I started to write about Bruce Springsteen yesterday and why a dream that does not come true is indeed worse than a lie. I’ll get back to that tomorrow.
And then I started playing around with some AI tools which got me mulling the black hole of tech and how we are going to need tech-free zones to survive. But as a subject for this space that will have to wait too.
Because over the last few weeks I have been trying to figure out how to get a business or a school to hire me just to talk to people because, well, I think it would make them less lonely. Me too.
I am pretty helpful when I hear people’s problems, I think, and I like to serve in that way. For most of us, though, the big problem is just that we are not talking to one another, or we do so with the weight of needing to be friends hanging over us. And friendship has always been a little bit of a mystery and now it is corrupted by Facebook and likes and the way we measure things that should not be measured, intimacy in particular. Or we talk as if some transaction is implied. Or, as we all know, we just interact with our screens because that makes being lonely feel safer than interfacing with a human being.
But few things are worse than loneliness.
So, for now, I just want to say, don’t be lonely. Tell someone what’s going on, me if you want.
Ted
I just wrote a couple of articles on the benefits of AI used properly to be more engaging as a person, for people — and to solve a lot of small and big problems, to learn and think better. Here's one on my blog about using AI to help medical diagnostics...if it doesn't relieve you, it might scare you more ... https://cmt.blog/2023/04/23/differential-diagnosis-with-dr-chatgpt-4/
There's also this... not a bad book... but a strange one. Owes a bit to the very strange, interesting Dutch philosopher-psychologist -social thinker J. H. van den Berg:
https://cmt.blog/2020/03/06/book-review-shades-of-loneliness/