I agree. We have learned so much historically from correspondence. In the online world content can be edited and altered. Physical correspondence may become more reliable.
I have my daughter create and write cards to her friends, especially overseas. It was the only way I could keep in touch with friends when I was growing up! People love getting mail just for them that isn't a credit card application, a bill, or some attempt to sell them something.
Cursive writing is huge for the active brain. Writing and thinking about what you are writing is a wonderful way to REMEMBER....even remembering is going extinct. I learned cursive as a child but mostly print letters on the Christmas Cards I send out. The only time of year I find myself writing/printing. My kids are learning both as home schoolers.
English teacher here: I read this essay to my students yesterday and I have half my class reading 1984 while the other half reads The Handmaid's Tale... We returned to the intro scene where Winston first puts pen to paper and describes how he is committing Thoughtcrime, that he is dying through writing. Pen to paper is significant. If it ever becomes insignificant, we may wake up to an accidentally-created Orwellian reality. Offred and her reality indicates these as well, it's just not really stated explicitly.
Full agreement, Sandy! Handwriting is indeed significant for humans. The art wires the brain in healthful ways that typing (peck peck, same repetitive action) cannot. While the pen spills its ink, dancing in curves along the pulp of paper, the senses are engaged in ways peck-peck cannot ignite. As a prolific letter writer since I was 5 years old (I'm now 50), I've heard hundreds of times, "The art of letter writing is dead." And I just shake my head say some version of: "No it's not. It is alive and well in the lives of those who feel how powerful it is." I call letter writing "penned intimacy." I've published many letters in my Substack account (Leaning into Light) and I use it with my coaching clients -- both delivered and, perhaps my favorite, undelivered letters. A powerfully medicinal art form. Plus, it slows us down to healthy pace in a world that's become far too sped-up. Yes, it is a gorgeous way to be, and feel, REAL.
Thy physical act of writing supposedly helps with learning. Probably something to do with myelination. Engaging with the physical world that way is likely critical for cognition… consciousness. Gardening, cooking, darning a sock, etc. Things we should probably be making time for anyway.
What a beautiful piece. And the rewards for staying human are endless and exhilarating. People seem to really respond well to vulnerability and effort-it’s remarkable at this point in time. Thanks!
Hands to paper creates serotonin, the wellness hormone. Screens create cortisol, stress. Reading and turning the pages of a real book gave, and added the healthy, pleasure of touch- producing serotonin.
Love your work sir, you make me want to be more human, even despite I'm gen Z and all my friends seem to be unaware of all this (I've shown to many the Anxious Generation but they seem to not care) and I end up feeling alone and disconnected in the deepest way... I say to myself it's worth it. Eventually, I hope, I'll find people like me who are awake in terms of recognizing the dangers posed first by social media and then AI...
I am a senior who has been blessed to remain outside the norm. I mention it, in that every generation has many who follow and a few who stray from the path of convention. My whole life I have struggled as to why I am. It doesn’t matter, I realize, as I have had a great life doing me and all the bumpy things that make me human. Celebrate you.
your words prompt my memory back to the day when my father asked for a recommendation from the gentleman selling him cigars "But is it a good cigar?" my father enquired. With a despondent look on his face, the cigar man replied "many people smoke it, Sir" :-)
Being a human remains super special, particularly now in the age of Ai. If you don't think so, watch Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot video on YouTube. Then think of this simple fact. So far as anyone knows, the only life in the entire cosmos is on Earth. And humans are the pinnacle of evolutionary change on the only planet that we know harbors life of any kind.
By the way, Ai cannot write like this human, cannot compose this human's music, cannot draw this human's sketch, cannot know this human's thoughts. Take heart fellow humans; Ai is but a machine, a tool for use by humans.
I’ve noticed how much better it is to read something clearly written by a human. I see the same, omniscient narrator writing everything now, so when I see rough edges or personal stories that AI can’t fake, it makes the writing genuinely more appealing. Let’s all be human.
There's such an intrinsic beauty in the panoply that is the human experience...the soul fluttering highs and the quaking and debilitating lows. It's all worth it...every single wretched, euphoric second is absolutely worth the price of admission.
I try having this conversation with my 15 year old daughter on the regular only to have her want to push back and recede deeper into the soulless monoculture. I think I'm going to print this out and leave it on her pillow.
There's so much gravity here; your depth of thought and emotion is palpably evident. She may wake up when she's 22 and realize how lucky she is to have you as a parent. Kids are tough.
How many science fiction novels focus on the few who resist the majority, often ending up isolated but in community, living 'the old way' until some type of revolution arch takes over with the story. I believe in this thesis- it may take effort to remain human, reading paper books, writing handwritten notes, writing my own imperfect substack blogs to get ideas out and refined, but the effort keeps us human.
Love this. You can be powerful and so helpful with your knowing. Thank you for taking the time to list all of the ways AI can be intelligently managed for great ends.
An older friend is wavering between "older tendencies" or owning the fulfilling truths that are arriving later in their life, the way forward. You are a light and know the ways forward. Thank you.
I’m always grateful for quality dialogue. That’s one of the real gifts of a space like Substack (other platforms are terribly negative) are it still makes room for thoughtful exchange. And to your point, the fact that you had to recreate an account just to leave a comment is a pretty good reminder that technology is far from perfect, even when it’s well intentioned. 😉
This was a Reply to Nikolas Bayuk's share. He gave a lengthy wonderful response to my questioning, but the Substack system wants me to recreate a new account just to reply at his spot. Hope he has a chance to read my appreciative response written here above.
Bravo! For the record, the writing in this piece is unmistakably better than anything an AI could produce. People act like AI is brilliant literary genius, it’s not, it’s mechanized, predictable slop, and in fact any book pulled off a 19th century shelf is better.
Great sentiment except (I guess here's me willing to offend), you WANT to say things that bother people and you WANT to offend...that feels childish - it invites people to get pleasure from bothering and offending, including directed at you...I would think the better approach might be to say and act as you think best, despite bothering or offending...if you want to be heard or achieve a goal, to put that out there feels like you are putting roadblocks/inviting someone to put them in your own path instead of encountering whatever comes.
I'm not a mind reader Andy. But I suspect that what Freya means here is that she wants to be honest and open about what she thinks. Inevitably someone somewhere is going to be offended. That's people for you.
There's a difference between setting out deliberately intending to cause offence, and simply stating one's beliefs, leaving people to think what they will.
The question is, what do we value more, honest expression, where we can argue things out, or never taking the risk of potentially offending anyone?
Indeed. It is also an opportunity for humanistic and liberal arts education. After a short stride through the desert, it will become the gold standard for becoming an adult once again. After all, we still add and subtract by the age of 8 well into the era of calculators.
With so many invitations to join an artificial world, I continue to bask in the joy of knowing we, as humans, have hearts. We feel. Years ago, I was hired by an AI thought leader to write letters after a big breakup. What was he hiring me for? My heart, as it is the brain my pen writes with. This was comforting. Today, once again, we have the chance to see pain as a gift in disguise. Through the pain we experience and threats we perceive with AI, we are invited to FEEL MORE FULLY. Love more deeply. Be more ourselves, authentic, real. With humble thanks, I accept this invitation.
Let your inner child, the eight year old who finds mystery & magic everywhere, bloosom. It will grow stinkweeds & thorns and flowers and ruffled edges and cause frowny faces but also mirth and smiles.
I think about handwriting as a subversive tool in the future. I might be wrong but I think the physical act of pen to paper is significant for humans.
I think letter writing needs to be brought back before it goes extinct.
I agree. We have learned so much historically from correspondence. In the online world content can be edited and altered. Physical correspondence may become more reliable.
I have my daughter create and write cards to her friends, especially overseas. It was the only way I could keep in touch with friends when I was growing up! People love getting mail just for them that isn't a credit card application, a bill, or some attempt to sell them something.
Cursive writing is huge for the active brain. Writing and thinking about what you are writing is a wonderful way to REMEMBER....even remembering is going extinct. I learned cursive as a child but mostly print letters on the Christmas Cards I send out. The only time of year I find myself writing/printing. My kids are learning both as home schoolers.
Yes! And yay for Christmas cards.
I'm very much an outlier at work because I take handwritten notes in meetings rather than relying on an AI assistant.
English teacher here: I read this essay to my students yesterday and I have half my class reading 1984 while the other half reads The Handmaid's Tale... We returned to the intro scene where Winston first puts pen to paper and describes how he is committing Thoughtcrime, that he is dying through writing. Pen to paper is significant. If it ever becomes insignificant, we may wake up to an accidentally-created Orwellian reality. Offred and her reality indicates these as well, it's just not really stated explicitly.
Great comment.
Maybe kids will be passing notes in class again!
We used to pass notes, but also doodle in the notebook of the person you were sitting next to, or better yet draw on their hand or arm!!
Full agreement, Sandy! Handwriting is indeed significant for humans. The art wires the brain in healthful ways that typing (peck peck, same repetitive action) cannot. While the pen spills its ink, dancing in curves along the pulp of paper, the senses are engaged in ways peck-peck cannot ignite. As a prolific letter writer since I was 5 years old (I'm now 50), I've heard hundreds of times, "The art of letter writing is dead." And I just shake my head say some version of: "No it's not. It is alive and well in the lives of those who feel how powerful it is." I call letter writing "penned intimacy." I've published many letters in my Substack account (Leaning into Light) and I use it with my coaching clients -- both delivered and, perhaps my favorite, undelivered letters. A powerfully medicinal art form. Plus, it slows us down to healthy pace in a world that's become far too sped-up. Yes, it is a gorgeous way to be, and feel, REAL.
Definitely! I write letters by hand and I will not stop.
Perhaps post cards from foreign lands will become a thing rather than an Insta-post
YES!!!!!
I try to not use comments to run commercials, but...
Cursive plays a role in my novel "2084 The Reawakening."
The protagonist contemplates the various cursive styles of letters he has from the past, as part of the bigger story about individual identity.
https://www.amazon.com/2084-Reawakening-Chip-Kussmaul-ebook/dp/B0DR3GVCQC/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3DY0Z1OBAGAJH&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.cpD2TAM3c-lTABPG6kzctA.fmHqn7TaajAnLfOKg6eYyjiekhrMUQKJVAgfaG8-Zw0&dib_tag=se&keywords=2084+The+reawakening&qid=1770245508&sprefix=2084+the+reawakening%2Caps%2C157&sr=8-1
Thy physical act of writing supposedly helps with learning. Probably something to do with myelination. Engaging with the physical world that way is likely critical for cognition… consciousness. Gardening, cooking, darning a sock, etc. Things we should probably be making time for anyway.
What a beautiful piece. And the rewards for staying human are endless and exhilarating. People seem to really respond well to vulnerability and effort-it’s remarkable at this point in time. Thanks!
I’ve never used Ai. I wouldn’t even know how to. I’m a composer and apparently it’s coming for us now too.
I went to see some flamenco a few years ago in Spain. An old village in the hills of Andalusia.
Wonderful guitarists and dancers. One woman probs in her mid sixties dancing beautifully with such passion.
She suddenly stopped and her fingers were splayed like a fan.
The guitarist followed her. And there was a brief silence.
He looked at her intensely.
Then, she moved a single finger and he started again and she danced on.
It was breathtaking.
I park dead centre of these moments when life is kind enough to present them to me.
Hands to paper creates serotonin, the wellness hormone. Screens create cortisol, stress. Reading and turning the pages of a real book gave, and added the healthy, pleasure of touch- producing serotonin.
Love your work sir, you make me want to be more human, even despite I'm gen Z and all my friends seem to be unaware of all this (I've shown to many the Anxious Generation but they seem to not care) and I end up feeling alone and disconnected in the deepest way... I say to myself it's worth it. Eventually, I hope, I'll find people like me who are awake in terms of recognizing the dangers posed first by social media and then AI...
This article is by Freya India, not by Dr.Haidt. Not that it changes the essence of what we are discussino now, but i thought I d note.
I am a senior who has been blessed to remain outside the norm. I mention it, in that every generation has many who follow and a few who stray from the path of convention. My whole life I have struggled as to why I am. It doesn’t matter, I realize, as I have had a great life doing me and all the bumpy things that make me human. Celebrate you.
your words prompt my memory back to the day when my father asked for a recommendation from the gentleman selling him cigars "But is it a good cigar?" my father enquired. With a despondent look on his face, the cigar man replied "many people smoke it, Sir" :-)
Hello from another Harobed who falls outside the norm. The struggle is the point. Blessings to you.
Love that you have checked out the name and you too are one.
Being a human remains super special, particularly now in the age of Ai. If you don't think so, watch Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot video on YouTube. Then think of this simple fact. So far as anyone knows, the only life in the entire cosmos is on Earth. And humans are the pinnacle of evolutionary change on the only planet that we know harbors life of any kind.
By the way, Ai cannot write like this human, cannot compose this human's music, cannot draw this human's sketch, cannot know this human's thoughts. Take heart fellow humans; Ai is but a machine, a tool for use by humans.
I’ve noticed how much better it is to read something clearly written by a human. I see the same, omniscient narrator writing everything now, so when I see rough edges or personal stories that AI can’t fake, it makes the writing genuinely more appealing. Let’s all be human.
There's such an intrinsic beauty in the panoply that is the human experience...the soul fluttering highs and the quaking and debilitating lows. It's all worth it...every single wretched, euphoric second is absolutely worth the price of admission.
I try having this conversation with my 15 year old daughter on the regular only to have her want to push back and recede deeper into the soulless monoculture. I think I'm going to print this out and leave it on her pillow.
Thank you for such a beautiful piece.
Might I add, such a beautifully written comment too!
There's so much gravity here; your depth of thought and emotion is palpably evident. She may wake up when she's 22 and realize how lucky she is to have you as a parent. Kids are tough.
How many science fiction novels focus on the few who resist the majority, often ending up isolated but in community, living 'the old way' until some type of revolution arch takes over with the story. I believe in this thesis- it may take effort to remain human, reading paper books, writing handwritten notes, writing my own imperfect substack blogs to get ideas out and refined, but the effort keeps us human.
Love this. You can be powerful and so helpful with your knowing. Thank you for taking the time to list all of the ways AI can be intelligently managed for great ends.
An older friend is wavering between "older tendencies" or owning the fulfilling truths that are arriving later in their life, the way forward. You are a light and know the ways forward. Thank you.
I’m always grateful for quality dialogue. That’s one of the real gifts of a space like Substack (other platforms are terribly negative) are it still makes room for thoughtful exchange. And to your point, the fact that you had to recreate an account just to leave a comment is a pretty good reminder that technology is far from perfect, even when it’s well intentioned. 😉
Write/right on! Thanks.
Forgot to say, I snap-shotted your full answers to my initial questions.
This was a Reply to Nikolas Bayuk's share. He gave a lengthy wonderful response to my questioning, but the Substack system wants me to recreate a new account just to reply at his spot. Hope he has a chance to read my appreciative response written here above.
💙"Why learn to draw, why practice guitar"? -- b/c only living human YOU can experience that process!🌱
Bravo! For the record, the writing in this piece is unmistakably better than anything an AI could produce. People act like AI is brilliant literary genius, it’s not, it’s mechanized, predictable slop, and in fact any book pulled off a 19th century shelf is better.
Great sentiment except (I guess here's me willing to offend), you WANT to say things that bother people and you WANT to offend...that feels childish - it invites people to get pleasure from bothering and offending, including directed at you...I would think the better approach might be to say and act as you think best, despite bothering or offending...if you want to be heard or achieve a goal, to put that out there feels like you are putting roadblocks/inviting someone to put them in your own path instead of encountering whatever comes.
Flies...vinegar/honey; discretion>valor; etc etc
I'm not a mind reader Andy. But I suspect that what Freya means here is that she wants to be honest and open about what she thinks. Inevitably someone somewhere is going to be offended. That's people for you.
There's a difference between setting out deliberately intending to cause offence, and simply stating one's beliefs, leaving people to think what they will.
The question is, what do we value more, honest expression, where we can argue things out, or never taking the risk of potentially offending anyone?
Indeed. It is also an opportunity for humanistic and liberal arts education. After a short stride through the desert, it will become the gold standard for becoming an adult once again. After all, we still add and subtract by the age of 8 well into the era of calculators.
With so many invitations to join an artificial world, I continue to bask in the joy of knowing we, as humans, have hearts. We feel. Years ago, I was hired by an AI thought leader to write letters after a big breakup. What was he hiring me for? My heart, as it is the brain my pen writes with. This was comforting. Today, once again, we have the chance to see pain as a gift in disguise. Through the pain we experience and threats we perceive with AI, we are invited to FEEL MORE FULLY. Love more deeply. Be more ourselves, authentic, real. With humble thanks, I accept this invitation.
Let your inner child, the eight year old who finds mystery & magic everywhere, bloosom. It will grow stinkweeds & thorns and flowers and ruffled edges and cause frowny faces but also mirth and smiles.