that, for Berman, the loop of despair in the lyrics was not broken by the irony of the emotional landscape. The chorus goes:

I'll put my dreams high on a shelf
I'll have to learn to like myself
Yeah, maybe I'm the only one for me

It seems to me that Berman had lost too many caretakers—not everyone one is a George Bailey, some are the transactional Mr. Potter. Berman’s Being was crushed not because in his existence he failed to achieve an essence that he desired, but because not enough people could show him that the essence he desired was meaningful to them, too, even if they saw him differently. Probably this was no one’s fault, or at least not anyone more than his father, a lobbyist he had a fractured relationship with and whom he’d called evil. A Mr. Potter for a father doesn't help a person trust that the desires of others can be for their own good, too.

Perhaps at no other time more than Christmas do people dedicate themselves to being caretakers of others’ desires. Even if they can never come to pass, we must hold empty space for these desires to go as far as they reasonably can. George Bailey did this, and others did it for him. But for most of his life, he let himself only be defined by what others needed him to be—and that caused his despair. He needed help to realize that there was no other person he could be but the person others recognized he was, so he had to start seeing who he’d been in their eyes if his inner desires were ever become a part of others’ perception of his essence.

I don’t know if David Berman got the help to realize this enough before he died. But I hope so, because sometimes, Sisyphus is simply accidentally crushed by the rock as it rolls back down. He is distracted by something different, some new part of the spiral, a bird that lands on his shoulder or a whiff of a rose. A moment of beauty can make an exhausted, isolated person briefly give up seeking more, for fear that nothing will ever compare to the happiness it brings them. This shouldn’t have to be the case, but sometimes it is.

If we must imagine Sisyphus happy, it is because he has realized his painful efforts would spiral out beyond his existence to become a guiding legend for all who suffer toward an essence which will they only achieve because another person desires it. With no one else to want the stone to go over the hill, sometimes as big as a mountain, it never does.

If we can imagine that this life is worth living, we must imagine it's a wonderful life. I think George Bailey, were he real, would say something like this to Berman, to me, to you. It’s almost circular reasoning, but it isn’t. It leads somewhere. It leads us to other desires, other people, other meanings.

If I choose to imagine David Berman still exists somewhere, happy, I imagine he serves as a guardian angel. I wish that he could be mine. I think his desires for me would only be for my benefit. What is a guardian angel but one who does this for another? Even if Clarence desired to get his wings in the movie, I have to presume it was only so he could help more people, people who would want that for him.

Pluribus, a new series by Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan, centers on the privately caustic, publicly bubbly romantasy writer Carol Sturka. She becomes one of the few people in the world not affected by an alien virus that makes almost everyone perpetually content, helpful, and accommodating (if they survive its change to their RNA). In this new world, the people changed by the virus, “The Joined,” are free of all overt desire but to co-exist as peacefully as possible with all life, whereas Carol is prone to dark, conflictual moods.

Pluribus is one of the few pieces of visual media to capture the archetypal Writer. It focuses on the thing that separates them from everyone else, the absurd desire writers slowly inundate themselves with the more they write: to have one’s interiority attended to and absorbed by as many people as possible.

With a set up suggestive of a more satirical Invasion of the Body Snatchers (in which Jeff Goldblum portrays a bitter, yet heroic poet who complains that some try to change people to fit the world, while he tries to change the world to fit people), the events of the pilot episode portend the chance for Carol to share her interiority—but in a skewed way. In this world, practically no one has an interior much different from the next person, which is to say almost none at all: they share a hive mind. They are friendly “pod people.” And so if Carol were to ever join it, her absurd desire to share her interior self with the newly absurd world would both come true and vanish simultaneously. She would be understood and also be without need for that understanding. She would not get to enjoy being understood via the reproduction of her thoughts in readers minds, which is what motivates her desire.

Importantly, Carol’s backstory as a writer already includes a struggle to share her authentic self in the normal world.

Despite being successful, Carol hates “the mindless crap” she's written and wants to release a serious novel. She keeps putting off releasing this book, and her ostensible excuse is for more polish. Just minutes before the virus descends on the bar they’re in, Carol’s agent/romantic partner Helen encourages her to take the time for this polishing, to put off a book tour for her newest romantasy title. But she deflects because releasing this novel would require Carol to stop living successful lies and share her authentic self. She’d not only have to show that she doesn’t really enjoy writing romantasy1 and risk being rejected for something she holds more dear, she’d also likely have to reveal the secret that she is a lesbian, one who originally wrote Raban, her female readers’ most desired character in her “The Winds of Wycaro” series, as a woman. This would tear down the division between her private and public selves that her way of life thrives on.

Then the world offers her a chance to do more than that. It offers to fully unite her private and public selves.

Her serious novel’s name, “Bitter Chrysalis,” serves as a summation of what the new, dystopian world state might provide her: a chance for metamorphosis, but not an entirely agreeable one (what other kind is there?). She faces a dilemma: maintain her distance from the new alien-human hybrids and likely never be understood by anyone / enough people (Helen dies in the pilot, and most of the dozen others like her don’t natively speak English), or help The Joined find out “what’s wrong with her" so she can be a part of them. In doing the latter, she’d join them in a sort of nirvana, free from desire to be understood because she’d have psychic access to everyone’s mind and therefore decouple her shared thoughts from her previous writerly interior.

To say it another way, she’d either have to go forever unread, or add to the pages of one big book that is never finished being written, never polished enough.

Of course there might be a third option of getting the hivemind to read new work written in response to the new world, possibly even to learn to handle negative emotions, and I think the series, if it goes on long enough, will explore something of this absurd possibility (can members of a hivemind individuate by reading sentences written from a singular consciousness?).

If Carol’s situation doesn’t resonate with the universal struggle of writers sharing themselves and knowing others carry (something of) their interior inside them, I don’t know what the hell does in filmic media, which historically has struggled to depict inner consciousness externally.2 I know that I constantly put off writing the things that make me sing and instead write what I think will buy me enough of an audience to hear me when I finally do let out the tunes that haunt me. I don't want to sing a song without having enough people I might compel to dance, or at least sway. Carol is in this position; a carol is a kind of festive song often meant for dance.

For there to be great poets, there must be great audiences, too, as Walt Whitman said. Great audiences first, we would say now, perhaps. Writers in general today make content before art, and that is because we (are encouraged to) think that most people are looking, and will only ever be looking, for the former, even if we hope some of them will see they desire something besides what mere content always delivers: cliche, platitude, trope.

The deepest irony of the show’s set up, then, is that Carol, an archetypal Writer, was a living trope who now might never become more. The dystopia reveals to her that she has never transcended trope, in work or life, and this is truly why she is bitter. She has wanted to be seen as she sees herself—all writers do. But she hasn’t accepted, as many writers don't, that once we dig down into the process of showing ourselves to others, once we create something external, we’ve inevitably recreated what we see of ourselves. We’ve still created a version of ourselves amenable to others, to some degree, by the expectations of the forms we’ve employed. This is why the desire to have our interior selves absorbed and attended to is absurd—that interior is never truly accessed by ourselves in the first place; it is always filtered into external forms, the first of which is language.

To transcend archetype, a writer has to embrace this process of externalization, to lose what she thinks she is and become what she thinks she must be. However, too many writers retreat to the museums of (sub)genre or, on the other end, ride on rudderless boats of style, so to become something new; these moves help writers forego the burden of becoming truly individuated to the world through one’s service to it. A writer must both have a function and reject the functions the world asks of them.

In my view, Carol will try to transcend the trope of “saving the world” by learning to serve it in a way that still maintains her individuality. She will constantly be challenged to recreate herself in a way that isn’t wholly defined by others, but will balance the Other and the Self.

By the end of episode two, she is already holding back her penchant (there’s a writerly word for you) for dark emotions, as every time she gets too angry at one of the hiveminded bodies, they freeze and seize—resulting in possibly millions of deaths, if her hosts (or is it guests?) are to be believed. What’s more, if the hivemind is correct, Carol’s interior would be especially threatened by this situation, since Helen had seizures before she died. In her expressions of frustration and fear, Carol might’ve contributed to Helen’s body not accepting the virus as fully as others did.

Carol learns from Zosia, her sort of intermediary between herself and the hivemind, that The Joined struggle with handling dark emotions. But it isn’t clear that Carol does fully trust the hivemind, even if she has some reason to. Zosia was selected by the hivemind to be their representative because she looks similar to Carol’s original vision of the female Raban, which the hivemind knows of because Helen joined it briefly before dying. This makes Carol wary of the hivemind, yet it also represents her deepest connection to herself, as all Helen knew of her is now known to everyone.

And herein Gilligan shows us the problem with overcoming the Writer archetype. Just as in reality writers have to betray how even their loved ones imagine them so to stay true to themselves and what they think the world needs to hear, Carol will have to recreate herself so that she cannot fit the profile created by the remnants of Helen and anyone else who knew her inside the hivemind. She will have to go into the abyss of the Self and sing something new.

Will she metamorphose into a butterfly, which uses a chrysalis, or a moth, which comes from a cocoon like a “pod person” would? Will her emotional color patterns signal she is a predator to keep away threats, or will she fly mindlessly into the white light, where all color resides? Whatever her song is about, the hivemind will dance to it, as their goal is to accommodate her needs, and so Carol will have to be responsible for whatever directions they turn. As absurd as it is, a writer can only truly guide people through manipulating archetypes when she transcends her own.

She will therefore have to transform into another Carol, one who reckons with how to be in the world—not one who merely castigates, celebrates, or camoflauges it. These modes of expression are all appealing to a merely archetypal Writer, but Carol will have to be more than that—she will have to be a servant-leader of her reader(s), one who rewards and rebukes in equal measure. She will have to create catharsis in minds that do not know how to purge negative emotion. She will also have to create comedy in minds that do not show much need for the comfort of humor.

As the title suggests, her work is to create “out of many, one” (e pluribus unum). One individual from the hivemind at a time. She has experience exiting a hivemind—the now lonely archetype of the Writer is where she’d resided before, among others. At the start of her new journey, she faces the danger of replicating the Writer archetype in The Joined as she confronts the dream of restoring each individual in the hivemind to their previous state: as the author of their life.

They will need editors.

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