The dreariness of winter, combined with family circumstances, has made it difficult to focus and write logically. My thoughts feel disorganized. But I would like to start with a series of vignettes with a common theme. Over the course of this year, I will write with more specifics. But I thought these vignettes might be the place to start, and I think others might be able to relate.
It was December 16, 2022. That Friday morning began like almost every other morning. I ate breakfast with my parents, then retreated to my room to listen to The Daily, one of my favorite podcasts published by The New York Times. Though I thought I kept up with the latest news and trends, somehow until that day, I had not heard of ChatGpt, even though it was released two weeks earlier, and had been in development since 2017. Ever since the invention of the steam engine, automation has been an ever-present threat to human livelihoods. As I came of age, the internet changed the career landscape for even more fields, including the field I hoped to enter, Journalism. The internet allowed people to get their news instantly rather than waiting until the paper was printed the following day. Anyone with an internet connection could start a blog and call themselves a journalist. Stories could be updated in real time and supplemented with videos, and on top of all that, this information was free. Newspapers struggled to compete. Just as I was graduating, reporters were being let go from newspapers all across the country, including from our local newspapers, and the newspapers who were hiring required reporters to wear multiple hats. When I did an internship with a local newspaper my junior year of high school—2007—the reporter and the photographer were separate positions. The reporter could focus on interviewing the subjects for a story, while the photographer snapped pictures in the background. By the time I graduated college in 2012, newspapers required a reporter, photographer, and videographer rolled into one position, and thus what I thought would be an accessible field for a blind person was no longer. But although I could not meet the multimedia proficiency required for full-time employment as a writer in the 21st century, I still took comfort in long hours in my room composing essays for my personal blog, and on a couple of occasions for freelance submission to magazines. The manner in which writing is delivered and consumed in the 21st century may have changed radically since the days of Mark Twain composing his classic works on a typewriter, but the act of writing itself could never be changed. Writing is not a formula that can be plugged into a calculator, nor is it mechanical like factory work. Writing is an art, a sacred labor of love that machines could never replace. Or so I thought. I still believe that writing is a sacred labor of love. When Michael Barbaro demonstrated how ChatGpt could write a love story in the style of William Shakespeare, or a mob boss, and when I subsequently played with it for myself, the stories it produced were generic, like an instant pudding mix, sweet and chocolate-y enough to satisfy my sweet tooth for the moment, but somehow lacking the deep rich flavor of my dad’s home-made pudding, of which the secret ingredient is love. But just the realization that it was now possible to generate box-mix writing disturbed me. And when I learned that some in the entertainment industry eagerly anticipate a future when movies and songs will be generated by AI, it hit me that capitalism doesn’t care about sacred arts, human labors of love or genuine human flourishing for that matter. Art was now just another commodity that could be reduced to computer code, and mass-produced by a machine whose only concern was profit. I will continue to enjoy the art of weaving words together, motivated by the fact that I have found plenty of other adults just as disturbed by generative AI as I am. But what of my niece and nephew who are babies now but will never know a world without generative AI? Will their school even bother to teach them to compose essays or craft their own stories, or will these skills be deemed irrelevant? Will they have the attention span to read a whole book and appreciate the beautiful prose of classics composed before AI? Will people who enjoy composing an essay without generative AI be as weird to them as people who sew their own clothing or travel by horse and buggy?
It was May 28, 2025, a typical Wednesday in my home office, where I log into a call center for work. That day, we had a contract with a company that wanted us to make business development calls. The business model was based on volume, so we were given a call quota for each day. To achieve this quota, our preview times and wrap-up times were closely monitored. Though this particular contract was new, I had been doing business development calls day in and day out for almost the past year, and my soul was getting weary of them. That day, the weariness was particularly pronounced. I could not find the motivation to click that “place call” button, and my long preview times were quickly noticed by a manager who sent me a chat message asking if there was anything wrong. Was I having computer issues? Going against the advice of every job coach I have worked with and read articles from—don’t make excuses, apologize and say it won’t happen again, get your metrics back on track—I decided to be honest. I was tired of being artificial. Memories of stiff, scripted job interviews where I pretended to be someone I wasn’t for jobs I wouldn’t end up getting anyway came flooding back to me. So I responded with complete honesty about the weariness of my soul. My manager was empathetic, but reminded me that this was a business, and we needed to honor the obligations of this contract. I should turn off any radio I was listening to that might be distracting me, take a five minute break if I needed to, but I needed to meet my quota. This was a fair response. The manager was doing what managers have to do in the business world. But it made me realize that I was not meant for the business world long-term. I could not live my whole life feeling like a cog in a machine, where the human spirit had to be shoved aside to just churn out calls like a machine churning out widgets. All at once that day, it dawned on me the meaning of The Pasture, a Robert Frost poem I sang for my spring choir concert just a week and a half earlier.
“I’m going out to clean the pasture spring. I shan’t be long. I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away. And watch the water clear, I may, I may, I may,” the sopranos sing. Each “I may” is softer and slower, as if to mimic a kind of holy distraction. Because of the fall, this farmer must toil. The leaves have to be raked away. But his line of work allows him to appreciate God’s majesty, by taking a moment to gaze into the beautiful stream. In the second verse, the calf must be fetched, but while fetching him, he can marvel at the miracle of new life. And after every verse, he beckons us, “You come to.” I willed myself to improve my preview time slightly, but all the while, it occurred to me that the reason so many in my generation feel spiritually dead is that the human spirit was never meant for the demands of the modern workforce. And it clarified my desire to go into ministry. I want to toil, to live a life of purpose, but I refuse to believe that toil requires feeling like a caged bird, shutting out all that is beautiful, lovely, in the service of meeting quotas. At the end of my life, I do not want to be remembered for the number of cold calls I converted to warm leads. I want to be remembered for shining a little light in the darkness of people’s lives, perhaps holding to account people or systems that contribute to the darkness, and drawing people closer to God in the process. I am not physically capable of being a farmer. But going into ministry, which is based on forging relationships, offering spiritual care and comfort is my way of telling that farmer, “I’m coming. I want what you have. I want more of society to have what you have.”
My dad bought an Alexa speaker a couple years ago. I was leery of it at first, but realized it can only follow simple commands, find music or a podcast we want to hear, tell us the time and temperature. We decided not to connect it to the phone given the horror stories we have heard, like the one where a guy was complaining about his boss to his family, and Alexa thought he wanted to call his boss. I especially appreciate being able to ask Alexa what time it is when I am on a 15 minute work break so I don’t have to carry my phone with me. But one day, instead of just telling me the time, Alexa said, “It’s 2:20, time for a laugh. Would you like to hear a Hogwarts-inspired Harry Potter joke?” Something about this appalled me to the point that despite enjoying the Harry Potter books in childhood, I had no interest in hearing this joke. Maybe it was the blatant manner in which I sensed I was being thrust into an involuntary experiment with big tech tinkering with the algorithms to make Alexa more engaging, or maybe it was just the idea that we have become so shallow we cannot go 15 minutes without technology entertaining us. I was so stunned that this first day, I ignored Alexa. But when she offered the joke again a few days later, I was ready, “No, and tell Jeff Bezos that I don’t need to be constantly entertained like the people in (the movie) Ideocracy.” Her response was “I’m not sure how to help you with that,” which was comforting in that this response proved Alexa isn’t sharp enough to replace humans yet. But Alexa hasn’t offered this stupid joke since. . This is probably due to the negative feedback of other customers. I couldn’t have been the only one who thought this was ridiculous. But I like to think that given that Amazon can listen to everything, maybe Jeff Bezos heard me.
It is November 26, 2025, the day before Thanksgiving, and I bundle up for a walk on the trail before work. It is cold, and snow is falling and blowing around. In the past, I would have chosen to walk on the treadmill on days like this, but I no longer have one. Just before we moved out of our old house, our old treadmill malfunctioned, causing me to fall off. I had some ugly bruises on my knees. Mom cried and insisted on taking me to the emergency room to make sure nothing was broken. X-rays confirmed nothing was broken, but my shoulders ached for weeks. At first, I was loathe to get another treadmill because of the trauma of that fall. But then after reading Against the Machine, by Paul Kingsnorth, it occurred to me that the fall off my treadmill could be a metaphor for the trauma that we all livewith. We are all bruised and broken by the Fall, which has separated us from God. Even Paul Kingsnorth acknowledges we cannot escape the machine of modern life entirely. The following evening after Thanksgiving dinner, I would purchase a rowing machine for exercise during the winter months since we no longer live a lifestyle where exercise is integrated into daily survival. Eventually, the trail would be covered in snow and ice, making it unsafe for a blind person to walk independently. But whenever it was feasible, I decided that walking should not be done indoors on a machine. Before the Fall, Adam and Eve walked with God in the garden, and that is what I wanted to doo too—talk to God and listen to the casual reply as John Denver would say. This morning, the snow was light and ice hadn’t formed yet. Mom and I practiced navigating the trail with my cane, and I had been taking my walks solo for two weeks. A few minutes into the walk, I hear rippling water in the pond on my left, and then a couple ducks quack happily. “Hi duckies, how are you today?” I asked aloud, “Do you like this cold weather?” “Quack, quack!” they answer back. I laugh, sheepishly at first. I didn’t hear any other humans on the trail, but sometimes sound is distorted by snow. If anyone heard me, they would think I had more problems than just my blindness. But then I recalled C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, and the virtual meetings which felt like fireside chats, facilitated by the professor for a class on the book of Genesis I took at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. When Christ returns and redeems all of creation, not only will languages no longer be confused, but we will again be one with God’s entire creation. I couldn’t understand what the ducks might have been saying that day, but I believe someday I will, and ruminating on this as I walked made me forget about the cold and wind.
In his introduction, Paul Kingsnorth confesses that as a child, he dreamed of living in a pine forest, perhaps due to reading “too much Tolkien.” I never got around to reading Tolkien as a child, but it’s never too late to read anything. Maybe reading Tolkien this winter would be good for my soul. The book that enchanted me in childhood was My Side of the Mountain, by Jean Craighead George, in which a young boy, tired of living in a crowded Manhattan apartment with a large family, runs away to the Catskill Mountains, learns to live off the land, builds himself a house in the hollow of a tree, even trains a falcon to hunt for him. I was also enchanted by songs, country songs that spoke of the cowboys riding on the wide open range, songs celebrating the splendor of nature like Colors of the Wind. Through these songs, I, like Paul Kingsnorth always sensed there was something off about the “real world” we are stuck living in. I wondered what would it be like to refuse to own a television or computer, to be completely ignorant of pop culture, with its shallow, mass-produced shows and Sundays dominated by the obnoxious business of televised sports? What if instead, I could set out and find some obscure culture, shunned by the mainstream, where people still sat around a fire and sang songs or told stories? What would it be like to lose track of exactly what day it is, and be more attuned to seasons instead? What would it be like to only have the work necessary for survival, without the additional chores created by modern life, like the never-ending chore of sorting through and reorganizing the overabundance of stuff the system convinced us to accumulate?
I know, I know, I have to accept reality. We live in a fallen world. The machine of modern civilization cannot be escaped entirely, and things will never be right until the New Creation. But I am also sensing I cannot ignore a restlessness God has placed in my heart. I pray this year that God might show me how I can rebel against this machine which seeks to subject us to an artificial, superficial life. As I begin education toward an mDiv, which I hope will lead to a career in chaplaincy, I pray God will show me how to shine a light into the darkness rather than just complaining about it, or fantasizing unrealistically about escaping it, and that I will have the courage to not allow myself to be conformed to the patterns of this world.
Gilbert and Me 