Fight the wind
On doing the work that's never done
The other day, during an unusually quiet walk home from childcare, my son asked me, out of nowhere: “Where does the sun come from?”
Here we go, I thought. I knew this was coming—the moment he would ask me something that I am absolutely not smart enough to answer.
“Well, the sun is in the sky,” I offered weakly. “And it’s so big, and so hot, that we can feel its warmth all the way down here.”
My answer was a pathetic dodge, answering where the sun is, not where it comes from. But he seemed to allow it.
I am regularly humbled by moments like this, witnessing the creative and ever-changing way he is using language and cognition to make sense of the world. “Last night” means any thing that has occurred in the past tense, which, fair. “Not today!” is said with a polite curtness when he stands up from the potty prematurely, with the heavy implication that he’s not interested in further negotiation. “But I want to be a sensible boy!” is deployed when I am about to take away the treat because he’s not listening. I still have no idea where he got the phrase sensible boy.
If large language models like Chat GPT offer the sum total of written human knowledge, produced on-demand in seconds, with no emotion, morality, or context attached, then I’d argue this is something far more miraculous. It’s the slow, incremental, and seemingly infinite process of a human brain taking shape. His output is dotted with factual inaccuracies, sure, but also moments of uncanny creation.
And unlike AI, his discovery process is circumscribed by context, morality, culture, and relational stakes: What he has been exposed to thus far, what he can negotiate, what impact he understands his actions have on the world and people around him, and what he believes he can create out of thin air.
I’ve never witnessed anything so obviously alive.
At the same time, it’s so easy to feel completely held under by the inhumanity of being alive right now. I’m not sure if it’s age, exasperation, or exhaustion, but I agree with Jia Tolentino who wrote “there is now a category of things I see online which I register simply as indications that the world is slipping beyond my comprehension.”
For example, I can no longer tell if the NYC wellness girlies in my algorithm are standard issue white women, or simulations of them engineered to sell me more VC-backed supplements and 37-step skincare routines. They all behave and speak in exactly the same lifeless way, but whether it’s by choice or by design, I’m really not sure.
When people tell me about the cool ways they are incorporating Chat-GPT into their personal creative practice—the prompts, the iterating, and the idea generation—I smile and nod. Why do they want to do that? I wonder, genuinely confused. I now feel like a mystical witch woman who prefers to have her ideas and sentences visit her, as if by magic. I’m still out here slowly collecting sap so I can maybe, one day, turn it into syrup.
The other day I watched a 90 second trailer of the Netflix documentary, Don’t Die, about the venture capitalist Bryan Johnson, who purportedly wants to live forever. I was struck by how his life of protocols, supplements, data, chambers, and masks seems completely devoid of pleasure, joy, spontaneity, and ease. I felt sad for him, and equally perplexed that this is being put forward as aspirational entertainment.
Taken together, these moments leave me feeling increasingly left behind by the culture’s direction of travel. But simultaneously, I feel more and more at home in that feeling. As it all accelerates, I feel my urge to keep up dissolve. When I allow myself to take in the worst predictions about where AI’s ascent (or descent?) will take us, I become more and more convinced that being left behind is the most sane course of action.
That’s the thing that has been the most transformative about the work of caregiving for me: How much it grounds me in the physical day-to-day practice of being alive. How effectively it disavows me of the notion that I can outrun the disappointing realities of being a human being. It’s a lesson I really needed to learn.
I couldn’t believe the magnitude of physical labor involved in early motherhood. The repetitiveness of dealing with the body’s needs, its waste, its wants (both his and mine). And now, with an almost three year old, I’m regularly brought to my knees by the enormous job of tending to another person’s inner world: the constant whys, the comforting and cuddles, the moments of emotional ransom, the questions you can’t answer. It’s the kind work that’s never done.
I do not find any of it easy, in fact I often suspect that I find it harder than a lot of moms I know and observe. But I also experience it as a necessary 24/7 reminder, one that’s helpful whether you’re a parent or not: To see that the reason why life is worth living is because of its limitations, imperfections, constraints. To recognize that the work that’s never done is the work. You can’t optimize it. You can’t escape it. But you can create ritual and find meaning in the act of showing up for it.
Our house and back patio is littered with cardboard boxes, sticks, rocks, and random objects that were taken out of the recycling bin. My son loves this stuff, far more than any of his toys, and it’s how we got the best of his linguistic inventions: “Fight the wind.”
It’s a game where he chooses a stick from his collection, and suits up for an epic battle outside our back door. He furrows his brow, goes deep into character, and we see him out there just waving his stick around, valiantly fighting the wind.
There’s a sense of defiance, unchained imagination, and utter certainty to it. It’s a world of his own making, an entirely human creation. It’s exactly the kind of world I want to live in.
A mood board of links that meet the moment
There are quite a few new readers here this month, welcome! Sometimes I share links in my editions, sometimes I don’t. Today, instead of a longer grab-bag list of links, below is a mood board of things that have been influencing my thoughts and writing, including the essay above. I hope you enjoy it.
David Graeber (RIP) writing on collapse in 2013.
“The human imagination stubbornly refuses to die. And the moment any significant number of people simultaneously shake off the shackles that have been placed on that collective imagination, even our most deeply inculcated assumptions about what is and is not politically possible have been known to crumble overnight.”
Carvell Wallace with a bunch of great advice on how to keep yourself in working order so you can show up for yourself and others.
“Try imagining there is no end. There is just action and counter action. The is just protecting life and love and/or destroying life and love. That’s it. Once you are relieved from the feeling that you are going to figure out how to vanquish your enemy, then a whole new world of possibilities opens up to you. You don’t have to be discourage thinking “this won’t work, that won’t work,” Because it won’t defeat the bad guys once and for all. Nothing will.
The point is that everything works if you do it. All of life works if enough of us protect it. That’s the one thing I’ll never be cynical enough to stop believing.”
on the Greek concept of philotimo, or grace without strings.
“We find ourselves, like all cultures and civilisations, on the brink of tyranny and collapse, with very few moral guardrails and leaders left behind to guide and steady us. So we will need to proactively excavate and resurrect threads, ideas, and prophets together.”
on the wisdom that comes from being a “war baby of two war babies.”
“And you can attribute it to mania or experience, but as the humdrum normalcy of our days feels at risk, the urge to gulp down the breadth of human experience only grows. My parents couldn’t control the geopolitics that affected us as children. But they did an elegant, exceptional job of warding off despair, focusing on our actual lives instead of big-picture conflict, and teaching us to appreciate every moment we were given. To enjoy the company of friends and family, to seek out real, deep human connection, to read and talk about it, to ask questions, to strive, to laugh heartily and eat well, and remember that this was the stuff worth preserving and passing down.”
A few other things from me
- interviewed me about community building for her newsletter The Shoulds.
A piece of writing advice from me that is also entirely fun and pleasant to follow.
And a book recommendation for readers who resonated with my last essay about the changing role of work in our lives:
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Rosie, I loved this piece and it aligned with so many of the things I have been thinking/writing/reading about lately. You write, "I do not find any of it easy," and I think of the question my husband and I keep coming back to: Is easy the goal? With AI, apps, new products, etc. capitalism is always trying to convince us that life should be easy. I'd rather fight the wind and do the work that's never done than live the easy life that feels like I'm not living at all.
THIS -> "I’d argue this is something far more miraculous. It’s the slow, incremental, and seemingly infinite process of a human brain taking shape."
While we marvel at what we've created with technology, let's not lose sight of our most beautiful creation: us.