Years ago, I read two different news stories about two different girls. Both girls lived in poor and violent neighborhoods on the south side of Chicago. Both girls were 18-years old, and about to leave high school. The Chicago Tribune did not connect these stories; the stories are only linked in my memory.
One of the girls lived in a chaotic household—too many people, too little space, too many problems, too few resources. But this girl had a goal: she would graduate from high school with honors, receive a scholarship to college, and thereby change her life’s trajectory. Noise and confusion filled her home. The apartment was only quiet in the middle of the night when everyone slept. Therefore, each evening this girl set her alarm for 2:00 a.m., got up, and studied during the nightly calm before the daily storm.
The detail I remember about the second girl, in the second news story, is that she had never seen Lake Michigan. She had grown up two or three miles, at most, from the shores of Lake Michigan, and never once in her 18 years had she gazed out across its expanse. She didn’t have the curiosity or gumption to explore or question what was beyond her immediate surroundings.
These girls have become archetypes in my mind.
I thought of the girls again a few months ago when 100 million people were using the artificial intelligence chatbot, ChatGPT, shortly after it was launched. Pundits, philosophers, and even the technocrats were surprised something so “human” was adopted so quickly by so many. They have been asking ever since, “What have we wrought?!?” Some fear AI is going to destroy humanity. Others believe AI is going to unleash amazing efficiencies and breakthroughs.
One thing is certain. The technology genie will not be stuffed back into its bottle. Cognitive roles—librarians, editors, coders, software engineers, radiologists, lab technicians, office administrators—will be replaced by AI, just as robots replaced physical manufacturing jobs a generation ago. The guys who lost their assembly line jobs eventually went to coding boot camp and got their IT certificates. Now those coding jobs, too, will disappear. What will those guys do next? I suppose if they’re like the girl who woke up at 2:00 a.m., they will adapt. If they’re like the girl who didn’t venture very far, they probably won’t.
Each new wave of progress has always resulted in creative destruction. This is nothing new. But, although creative destruction is nothing new, the waves of change are rolling in faster and breaking up higher. As today’s stable ground erodes, some will clamber over the dunes and envision possibilities on the new beachhead. Some will drag themselves up to the higher ground, only to find themselves unwilling or unable to stake a claim in the new territory. And some will simply sit down on the wet sand while the tides of progress wash them out to sea.
I have a theory that this is why so many Americans are depressed, anxious, stoned, angry, combative, or disconnected. Each new beachhead requires less time to stay alive…and therefore we are faced with more time to be alive.
Once upon a time, merely staying alive was a full-time job. In response to the primal survival instinct, people filled their days by gardening, canning, raising chickens, sewing clothing, hunting game, making soap, and scrubbing clothes on a rock down by the river. But today society is so efficient that the tasks necessary to sustain our individual lives don’t fill our days. For instance, in 1800 the average person would need to work more than five hours to buy the equivalent lumens of light that he can have today for less than a second of labor.1 Or consider breakfast. One hundred years ago the average blue-collar worker needed to work almost ten hours to stock his pantry with bacon, butter, coffee, eggs, oranges, milk, and sugar. Today the same breakfast items can be purchased by the same average blue-collar worker for one hour of labor.2
This progress isn’t a bad thing. Because Steve Jobs didn’t have to spend his days plowing with a mule to raise his food, he had time to invent the iPhone—which created tens of millions of previously non-existent jobs, jump started development in third world countries, and pumped trillions into the global economy. (Hooray for tractors and refrigeration!) Because Taylor Swift doesn’t have to knit her own cardigans, she has time to write music, go on tour, and pump an estimated $5 billion into the U.S. economy. (Hooray for textile automation!) When humans are freed from the drudgery of merely staying alive, some of them create new things or produce existing things more efficiently. This makes it possible for the rest of us to stay alive with less effort, and the cycle continues.
But with less time and effort required to merely stay alive, we find ourselves with an increasingly blank slate. There’s no butter to churn. There’s no firewood to split. What do we do with all this extra time? Some, like Swift or Jobs, engage productively with their newfound time. Others escape into drugs or virtual reality. Some get angry or create crises just for something to do. Many become anxious or depressed. What factors determine who engages and who surrenders?
I recently read Man’s Search for Meaning written by Viktor Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist held prisoner for three years in various Nazi concentration camps. He wrote the book shortly after his liberation to convey “…that life holds potential meaning under any conditions, even the most miserable ones.”3 Frankl fully acknowledged that survival in the camps often came down to luck (who was ordered into the line for the gas chambers; who was ordered into the line for the barracks), but he pondered why some who were not killed outright eventually died, while others survived. He realized that those who survived made a conscious decision to engage with life, in the moment, as it was. It was a waste of time to question the meaning of life. Rather, the survivors took life as a challenge. “…it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life …. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.”4
It’s not hard to see how those with more—more curiosity, more perception, more initiative, more courage, more vision—will be better suited to engage with life. Those with less of those characteristics will not. Frankl said as much, noting that those with a rich intellectual life fared better.5 Tom Sutherland, friend of my parents who was held captive by the Islamic Jihad in Lebanon from 1985 to 1991, was another example of the same phenomenon, surviving by reciting Robert Burns poems from memory, and creating complex games to play with his fellow captive, Terry Anderson. He could draw from a deep well of these vital characteristics.
Today, as technology evolves at an ever more rapid pace, the demands and questions that life presents to us are changing. It’s as if life says, “Now that you’ve answered so many of the questions about staying alive, how are you going to be alive?” Imagine that life presented our grandparents with a paint-by-number kit and a box of crayons. Today we are given a blank canvas, no subject matter, and no recommendation as to whether we should use watercolors, acrylics, or colored pencils.
Those with deep wells—like the girl who studied in the middle of the night—will be more likely and more able to create the art of life than those with shallow wells. It has ever been so. But I feel it is becoming ever more so, in the sense that tasks reserved for humans will be more complex, nuanced, and demanding with each successive wave of progress. More and more of us will need to become intentional—we will need to make conscious decisions—about being alive. We should not misunderstand what that requires, nor underestimate how much of it is required.
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1Marion L. Tupy & Gale L. Pooley, Superabundance, (Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 2022) p.283, also https://www.nber.org/system/files/chapters/c6064/c6064.pdf
2Tupy and Pooley, Superabundance, p.248
3Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1959, 1962, 1984, 1992, 2006, 2014) p.xiv, preface, 1992 edition
4Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, p.72
5Frank, Man’s Search for Meaning, p. 34
