Refusing To Be Less

On the importance of being human

“@Grok summarize the book” the anonymous account said, in the replies of someone citing The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky as the greatest thing they’ve ever read. A microcosm of the post-intellectual, incurious, and downright depressing reality we are forced to live in today. Unfortunately a far from unique occurence, but one that’s come to signify the worst part of capitalist decline: the decline in the interest and delight of being human. We work and slave at our meaningless jobs for 8 or 9 or 10 hours a day, and then exhausted, we rest. We seek our empty pleasures in online gambling and mindless discourse on social media. We overindulge in booze or drugs. We shop for another doodad we don’t need on Amazon dot com. We turn off our brains and we outsource whatever is left of our humanity to a fucking useless machine. We rarely find space and time to connect with other people, and we forget that being curious about each other and creating and sharing is the meaning of all of it. We stop reading books and when we do, we read crude and raunchy bubblegum romantasy written at a sixth grade level. Easy narratives with heroes and villains that don’t challenge us or push us or make us question anything. We don’t seek to confront ourselves, we forget to stop and breathe. We just try to get through another day, and another, and another, and we let chatGPT write that letter of condolences. We spend every day just getting to the next without even wondering what it’s all for. We forget that there is something special about humanity because we’ve devalued all that makes humanity special. We stop learning once we leave school and we forget to wonder why things are the way they are. We accept the barriers to education and to art and to each other without asking why they were designed this way and who is doing the designing. We fall into tribalism and team sports and easy narratives and blacks and whites. We forget that each of us is a universe and prefer to look at the colors of the team jersey someone is wearing to measure the weight of their soul. We forget we have one of our own. We don’t even look up at the stars anymore. We don’t ponder why we are here or who are what we are. At the end of our lives we hope we have a lot of stuff to fill our rooms and maybe, just maybe, we finally question if the pursuit of that above all else was really worth it. Our lives become stripped of the very best things about being human and we barely even notice, until there’s nothing left.

And it’s all exactly what they want. They want being a person, a sentient being, someone ensouled, to mean less. They want to convince you that a machine can make art and it can mean the same as if we did. They want to erase the meaning from every aspect of our existence because we, to them, are merely numbers on a spreadsheet and cogs in a machine and ways to reach a bottom line. Human capital stock. They want to convince you that some of us are expendable because it is only by virtue of that belief that the whole charade can go on. And even though you aren’t worth a damn to them they get you to fight their battles anyway. They convince you that you win when they win and that their gains are your own. They convince you that if you put on a certain uniform then taking a life has some moral authority, because that life doesn’t mean anything compared to yours. They promise you that if some people go hungry you’ll always have enough and that that is an acceptable sacrifice that any patriotic American should be willing to make. You give over your humanity bit by bit to them, not even realizing how much you’ve traded away until there’s so little left that you are unrecognizable. But somewhere along the way you’ve persuaded yourself that you’re getting something out of the whole deal. The trap is so all-encompassing that it’s virtually invisible to the untrained eye.

Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash

If you’re lucky, you - by virtue of happenstance or by a dogged determinism not to live this way - break the pattern. You put down the phone and turn off the TV and you read a piece of literature. You pick up the guitar. You see the man begging for change as not a nuisance but another being with every bit as much a right to be here and to live with dignity as you do. You stop seeking the comforting numbness of not having to think and realize that all of human flourishing is in the hands of each of us and not some bloody machine. You seek connection instead of division and you realize that borders and demographics are just arbitrary lines that someone drew in the sand somewhere along the way. You disrupt the matrix just a little bit, by leaning into who you really are, who you were before the world made you forget. You begin to see yourself in other people and them in you. You reclaim your humanity by refusing to accept that it all has to be this way and that you should whittle yourself down, smaller and smaller still, until all that’s left is a bunch of spare parts that can easily be replaced. You realize none of us are replaceable nor replicable. That our value has nothing to do with the S&P 500 or the things that line our shelves. If you’re lucky, you have a little revolution every day by refusing to think like them. Refusing to give into the temptations of easy answers and anesthetizing distractions, you start to become more again. You start to see all of the ways that this world and its kings want to diminish you down to nothing and you reject it all. You come face to face with the pain that the easy distractions were muffling and you see that it’s the pain of knowing deep down that it shouldn’t all be this fucking hard. Not for you, not for anyone. You start to reinvest yourself in the pursuits that make any of our existence on this godforsaken planet worthwhile. You finally begin to understand the value of things that don’t have a price, and that they’re stealing these things from you little by little and then selling them back to you at a premium that is more than any of us can afford.

This is only the first step to transforming the world but it’s the most important one. In every act, this system and those at its head demand that you forget what being here, being alive and sentient and human is supposed to mean. They rip it from your hands in your schools, in your offices, in your public places. They claw at your soul and try to measure your worth in U.S. dollars. They require you to think that this is “just the way it is” and there is nothing to be done, because that’s the only way this works. They abhor the fundamental aspects of being human, in all of its imperfect perfection, and they want to infect you with this terminal disease. They spend so much time, so much wealth, convincing you to freely give up your very self, the innate being that you are, because it’s the one thing that can’t take from you without your consent. Your refusal to comply is the first rebellion; a rejection of this world they’ve constructed and a belief that what lives deep inside each of us is more important than the superficial treats they promise you will make you happy one day.

There are many more steps you must take along the way from awakening to liberation, but the first to see the deception. You must liberate your mind from the trap of being less. You must refuse to consent to the slow diminishing of your soul and reject the act of prostrating yourself on the altar of the algorithm. You have to resolve to remain human - divine, extraordinary, flawed - but fully ensouled. There is nothing that Silicon Valley can produce that can ever be anything but a cheap replica of who and what you are. The songs that are composed by your hands, the prose that is written on your soul, the deep and primal urge to share these gifts with one another, all of this no unthinking machine could ever reproduce. Rage against the demand that we erode the phenomenology of existence for the profits of the people who were born with a missing piece; who see no difference between a sleazy gimmick and the real thing.

David Foster Wallace gave a commencement speech in 2005 wherein he told a story: “There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes ‘What the hell is water?’ ” Nearly everything in our current reality is constructed in such a way that few of us even see the water. Few of us even notice the totality of the thing, the machine designed to make us less human at every turn. It’s trading your books for apps that enclose you in an ecosystem that limits what you can say, it’s trading your real life communities that contain all types of people for online echo chambers, it’s the five minutes you save by having AI draft that email for you, it’s turning off your brain and taking the easy way out. You submerge yourself without realizing it and you give up all your best parts unconsciously until you are all hollow and husk. To see the water is to see the reality of our situation and refuse to accept it.

To remain human is to recommit to knowing ourselves and each other and refusing to submit to the notion that all we are is a vector of profit. The first step to reclamation is a refusal to comply. Be stubborn and do not go gently. Give up nothing without a fight. Remember what you are, what all of us are: not numbers on a spreadsheet but the universe experiencing itself in each word, in each act, in each sacred breath. A child of that which no machine could ever possibly subsume.