“playgrounds for our souls”

Do You Feel Needed?

… In an essay from 2000, published in Wired and titled “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” the computer scientist Bill Joy worried about society’s direction: by 2030, he predicted, we’d be able to build computers “a million times as powerful as the personal computers of today,” making “the prospect of human-level computing power” realistic for the first time. (By some measures, today’s most advanced A.I. chips can be about that fast.) Joy feared that such technology, coupled with genetic engineering and other advancements, might “replace our species”—an anxiety that becomes even more credible when you realize that it’s existed for nearly two centuries. Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man argued that individuals had become “piano keys” that could be played on command, in a composition coördinated by supposedly rational rules. In “Signs of the Times,” from 1829, Thomas Carlyle warned that we were entering a “mechanical age,” in which not just “the external and physical” would be “managed by machinery, but the internal and spiritual also.” Leo Tolstoy, in his 1886 novella “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” imagined a man who was basically successful but who realized, on his deathbed, that he’d lived on autopilot. These thinkers suggested that we might internalize modernity’s logic of redundancy, finding ways to be unnecessary not just to one another but to ourselves. From this perspective, the development of technologies such as A.I. is just a furtherance of a long-standing trend.

Will A.I. really take our jobs? Will scientific and economic developments actually render the traditional human way of life obsolete? Maybe (hopefully!) not. But even the possibility of such outcomes wounds us. How can we insist upon—and really feel the existence of—our necessity, when so many forces seek to minimize it?

It helps to recognize that, just as there’s a rich discourse of redundancy, so there are many perspectives that clarify how and why we’re needed. In his book “Deep Utopia,” from 2024, the philosopher Nick Bostrom, who studies A.I. and coined the term “superintelligence,” asks how we might find meaning in a “solved world” in which A.I. does everything for us. He imagines people devoting themselves to hobbies, spirituality, the arts, sports, food, conversation, and “other domains which can serve as playgrounds for our souls,” and which will allow us to learn about each other and develop “our virtues and potentialities.” Hobbies, conversation—these seem slight against the steamroller of modernity. Yet my wife sings in a choir on Sundays, and, because there aren’t many altos, she can’t miss a rehearsal without letting the group down. Our participation in communal life really does make us necessary; it conjures, out of nothing, a place we need to be.

In “The Dignity of Dependence,” Sargeant suggests that, by believing in our own autonomy, we create the very conditions that obscure how much we’re needed. In his book “Dependent Rational Animals,” from 1999, the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre argued that we should do the opposite, by acknowledging that both needing and being needed are fundamental to our existences, from our vulnerable childhoods to our dependency in old age. Across our lives, MacIntyre wrote, “in order to flourish, we need both those virtues that enable us to function as independent and accountable . . . and those virtues that enable us to acknowledge the nature and extent of our dependence on others.” One of the complexities of being a dependent, rational animal, he pointed out, is that we’re not always needed and needful at the same time; in life, there are some periods when we give help, and others when we receive it. If you feel needed today, know that you’ll have needs later; if you feel unnecessary now, the odds are that you’ll be relied on down the road. Apocalyptic thinking tells us that we’re on a one-way journey to obsolescence. Actually, we’re on a wheel...

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/open-questions/do-you-feel-needed#intcid=recommendations_the-new-yorker-mobile-app-homepage_90f74c5d-2066-4e44-b6d7-6cf86d23959f_cygnus-tny-app_bkta

Creative loafing in St. Pete

It’s been a great fall break, in a place with a much younger and more progressive vibe than its reputation suggests. We’ll be back. Nice connection to our last out-of-town trip too:

W.S. Merwin on writing

On writing, Merwin insists on regular practice. He said: “I’ve found that the best thing for me is to insist that some part of the day — and for me, it’s the morning until about two in the afternoon — be dedicated to writing. I go into my room and shut the door, and that’s that. You have to make exceptions, of course, but you just stick to it, and then it becomes a habit, and I think it’s a valuable one. If you’re waiting for lightning to strike a stump, you’re going to sit there for the rest of your life.”

And he said: “I think there’s a kind of desperate hope built into poetry now that one really wants, hopelessly, to save the world. One is trying to say everything that can be said for the things that one loves while there’s still time.”

https://www.garrisonkeillor.com/radio/the-writers-almanac-for-wednesday-september-30-2026/

"Talk about Walking” by Philip Booth

Where am I going? I’m going
out, out for a walk. I don’t
know where except outside.
Outside argument, out beyond
wallpapered walls, outside
wherever it is where nobody
ever imagines. Beyond where
computers circumvent emotion,
where somebody shorted specs
for rivets for airframes on
today’s flights. I’m taking off
on my own two feet. I’m going
to clear my head, to watch
mares’-tails instead of TV,
to listen to trees and silence,
to see if I can still breathe.
I’m going to be alone with
myself, to feel how it feels
to embrace what my feet
tell my head, what wind says
in my good ear. I mean to let
myself be embraced, to let go
feeling so centripetally old.
Do I know where I’m going?
I don’t. How long or far
I have no idea. No map. I
said I was going to take
a walk. When I’ll be back
I’m not going to say.

"Talk about Walking” by Philip Booth from Lifelines: Selected Poems 1950-1999 (Viking Press). Reprinted with permission.  (buy now)

https://www.garrisonkeillor.com/radio/the-writers-almanac-for-wednesday-september-30-2026/

The Good List: 6 Things to Add Delight to Your Day

Always look for d’light… https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/16/briefing/16-the-good-list-september-migration.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

A bargain!

Look It Over

by Wendell Berry

I leave behind even
my walking stick. My knife
is in my pocket, but that
I have forgot. I bring
no car, no cell phone,
no computer, no camera,
no CD player, no fax, no
TV, not even a book. I go
into the woods. I sit on
a log provided at no cost.
It is the earth I’ve come to,
the earth itself, sadly
abused by the stupidity
only humans are capable of
but, as ever, itself. Free.
A bargain! Get it while it lasts.

"Look It Over” by Wendell Berry from New Collected Poems. © Counterpoint Press, 2012. Reprinted with permission.  (buy now)

https://www.garrisonkeillor.com/radio/the-writers-almanac-for-wednesday-september-16-2026/

Think for yourselves, American scholars (but not BY yourselves)

On this day in 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered his famous “American Scholar” address to the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard. He told the students to think for themselves rather than absorb thought, to create rather than repeat, and not to look to Europe for cultural models...

https://www.garrisonkeillor.com/radio-categories/twa-2018/

The point of life

He Said He Was the World’s Healthiest Man. Then Came a Stunning Diagnosis.

… Trying to defeat aging, Dr. Emanuel and other critics of the live-forever movement say, is arrogant and narcissistic.

Dr. Emanuel supports simple — even enjoyable — biohacks like cutting out ultraprocessed foods, getting good sleep and taking up new experiences. The title of his latest book, “Eat Your Ice Cream,” speaks for itself.

“The point of life, I think, is to make the world better for your family, your community, for humanity,” Dr. Emanuel said. “We’re here for a short time, and it’s not all about us.”

…

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/21/us/bryan-johnson-biohacker-autoimmune-gastritis.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

Speaking is no substitute for writing… and thinking

Everyone’s Using This A.I. Dictation App That I Want to Murder With a Hammer

… Because writing, when it comes down to it, is a higher form of thinking. Writing takes time and editing and a deep level of commitment. Writing is a rigorous process to understand your own thoughts and then lay those thoughts out in a way that convinces or inspires or moves other people. But speaking is not that process. Speaking out loud can be tremendously useful when you need to deliver instructions or talk something out with another person or jot down a quick brainstorm while you are in the middle of washing your face in the bathroom or something.

We’ve been talking a lot about the so-called end of literacy, but the real problem isn’t that people don’t read — it’s that they do read and spend all day ferociously consuming words, but those words aren’t really written, not in the way that any writer would consider them written, because the words they’re reading are more like speaking. I wish I could italicize the word “really” in that last sentence. Italics really. Uh. Close enough, I guess.

I just got a notification from Wispr Flow congratulating me that I have written enough words with the software in just these few minutes here that I have “written 12 wedding vows.” Which, I mean, is kind of my point. Can you imagine if wedding vows were off-the-cuff speaking? Could we stop, soon, with the apps and programs that want to replace every facet of human thought with something more efficient, like there’s no value at all in … reflection? At this point I’m ready never to speak aloud ever again...

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/19/magazine/ai-dictation-app-wispr.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

Sane and happy

“Finally, I would like to assure my many Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, and Muslim friends that I am sincerely happy that the religion which Chance has given you has contributed to your peace of mind (and often, as Western medical science now reluctantly admits, to your physical well-being). 

Perhaps it is better to be un-sane and happy, than sane and un-happy. But it is best of all to be sane and happy. Whether our descendants can achieve that goal will be the greatest challenge of the future. Indeed, it may well decide whether we have any future.”

—Arthur C. Clarke 

Colombo, Sri Lanka September 19, 1996

3001: The Final Odyssey Valediction/afterword
https://a.co/0aG1eeZZ