Prologue: A Cursor Blinking in the Void
A blank page. A blinking cursor. Me, fingers hovering over the keyboard, wondering what to ask next. One tab holds ChatGPT. Another, a Google Doc titled "Life Plan 472." And somewhere between them, I float — full of questions, of ideas, of seeds of possibility, of tools, and yet somehow… stuck. So stuck.
I’ve opened chat after chat, doc after doc, reflecting on myself and listing my next steps and asking ChatGPT to help me figure things out. And it does — beautifully. It lays out strategies, maps, paths. Amazing ones. It names my talents better than I do. It sees patterns, asks questions, organizes dreams. It believes in me and my potentialities more than I do. And yet: nothing moves. Nothing grounds.
This isn’t a failure of AI. Or of myself. It’s the emergence of a new kind of crisis: a fog of possibility so dense that orientation itself becomes the problem.
I’m trying to light a flashlight in that fog, to open a reflection on what it feels like to be human in an age where thinking, meaning, and even dreaming are increasingly synthetic. Where our tools are smarter than ever, and yet we often feel more lost than before.
What AI Can Do (and What It Can’t)
Let’s begin with the obvious: there’s very little I can do that AI can’t help me do faster, better, neater. It can plan my career, summarize my thoughts, write this essay. It can soothe, reflect, inspire. It opens up dazzling new capacities.
And yet, strangely, I feel more disoriented than ever.
Because capacity is not clarity.
Because what I’m missing isn’t answers — it’s a compass.
AI doesn’t solve the need for meaning. But it does fill the space where that need used to echo. It keeps the mind busy, the tabs open, the projects multiplying. It promises we can do anything — and in doing so, quietly unravels our sense of why we should do anything at all.
And here’s the paradox: the more help I get, the more impossible it feels to begin.
The Too-Muchness of the Synthetic World
This is the texture of modern disorientation: not silence, but saturation. Not absence, but abundance. An overwhelming one.
Everywhere I turn, AI systems flood me with words, articulation, and possibility. My thinking no longer feels like a lonely act of effortful weaving — it’s become a kind of curation, a dialogue with algorithms that always offer more than I can hold.
But this more-ness comes at a cost. My attention is splintered. My sense of interiority, diluted. My sense of self, under revision. And too many words obscure their meaning. Erode their power.
Before I act, I doubt. Before I speak, I simulate. Before I decide, I scroll…
This isn’t technological pessimism, but an attempt to name a subtle shift in how we experience reality: where life feels rendered instead of lived, where the self becomes a draft among drafts, and desire stalls — hesitant, ambient, shaped more by reflection than intention.
Existential Crisis in a Time of Superintelligence
This isn’t just a classic existential crisis. It’s an ontological one. But maybe they all are.
Not “What should I do with my life?” but “What is a life in a time like this?”
We’re no longer suspended in the old existential void — the one haunted by death, absurdity, and the impossibility of meaning. We’re facing a new void: one that emerges not from nothingness, but from excess. An overflow of answers, options, simulations, lives we could live.
The traditional existential crisis was marked by a confrontation with finitude. But this one — this AI-era crisis — is marked by a confrontation with infinite versions of self. An unbearable fluidity. A dissolving of contours.
Desire itself becomes unstable. Not because we no longer feel it — but because we no longer know whether it originates from within or is softly scripted by an interface, a trend, a prompt. We want, but we don’t trust our wanting.
We scroll through lives. We generate plans. We articulate purposes. But somewhere in this fluency, something goes missing — the silent, unoptimized intuition that once said: this is mine. This is real. This is enough.
This isn’t about despair. It’s about dissonance. It’s about the strange weight of choosing when nothing limits what can be imagined — except the body, the day, and the limits of attention, those so-precious resources.
And maybe that’s what it means to be human now: to carry the ache of finitude in a time of simulated infinitude.
Figuring It Out (or Not)
So no — I haven’t figured out my life. Not "not yet" — I don’t think I ever will. I’ll probably keep trying. Keep tracing and retracing what it means to live in this world, to be with people, to shape a day, to let meaning arise from experience — and not from some pre-written narrative trying to fill that need on my behalf.
I guess what I’m learning is this: to figure it out isn’t to solve it, but to stay with it. To dwell in the in-between. To hold the ache, and not rush to convert it into clarity. To keep trying.
To figure it out doesn’t mean to master it. It means to stay in touch with the texture of uncertainty. To keep asking, even when the questions feel too big. To stay unsure in a world of sharp solutions.
And each time, I’m learning again: to reclaim attention as an ethical act. To slow down when everything accelerates. To stay human — not by resisting tools, but by remembering that tools are not ends. They’re invitations. Mirrors. Multipliers. And sometimes, distractions.
There are days when I’m overwhelmed by what I could become — and others where I touch something small, slow, and true: the feeling of my breath while doing yoga. A surprising thought while journaling. A deep laugh. A shy shiver of interest. The texture of my own desire, unoptimized.
This is not clarity. But it’s contact.
And maybe, in the age of AI, that’s where meaning begins again.