When you have abrupt life changes forced upon you and those you love, you take a step back. Not just to take stock of the mess, but to orient yourself to pick your next direction. Two weeks ago I lost my job of eleven years to downsizing and my father was rushed to the hospital with pneumonia at the age of eighty-one. I have nine months to find new work. My father and mother now have to find new living arrangements in potentially far less time as they’re no longer able to sustain their household independently and I’m an hour and a half away from any emergency.


So life goes up on the board and you look at it, at what’s important and where you need to go. I’m helping my parents wrap up aspects of their life to move while I take stock of mine and well, you reflect a bit. An update in my former company’s app confirmed what I’d suspected. I’d lost my job due to a chatbot making a third of the department surplus to requirements.


Writing has been the professional and emotional center of my life for as long as I’ve been passionate about anything. Even working in finance, getting a glow from somebody who finally had a detailed concept explained to them in a way that finally made sense gave me satisfaction. Going home and getting characters to express different musings in hypothetical situations closed the gap. Writing for me is endless free therapy in the way that reading is my introvert’s laboratory. In tandem, for my many foibles, I’m a complete person thanks to the very existence of this medium. It’s just that amazing.


It still holds in some circles that some see reading as the introvert’s quick escape from the world, but in actuality its quite the opposite. For many of us divided by geography, class, ideology and a thousand other things, literature puts us in rooms and heads with the inner workings of stranger’s ideas, their triumphs and their follies. What’s more, it connects us to what others think those very concepts even are in a world where the collisions of deep-felt convictions drive pretty much everything. You get to deeply, truly know too few people in a life, but the things people write help us with that deficit, and in so doing reveal their greatest reward.


Stories are lovingly curated windows into how others see the same world we live in, made unique by all the particulars that distinguish one human being from another in places we’ve never been. Even the most speculative settings, the space opera, the ancient horror, the epic quest for the magical thing can be turned over by a million different storytellers and yet have intrinsic individual value because the person who took the time to write it had that particular, uncompromised lens on worlds better or worse and felt compelled to express whatever the hell made their heart beat faster. Literature and visual art are languages for dreams to be voluntarily transferred. That’s the foundation of the agreement. It’s why I read anything at all.


I write this immediately after reading a chapter of a novel in progress that had a spiritual undertone in a simple scene, a metaphorical use of water that a linguistic model would never conceive of because it doesn’t feel the connective essence of symbols, doesn’t understand the emotional journeys of people who are in turn the extensions of wants that excite or haunt someone real, someone tangible. That someone is sharing the earth with us right now, while others are taken back to it and gone, but they shouted and were heard and can be heard again by people not yet here. That’s art’s gift, any art, but for me this one in particular.


As I sit here, I’m not angry at the AI that took my job or the AI that’s after other’s, I’m just sad. I’m dismayed that the deeper mystery of a human being communicating the innermost part of themself to passers-by is seen as just one more swappable component in the mass content-push that art and literature is transitioning to…to sell more content and have more content to sell. Short stories crafted by humans take hours to days. Novels take days to years. The heart speaks its own language at its own speed and some aren’t happy with the RPM’s achieved. Too bad. All the input fed to any language model can’t give me a deeper means to understand people who shoot out of bed and get an idea down in the crush of night because there is nobody’s urgency to contemplate, nobody’s anxious voice to hear. The component that truly mattered might not be there at all.

So I’m dismayed, a little more lonely at the knowledge that what means everything to me means so little to some with deeper pockets that can't fill fast enough. It’s not pleasant to read but tell me that a model can feel this way, much less express it with any honestly. The answer would be some interesting content, I’m sure.