On fragility and insufficiency

Or: why not using ChatGPT will kill you

Photo by Studio Michael França on Unsplash

I started this blog with the specific intention of writing out some of my academic work. Now, the last post felt like a slight change of direction, towards a more personal tone.

So, it seems I’m still trying to find a voice here. And maybe it could be good to mix these two aspects: academic and scholar subjects and personal reflections on life and “the human condition”. I got some good feedback from some people regarding the last post; but, even if I didn’t, I’m always attracted to this idea. Some talks I’ve been giving recently kind of went this way: I started with some theoretical and academic subject and ended up talking about those things that touch us more intimately. But the order wouldn’t actually matter — I could make it the other way around, or even do both at the same time - like having a more subjective, or maybe even a devotional, tone, while throwing out some important theory. Maybe I tend to like writers such as C. S. Lewis (who was called “the romantic rationalist”) or Simone Weil because of this.

Yet, I recognize the frailty of pursuing a tone like this. Personal reflections won’t score in the accelerated productivity game we are all engaged today, right? Maybe that’s even why it is so hard for us to find or read authors such as Simone Weil today. They seem to carry a depth and weight that embarrasses us; always leaving an impression that we would need more time and restfulness in order to really feel that in full.

Last time I spoke of the exquisite beauty of collapse and death, and maybe that is what we find here. I feel that when reading authors like Weil, or David Foster Wallace, or characters like the priest in Bernanos’ The Diary of a Country Priest. People who died early in life and seemed to feel all its weight over them. People who accepted and were willing to show the fullness of the fragility in them and all around us.

On and on, the rain will fall
Like tears from a star, like tears from a star
On and on, the rain will say
How fragile we are, how fragile we are
(Sting, Fragile)

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They show so much fragility, yet, paradoxically, we all find a loud voice in their writings, personal letters and diaries. And this makes me think a lot about our motivations to write or even work with anything at all.

See, by reflecting on the use of tools like ChatGPT for writing or automating other tasks, I get to think about why so many tasks today became so tedious and tiresome to us. So much stuff today seem like “oh, just another task I need to go through”, and this seems so different when we read these people writing these letters and diaries. Their writing seemed just like an urge, a calling, an activity that they would go through that maybe couldn’t even be called an activity; it is a pouring of their soul, a natural movement in which issues of effort or time wouldn’t matter.

Academics out there speak about the different between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and that could roughly approximate what I’m talking about. The accelerated pace of life we live seems to force us into this state of only acting based on extrinsic motivation — we just have tasks to complete, just games to score points. And yet we are left dreaming and longing for these moments of intrinsic motivation, of flow (Csikszentmihalyi), which seem to rarely come.

I use to talk a lot about how we need a philosophy and ethics of automation, or, even more broadly, a philosophy and ethics of delegation. And maybe that is what it amounts to: automation and delegation depends on whether we will approach our tasks with intrinsic or extrinsic motivation. In other words, it seems to me that the degree of temptation we have about using ChatGPT or another tools is proportional to how extrinsically motivated we are about a certain task.

For example: I’m not using ChatGPT to write or revise this text, and maybe that’s because this text felt something that I really needed to put out no matter what. It feels necessary and proper to do so, and while I’m at it, I’m indeed almost losing my sense of time and place. The result may be strange, incomprehensible, rough, clumsy, idiosyncratic (as a friend told me last time). And, as so, it wouldn’t score too much in the public game.

Extrinsically-motivated tasks are more rewarding in terms of the reward games that acceleration have put us, yet they always feel an intrusion to the life we really long for, although they seem so necessary in order for us to get to it. So that is why acceleration technologies, like automation and AI, seem always a good idea and aid.

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Recently I’ve been thinking and writing a lot about Hartmut Rosa’s theory of acceleration and how he sees that the idea of resonance would be a counterpoint to it (actually, it is the counterpoint to the experience of alienation that acceleration brought to us).

For me, Rosa is actually just adding his own voice to a lot of other authors and theories that seem to point to the same dynamic. Rosa is even aware of that: he says that this preoccupation could summarize all the work we find in the Frankfurt School. But I could also add some other voices. For example:

• Jacques Ellul noticed the alienation brought to modern human beings because of La Technique, which is the pursuit of efficiency in all areas of life (i.e., acceleration). His counterpoint, as suggested in lots of places, is an ethics of non-power, a refusal to power that relies on faith, hope and a deep connection to what can’t be measured and relies only on divine action.

• Albert Borgmann described modern technological society as a “device paradigm”, a search for infinite availability and access to all resources we could desire (again, acceleration); a dynamic that brings only boredom and disorientation. In contrast, he suggests the importance of “focal things and practices”, which are not necessarily non-technological but point us beyond the mere acquisition of resources and impose a “commanding presence” capable of (in other words: resonance).

• I could even argue that this is also roughly the message of the Preacher in the biblical book of Ecclesiastes. “Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher”. And yet, what is the best thing to do? “There is nothing better for a person than that he should eat and drink and find enjoyment in his toil”. Again: resonance, non-power, focal things and practices.

All of these also seem to be touching on my last point, about how extrinsically motivated tasks seem tiresome and boring — ready to be delegated to machines (or slaves, if you lived some centuries ago) —, and intrinsically motivated ones seem almost effortless to us.

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Yet, my biggest point here is this: I’m definitely not willing to call all those counter-proposals solutions, or antidotes, or remedies to our accelerated condition today.

No, these will never be solutions, because, honestly, there is no solution.

Sit back and brace yourself: here comes a strong whiff of pessimism. Sorry for that, but…

We need to be honest with ourselves. We are, and will remain, agonizing in the accelerated pace of this world until we die.

And that’s exactly the kind of honesty we find in the fragility of Simone Weil, David Foster Wallace, and Bernanos’ priest.

Because, honestly, if I could summarize in one word what is the feeling that the accelerated society handles us on a 24/7 basis, it is insufficiency.

I don’t know about you, but this really strikes me 24/7 and increases every year. At home. At work. At sleep. Even at prayer and devotionals. The term that we usually use in Portuguese is “não dou conta” - “I can’t account for it”. Or maybe: “I can’t handle it”, “I can’t cope”.

You notice your house is a mess. You are not giving the attention you should be giving your kids. And then you remember you have been sick for years — chronic fatigue and lots of time spent in doctors to never know what is happening (IBS? Food allergy? Long covid? Impossible to say). And, wait! Bureaucracy, taxes and general anxiety about being an immigrant in the US in the year of 2025 is catching you, with all the mental exhaustion it generates. Sometimes you get paralyzed, and then notice you are not doing the best of your work, or teaching, research and scholarship. You take some measures, sacrifice some other areas, and put some huge effort into improving that. Still, not sufficient — because, you know, you know will never get to the same standard of a colleague who is healthy, already an US citizen and has no small kids. It will never be sufficient.

US is the nation of meritocracy, yet I may understand today why it is the nation of serial killers, mass shooters and so many people going mad and doing all kinds of dangerous stuff. You know, coming from Brazil, I still had this felling of insufficiency, but never as much as in the US. In Brazil, in lots of areas, people sometimes don’t care about optimization and perfection; they just want you to get the job done, no matter what. You are not doing to earn merit or establish competition or merit; you just need to do it, be it good or bad. Now, things seem to be so much more reflexive in America, which sometimes is something good — people really seek excellence in all they do — but it is also a huge, huge, burden. Everything is observed and assessed to the last detail. There is always something to work upon. Always more. Never sufficient.

So, no wonder why nihilistic violence seems a way out for so many tormented souls. Or at least the search for more and more Escape Attempts, like in movies such as American Beauty. Like in the song “Rockin’ the Suburbs”, with all its irony:

It gets me real pissed off, it makes me wanna say
It gets me real pissed off, and it makes me wanna say
It gets me real pissed off, and it makes me wanna say
FUUUCK!
(Ben Folds, Rockin’ the Suburbs)

My generation’s fixation for games is also a symptom of this. In the magic circle of a game, people have a small moment in their lives when “insufficient” is not the main message anymore. (Of course, you may lose the game, but still, you are given a possibility to win. It is something you can handle). Scores are achievable — not as in “real life” scores, so hard to obtain, in a game that is constantly changing its rules and completely crushing its losers. If a panic attack could be understood as the outpouring of the extreme will of “enough!”, or “stop this train; I want to get out”, games are one of these best places where our generation is finding relief, even if temporary, in these small cracks where they can fit some indulgence.

Small cracks we can fit some indulgence — that is what explains the differences between playing a videogame or listening to Bach. Rosa shows some research about this in his work; on why would most people prefer watching TV over classic literature or music. The answer is simple, and we all know that: watching TV or playing a videogame require less effort and are less costly from the point of view of life’s demands. Spending more time to learn to play an instrument or appreciate poetry would cost too much and leave us too far behind in the acceleration game. The sense of insufficiency lurking all around just says that the price of resonance is to much to pay. (And, sometimes, for some people, even playing a small silly videogame or watching TV is too much).

And here is why I find a lot of naiveté in all the different ways that authors articulate urges to come back to these “richer forms of life”. We all know those. “Buy local”. “Get a hobby“. “Take care of your body; do exercise“. “Meditate“. “Play with your children”. “Slow food". “Slow work”. “Slow faith”. We know how all those are more and more becoming luxuries, and how they just pile up as impossible achievements in the game of insufficiency.

Plus, Rosa said that one of features of the feeling of resonance is the sense of efficacy, of doing something meaningful, that makes a difference. Can you guarantee that, especially in a world where, no matter how much effort you put unto things, the message you receive will still be “insufficient”? Yes, there are still some small areas where you could see something you do make a difference, or that it was sufficient. But they are becoming rarer, and rarer, and rarer. They are small packets of grace we receive and try to savor the most we can. Be we can’t expect those.

So, again, I’m sorry, but I don’t see solutions. We can articulate what we want — resonance, focal things and practices, etc. — but we will increasingly agonize in search for those, and wonder if we will be able to pay the high prices they pose.

Again, I find this honesty in Weil, Wallace and Bernanos’ priest. They are testimonials to the helplessness and fragility that is everywhere. Did they find resonance? Yes, I think so. But it costed a lot to them — it costed their own lives. But let’s face it: death is not an option for most of us, because of the love and responsibility we have to our loved ones. In this sense, then, I still find them to be rich: they could pay with their lives; they could offer that as a luxury to be spent. But we know that this is not the case for most of us.

Still, they are testimonies to how costly this world has made life.

It is a testimony I also find in Elomar’s song O Violeiro, which I always try to keep in my mind in times of overwhelm. The fate of the poor guitarist and singer is simply to die singing the good of love.

E sem arrepará se é noite ou dia
Vai longe cantá o bem da alfurria
Sem um tostão na cuia, o cantadô
Canta até morrê o bem do amor

And without minding if it’s night or day
He goes afar to sing of freedom’s good
With not a penny in his gourd, the singer
Sings till he dies the good of love

(O Violeiro, Elomar Figueira de Mello)