Writing, A.I., and the Value of Feelings

This morning I was outside raking (yes, it’s four days before Christmas and I’m in New England—I’m not responsible for the weather—I just clean up after it), and I was thinking about an article in The New Yorker, What if Readers Like A.I. Fiction, by the novelist Vauhini Vara about a study examining A.I. and its increasing ability to sound like specific, very talented, writers.

Vara wrote, “As a novelist and a journalist covering A.I., I’ve tended to dismiss the threat it poses to authors. I won’t enlist A.I. to write on my behalf for the same reason that I won’t enlist a robot to do other hard stuff—hike a mountain, argue with my husband. But, lately, I’ve been pushing up against the limitations of that logic. I can write a book for my own reasons, but I can sell the book only if readers like it more than what they can get from, say, a chatbot. If readers prefer A.I.-generated fiction, then authors won’t be able to stop it.”

I bought five Christmas presents this year. Grinch and I are hanging out at the bar, eating all the peanuts and drinking our glasses of water. There is something weird about buying things for people who own storage units and who routinely go on fasts to lose weight. They don’t need speciality chocolates. They don’t need another L.L. Bean sweater. What they need, at least most of the people I know, is peace of mind. I love giving and receiving presents, but there was something about this year in particular that didn’t make the experience a dopamine fest. Could I just have five minutes of not worrying about the state of the planet and the fact that I am raking when I used to be shoveling?

I think in 2026 we are going to enter the era of feelings. Where else is there to go? Consumerism went to shit and is now gilding the already gilded in Washington D.C. while countries, including our own, burn. The Industrial Revolution did a nice job of taking people out of nature and putting them into boxes, but it seems that the boxes are falling apart at an (to use perhaps the most over-used word of the last five years) unprecedented rate and perhaps the only place left to go is in.

Joan Didion said, “I write to know what I think.”

Increasingly, I write to know what I feel. I pay so much attention to my thoughts they have become the boss of me. I have the thought that things are going badly in the world, and the next thing you know I’m on a supersonic search mission to prove to myself just how badly things are going. My mind has trained my mind to look for shit and disregard the rest.

How does that make me feel?

I have to look at my feeling wheel to find the right words. Hold on.

Despair. Isolated. Victimized.

The reason I have to look at my feeling wheel is because I generally don’t know how I am feeling if it’s not mad, glad, or anxious. It’s like I was born and went straight into Thought School and skipped over Feeling School because Feelings don’t have much value in our culture. Who needs to learn about feelings when you can think your way out of almost any problem, when you can think your way into a job where you make six figures, when you can think your way into the life of your dreams?

Why do we then have a body that has all these feelings? What is the purpose of shocked, liberated, playful, empty, repugnant, skeptical, jealous, awe?

This brings me back to writing and A.I. I understand that for people who make their living as writers, this could be a frightening time. It’s like being a home builder and watching people learn to dig their own holes in the ground to inhabit. What a thing for your sense of self and purpose to no longer provide you with the means to eat and keep a roof over your head.

As a writing coach, I’ve never been as interested in the finished, published work of someone as I am in the process of watching them go from A (not knowing how or what I want to say) to B (I know how and what I want to say, and I’m saying it). It’s like those videos where flowers bloom before your eyes.

Some people are perfectly happy just living their lives, and then their are the people who have the underlying question, always, What can I create from this? I’m one of those people. Life for me is like a bunch of clay thrown on the table. The real meaning comes to me out of what I make of it with the stories I tell.

More than writing, even, I love collaborating with others as a teacher or mentor or coach to help them find the freedom to fully express their own vision of the world through words. To be graced by another human’s truth feels like a benediction, a wild glimpse of freedom. We spend so much energy masking and trying to be other in order to protect what feels most vulnerable and at risk in ourselves, and when someone opens the curtain and lets us see what’s really going on inside the body and mind, we get to feel connected, alive, vital.

I accomplished my goals—I wrote a book and a movie—and now it feels more exciting to help others write what they dream of writing. However, because my brain sees the world in sentences, writing is something I will probably always feel compelled to do in order to not walk around feeling like a flute someone forgot to play.

So many people say to me they wish they could quit their day job and write full time instead, but that rarely sounds all that great to me. It can be a wonderful thing to write and to not make a living at it. What freedom! For example, I get to write a sprawly, disorganized essay such as this one and not have to worry about making sense or pleasing you because 1. this brings me no money and 2. I write these posts to practice the flute of voice and that is all.

One of the most frequent readers these days of my blog is “China”. I’m assuming that is A.I. vacuuming the shit out of the years of posts that have accumulated here. My words have gone into the soup of us.

In an unprecedented fashion.

I don’t know yet how I feel about all of this—right now the words are shock, uncertain, upset, awe.

When we don’t value the art of individual human bodies and pay for the output of machinery instead, we have created, well, trouble.

At least that’s how it feels to me.

Troubling.

And under that?

Deep curiosity.