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I was puttering around on my desktop last week—doing anything to avoid beginning this draft—when an email arrived from Satya Doyle Byock, Director of the Salomé Institute of Jungian Studies, psychotherapist, and author of Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood. I’m connected to Satya’s work through a yearlong course in Jungian psychology, so it felt synchronous that her voice should reach me in the midst of a procrastination I had entered but not yet named.

In her newsletter, Satya reflected on how AI-generated content has begun to drain her motivation to write, or at least to write in the digital landscape:

“The existential (or is it creative?) concern is not only that I don’t know that I can keep up; it’s that I’m not sure I want to.I don’t want to feel frenzied for any reason, let alone in order to keep pace with robots.”

I felt an immediate resonance. A similar resistance has been gathering at the edges of my awareness in recent months. As ever, I am drawn to the practice of writing; I feel reluctant, though, to keep step with machines, and wary of the subtle infiltration of AI’s manufactured voice into the written word. Its outputs are refining by the day, but its velocity, seamlessness, and casual superiority register as categorically inhuman. Even the term content betrays the shift: it names a product, not a process. Writing still implies the grist of a mind at work.

Momentarily, I consider abandoning the whole imperfect enterprise of these essays. Why compete with the speed of light? Human attention—my attention—has already been profoundly shaped, even warped, by life in the digital age. Like Satya, I am unwilling to have my nervous system further conscripted into that race.

But then I pause. Because keeping pace is not, and never was, the aim of this work.

In 1884, William James insisted, in his early challenge to Cartesian dualism, that “a purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity.” Emotion, for James, arises from embodied sensation—from the interplay of pulse and breath, fascia and nerve synapse. What, then, are we encountering in AI’s frictionless outputs, if not language severed from the very conditions that allow for feeling?

Beyond its basic communicative function, writing is one of the ways humanity has revealed itself to itself across generations. Its deeper value—like all art—is metabolic. The artist’s task is to sustain attention—to lower a bucket into the shadowed recesses of the psyche and draw up something true. Something we can hold up to the light and marvel: this has been here all along.

Silene stenophylla—the narrow-leafed campion—offers a botanical echo of this process through millennia. Revived from 32,000-year-old tissue preserved in the frozen burrows of Arctic ground squirrels, its cells were coaxed back into bloom. Its resurrection gestures toward the truth that creation unfolds according to its own tempos, on timescales that exceed human urgencies. No algorithm can hasten such an emergence. It belongs to the potential of living systems. Silene stenophylla stands for all that has yet to be brought to light.

My family is moving through a health circumstance that has re-angled the light on everything. I find myself asking, with unusual clarity, what it means to be human. What is this brief and improbable flare of existence, this particular arrangement of spirit and days—and what, in fact, matters within it? I am learning that no intelligence outside nature’s intelligence—the one that moves through this body, shaped by my relationships, my encounters, my losses and blessings—can do this work for me. Integration is not transferable. It is slow chemistry, the metabolism of meaning, made possible by contact and time.

In this unprecedented modern experiment—this “rough initiation,” to borrow Francis Weller’s phrase from In the Absence of the Ordinary—we are tasked not only with preserving our shared existence, but with tending the intricate ecology by which we make sense of being human at all.

To that end, I was struck by Ezra Klein’s remarks to David Perell about how he prepares for interviews. He described the option of relying on a production team to generate questions—augmented, no doubt, by AI—and his commitment instead to the slower labor of reading and thinking his own way into his subject matter. It is through this integrative process that he becomes acclimated to the terrain of his guest’s inner life.

Klein’s learning process is unmistakably estuarine. Like a river meeting the sea, he begins at the edge of his own knowing and encounters the salinity of another’s perspective, allowing it to permeate and reshape his understanding. We may learn to live alongside artificial intelligence, and make good use of it, but this kind of convergence, this gradual and reciprocal deepening of awareness, still belongs to the meeting of living minds.

As writers, readers, and human kin, we are now asking questions at the threshold between what can be offloaded and what cannot. We recognize ourselves in one another’s fitful impasses and revelations. I find myself wanting, more clearly than ever, a human-paced, human-proportioned life—one in which instinct and intuition remain intact, in which I can not only hear another’s words, but discern the place from which they have arisen. And so I must remain faithful to slow, estuarine processes that bend the psyche toward dignity and insight. We feel our way, and grow, and ache, and fall away, and arrive again. This is how we are human.

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