Introduction - A Resolution Facing A.I.

I woke up today in a mood that I would qualify as “strange” if it hadn’t become so typical in the last year. It was a mood of lethargy mixed with apathy, but without any tinge of melancholy.

Without boring you with the details of how I reached my conclusion, let me simply state what soon appeared to me as the reason for this mood. The last year has been one of relative mental inactivity when compared to my life before the use of A.I. became a requirement at my job.

I am one of the few in the contemporary economy for whom LLMs do provide substantive cognitive relief. At first, this seemed a brilliant innovation. A.I. promised to relieve me of much of the labor I was exercising at work and to devote myself more completely to my passions, which are reading and writing. There have been times in the last year when this was the case, when I would fire off Claude-code sessions while I read poetry at a café. But I have recently begun to realize that my capacity for concentration has dissipated, that I would often rather watch television than read a book. In other words, I have become. . . .lazier?

Lazy seems to be the wrong word insofar as it would imply a deficit in my character. My issue, as I understand it, is less related to my character and more structural. What has really happened, as far as I can tell, is that I had previously been relying on productivity mandates typical of modern middle class jobs to give me a structure in which to exercise my mental capacities and, more importantly, to maintain them. Even if the work was drudgery or meaningless or what have you, it nevertheless meant that when I had free time to devote myself to intellectual activities more fitting to my disposition, I was not working with a rusty machine.

Work no longer provides that structure for me, which means that I need to find it, create it myself. There are many ways of going about this, but what I've chosen as the most fitting path is to read a book a week and post a short review on here. I vaguely recall having once read that Virginia Woolf used to do the same thing, so it seems as good a way as any.

I should close by saying that this isn't meant to necessarily be a social critique. It's long been true of a certain economic or social class that they had a lot of free time on their hands and had to figure out ways of structuring it. A.I. has many deleterious effects, but in my case, it has genuinely afforded me leisure. Now is the time to learn something very un-american: how to devote myself fully to useless, beautiful things. This was a life I always dreamed about, but that dream did not prepare me for the reality.

Leisure is a terrible thing. One might recall Nietzsche's adage about staring into the abyss, but the reality is much less interesting and dramatic than that. It suffices to say that the scholarly life is one in which one's whole being is put into question. The posing of the question is, as Parsifal demonstrates, the hardest part; especially, I might add via Marx, for us alienated subjects. Now is a moment of danger: one must learn to ask the question. One must learn to wait for the answer.

25 August 2026