Hello, and welcome again to Every Dawn, the place where we share a thought every morning that we can take with us into the day.
Yesterday, I was reminded when I saw my colleague's reaction to ChatGPT. You know, we all have older colleagues, perhaps, who see this new wave of AI and they say, "I don't understand this. This is not for me. I am old school. I do my work, you know, the old way. I'm not going to engage with this." And this happens in every job, right? It happens in philosophy, it happens in any office job, it happens everywhere with every new technology. It's not only ChatGPT.
And perhaps it's you, even, or perhaps it's me sometimes, when I say I don't want to engage with something. For example, for me, it's music. I don't engage with modern music, with you know, contemporary music at all. I have no idea what Taylor Swift is doing, and I hear the name, I read it in my newspaper, but I have no idea of her music. I'm not going to listen to it because the music I like to listen to is music from the '70s and '80s, and this is the music when I was young. And perhaps, like most of us, I'm attached to this kind of music, and I don't care for the music that others do now. I mean, it's not my thing.
So it's just another instance of the same phenomenon, right? That somebody says, "This is not for me because I am a different generation. I am something different. I don't identify with this." But I remember that even my grandfather did this. My father once told me, and I didn't know my grandfather because he died early, but my father once told me that in the '70s, when people at home had recording machines with tape, and these were not the cassette tapes but it was these big recording tapes, my grandfather, even then, was too old, and he was unable to understand how this worked, and he said, "I don't understand this. I don't want to understand it." But he was not actually uneducated; he was an educated man. He knew science. He knew how electricity worked. It was easy for him to understand this. He could have
understood it, but he just did not want to.
And not wanting to understand it meant that he had made a decision, a conscious decision, to not be part of the modern world, what for him was the modern world of the '70s. He didn't want to be part of this anymore. And this, already when I heard it
for the first time, this story, and now when I think about it with my reactions or my colleagues' reactions to AI, I realized that this is a very dangerous way of viewing the world and it's actually a kind of death.
It's a kind of refusal to change, of refusal to adapt. And if you think of life, the refusal to adapt is actually death, right? I mean, it's the definition of death. The definition of life is adaptation to environmental conditions. The definition of a dead thing is something that does not change, right? This cup here does not change. It is dead; it doesn't do anything anymore. It won't adapt. It's dead.
So being dead means, you know, you stay where you are, and you don't adapt. And so, not adapting is a sign of death, and nobody wants to be dead. So perhaps today, when we go out, we should force ourselves a little more to engage with things that are challenging to us, with things that cause us fear, and with things that are uncomfortable to us. But stepping out of our comfort zone is actually what keeps us alive, and what keeps us connected with the world. And being connected is crucially important because then we are part of this circle of life, of this web of life, not only physically, by you know, eating and excreting, but by culturally, by ingesting the culture of our time and then producing something that will connect with others and make us part of this culture and give us a voice.
And then we are part of this whole thing if we not only consume but if we produce something. Like in nature, every animal consumes and produces something for other animals. There's no animal that only consumes. There's no plant that only consumes. Every plant produces something — produces leaves, produces fertilizer, produces, you know, vitamins, produces things that other animals use. And this is true of everything in nature, and it is also true of our culture.
And I think that much of human unhappiness, and this is something Aristotle said, and also Bertrand Russell, who was a philosopher of the 20th century, they pointed out that what makes us unhappy is exactly that we are not participating in the world fully, as fully as we should. And happiness is often just participating, just taking on the world and doing your thing in it, and then your life feels meaningful. And you know what you have achieved. So in the evening, you come home and you can tell, you know, your partner, or your children, or yourself what you have achieved today, because you have achieved something. You have produced something. You have done something.
And even if one's job is not that meaningful, one can find meaning outside of a job. Like I'm recording this now. This is not my job, but it's something that gives meaning to my life. What prevents me from doing it, except myself? So as we go out today, let us
think of how we can be more participating in this circle of culture and this circle of life, in this exchange of things that defines life and that gives our lives meaning.
Thank you, and see you tomorrow.
