Category: old age and technology

“Something Good” – Wendell Berry and Remembering When We Made a Difference

Nothing comes from nothing
Nothing ever could
So somewhere in my youth or childhood
I must have done something good. (from “Something Good,” The Sound of Music)

Last week, I wrote about the regrets that we all have about our pasts and wondered about the best way to handle them in our old age.  Reading Wendell Berry’s new book, Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story, made me think about the “good” things from the past.  If you’re like me, you spend much more time with your shames and regrets than you do with “worthy” acts.  What things in our lives have been for the good, what experiences have we had and stories have we told that made a positive difference, which resulted in “something good”?  The fortunate among us have had an old friend, student, or co-worker thank us years later for something we did not even remember doing for them or for kind words that we can’t even recall at all.  It would probably do us all good to dwell more often on the positive aspects of our lives and less often on our (numerous) regrets.

Berry’s book is narrated by Andy, the very elderly grandson of Marce Catlett.  Long ago, Marc stood up to the Duke Tobacco interests by sharing his experience with his neighbors.  His oft-repeated story of one day, told over and over, shaped the lives of all those around him in the wonderful world of Port William.  The day was devastating, but the main part of the story is about how Marce immediately picked up and carried on and worked with fellow farmers so that such a day would never happen to them again.

First, let me say that Wendell Berry just published this book at the age of 91, and it is a true gift for all of us.  Marce Catlett  is a spare book written with a sledgehammer, and not just a story about 1917.  Berry has a pretty good idea about not only what is wrong in Washington these days, but what is wrong with all of us.  And our children.    The novel can be read in a day, but it would take much longer than a day to forget it – and so it was with Marce Catlett’s story about coming home from a tobacco auction with less money in his pocket than it had taken him to grow the crop.

Wendell Berry is a wonderful writer about wonderful things; many of us know his poetry (think of “The Peace of Wild Things” or “How to be A Poet).   We also have read his essays, which go back to the 1960s and include gems like “Living in the Presence of Fear” and “Why I’m Not Going to Buy a Computer.”  But it is his fiction – the novels and stories of Port William – that future generations will look back on for a prophetic voice that was seldom heeded.  Marce Catlett is simply the culmination of this story.  You do not have to have read any of the others to appreciate this latest (but hopefully not last) work though; Berry fills us in.  I was greatly disappointed not to find it listed in this week’s NYTimes Book Review as among the best of 2025; they are wrong.  It is probably the very best of 2025.  And relevant to us elders – written by an elder, narrated by a very old man, and insistently recalling the valuable parts of a world gone by.

And I might add one more thing here.  In Wendell Berry and Marilynne Robinson we have two writers who give us alternative views (alternative to both evangelical and mainstream religion) of the place of Christianity in human life.  For those of us whose symbols, music, and history are steeped in the Christian faith, such alternatives are much needed and hard to come by.  I don’t know if this will be Berry’s last novel, but it is precious cargo, nevertheless.

Almost all of Berry’s fiction – like most of Faulkner’s – takes place in a well-defined place and gives priority to the work that is done in that place.  Like the descriptions of whaling in Moby-Dick, which ground us in the real and creates a community among the participants, in Berry’s latest book we get the details of raising a certain kind of tobacco.  We all spent much of our lives working – often in jobs that do not even exist anymore. Berry reminds us that the work was real. The lives were real.  At one point he catalogues the buildings and equipment on the old farms and says he is not writing a requiem for all that, but for “the way that once lived among them, the paths worn and wearing day by day, which connected them to one man’s effort and desire” (145).  This tribute to a careful kind of farming stands alongside a description of a careful kind of living that we don’t encounter very often these days.  It also reminds us that the memory of the old – for instance, about how to grow a crop or prepare a recipe – used to be greatly valued.  Now we are more likely to go to AI than Grandpa for such knowledge.

The book is also a diatribe against greed.  “Greed has passed to and fro over the whole earth, reducing life to matter and matter to price.  Though time and change bring sorrow, they belong to the seasons, to fecundity and health, and greed is a mortal disease” (150).  Indeed.  My guess is that was the reason Wendall Berry penned another book in his ninetieth year was to make precisely this point in a world that is sacrificing everything to… greed.

In the end, Andy comes “at last to see his grandfather Catlett, his father, and himself as three aged brothers.”  In his own old age, he now understands their old age.  I often think of my grandparents in this regard and wish I had appreciated them more.  They too had their stories of survival that come back to me – like the one about how, during the Depression, they rented out their house and lived in a neighbor’s garret in order to realize some desperately needed marginal income.  They laughed when they told the tale; they were proud that they had found a way to get through.  I see lessons there that I did not see when I was younger – including a lesson from the laughter.

I was very disappointed that Berry’s new book was not included in the NYTimes notable books for 2025, but there is a poem by Wendell Berry (“The Loved Ones”) in a recent New Yorker.  And, if you like Marce Catlett, there is reading for the rest of your lifetime in the stories of the people of Port William.  These books will change you.  They will inspire you.  And, hopefully, they will nudge you to recall the stories of your life that made a positive difference.  You “must have done something good.”  Yes.

In relation to old age, I would also particularly recommend Berry’s short stories “Fidelity” and “The Inheritors.”  The first is about the end of the life of one man and the effect on those who loved him.  It will get you thinking about technology and death and community.  The other is a portrait of an active man entering into the diminishments of old age and yet keeping his spirit whole.  Read them. 

An Old Lady’s Take on the True Danger of AI

Sunday’s NYTimes was full of articles about the economic danger of the AI bubble, and I am sure that it is a possible economic hazard for the companies involved. But I am much more concerned with the moral hazard, the risk that will be passed on to others, to us.  I think the danger is substantial, and so let me unpack it a little.

Every time I think about why AI scares me, I end up pondering what it means to be human. Human beings have always been greatly invested in proving that we are more than animals (think Scopes trial). The Bible spends a lot of time making sure we know we are in charge – and a step above the animals.  This of course has blessed us in using animals any way we wish. But, is there really such a difference between us and the animals?  Or is it just a great chain of being with a slight dotted line between man and apes?

Aristotle says that the difference is that humans are rational.  But surely AI is more rational than we are!  Descartes said that animals are akin to automatons or robots – merely mechanical, but that humans had souls.  Does the computer have a soul?  How would we know?  Another commonly repeated differentiation between men and animal is that animals adapt to their environments or die, while human beings are capable of changing their environment.  But, these days, it looks like changing our environment might be killing us, so maybe it all comes to the same thing. Maybe all we can say about all of this is that human beings need to feel special, we need to feel superior to animals, and we really haven’t worked out our relationship to a really smart machine.

The further I explored this issue, the more I intuited that the true danger of AI was the loss of any sense of worth or efficacy that we could do things ourselves.  I could, for example, have AI write my blogs.  I could just give AI a topic and set it loose. You might not even notice the difference.  You might even think that my writing has improved. But.  I would have abandoned the maintenance of a discipline, a sense of self-worth, a lifeline of true connection with those who read it.  And so it is with other things in our lives.  I play Bach rather badly, but I continue doing it, although I could listen Glenn Gould’s magic through my earphones. My husband and I still do almost all our cooking from scratch, including bread and desserts.  Not long ago, my son told me that he couldn’t imagine spending the time that we spend planning, shopping for, cooking, and cleaning up after meals, as if those were worthless things that should be discarded as soon as possible.  Surely the project of feeding ourselves could be outsourced in some way?  Yes, we could order takeout or go out to eat.  We would save time, perhaps, and some mental energy (but not money).   What would we replace those hours with?  Word games, news feeds, slick TV comedies and soapy dramas?  No thank you.  I understand that people will succumb.  I sometimes succumb, and, as I grow older, I may yet totally capitulate.  But it is not just about self-esteem and good home cooking.  It is about a sense of discipline. A sense of being in control of our selves – could this be what is meant by soul?

Let me just begin by saying that we have allowed discipline to become a bad word.  Michael Foucault and other modern thinkers helped in this regard, with the emphasis on discipline from without rather than Benjamin Franklin’s stress on self-discipline.  Discipline used to be valued, prized.  Discipline used to be seen as a way of living a better life.  Monasteries had disciplines, so did the Methodist Church.  Jesus had disciples.  Buddhism has a discipline called the Vinaya.  I never made much of my life until I learned a certain level of discipline, and I am sure most of us would say the same.

It is always hard to explain to younger folks that we study some things not in order to learn them, but to learn discipline.  I have never used calculus in my adult life, but I learned a lot about logic and determination by studying it when I was young.  I am currently studying French – not because Google Translate can’t meet all of my meager translation needs, but because the study itself keeps my mind active and teaches me something about the very nature of words and language.  Similarly, I write a blog not just for my readers (although I thoroughly appreciate you!), but for the discipline of having to read and think a little more deeply.  The process forces me to actually sit at my computer a few times a month to organize my thoughts.

Sloth and torpor are sins in most religions.  We might be reminded that we have given animals we eat a life of sloth and torpor – we feed them, house them, make all their decisions for them.  And then we see a picture of someone who has “liberated” a cow or pig and it is cavorting in the pasture.  Do we think it misses its sense of security? Do we think it preferred to have us doing its thinking for it?  “Taking care” of it?

AI wants to take our work, particularly our mental work, away from us.  For some, it is taking real work away.  We already have two middle-aged adults in our family who have lost jobs in which it is very likely that they will be replaced by some version of AI.  And such losses have only begun – why would businesses invest big money in AI if they don’t anticipate that it will save them money elsewhere (salaries)?

This is not the first time that our generation has seen technology replace our work. We went to school in the days of blue book exams and math without a calculator (except for the trusty slide rule).  But then things started to change rapidly, and my generation accepted those changes willingly.  I remember when dishwashers became common, and when I used my first garage door opener.  So much of the work-replacement seemed common sense – we didn’t even think about it.  Who wouldn’t want to replace the drudgery of cloth diapers with disposable ones?  But now we need to think, and thinking is exactly what AI is trying to take away from us.  It wants to program our reading and listening (it knows what we like!) and rescue us from the messy business of… living.

I am as lazy as the next person.  I know that, and I know it is a problem.  Much of the meaning of my life involves fighting inertia.  I used to be my own worst enemy, but now I think I’ve got a more formidable one.

I do not think that the danger is that AI will get rid of pesky humans; I think that we will become less human all on our own.  I will fight my personal battle on this, but it will take all the discipline I have – discipline I learned doing calc by hand and hanging cloth diapers on the line.

One of my favorite stories about technology is Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains.”  He got his title from Sara Teasdale’s poem (also relevant), “There Will Come Soft Rains (War Time).”   And, Happy Thanksgiving!  For all my old lady grumbling, I am exceedingly grateful for my life and my loyal readers.  And this message was not brought to you by AI!

“Here Be Dragons!” – AI and Old Folks

I have been trying (and failing) to stop thinking about Artificial Intelligence (AI).  It is everywhere.  And it occurred to me that the replacement of our brain by silicon networks has ramifications that old people know something about.

But let’s start with an earlier usurpation by technology – that of replacing people power (physical work and transportation) with machines.  I am always amazed when reading Emerson or Thoreau to find that they thought nothing of a twenty-mile round trip walk to see a friend.  These guys were in great shape!  As was almost everyone in those days (except the filthy rich and they were fat).  Now we are all out of shape and spend hours doing Pilates or walking on the treadmill trying to regain some of the fitness that Thoreau had as a matter of the life he lived.  This only gets worse in old age, as we continue to try to persuade our bodies not to freeze up or flab up.  I, of course, am grateful for technology that allows us to replace or medicate arthritic joints and such, but we must also realize that as we delegated many physical activities to machines (machines that polluted the planet), we also handed over a natural way to stay fit. We have even convinced ourselves that going up and down stairs is bad for us, so we should live on one level or (better yet for the economy) invest in a stair lift.  While there is a time of life when stairs are not possible, study after study has shown that climbing stairs is good for old people.  I read once that when Paris put elevators in some senior residence buildings, the life expectancy actually declined!

Now we are accelerating a parallel process that had already been underway – that of replacing our minds.  If we don’t think our minds will decay from reduced use, we are deluding ourselves.  Anyone who has retired from a mentally challenging job knows that “use it or lose it” is true.  Old folks try to compensate by doing word and number puzzles – any group of elders often drifts to that day’s Wordle or the Jumble in the morning paper.  We take French classes, join book groups, tackle the myriads of math problems that show up on Facebook.  We are trying to maintain what is now not adequately used.

And, incidentally, there is AI designed just for old folks, including a monitor with the cute name of ElliQ which will help you take your pills, do your exercises, plan your meals – as well as giving you someone to talk to at any time!  If your younger relatives give you ElliQ for Christmas, you can be assured that they don’t want you looking to them for help!  And if we do not have to exercise our minds at all, what does that mean?  For the old and for the young?

Spinoza equated intelligence with virtue; Aristotle said that it was our ability to reason that makes us human.  Could farming out our intelligence rob us of both our virtue and our humanity?  I fear it might.  There is also something authoritarian about AI – it has the one true answer, the ability to tell us what we ought to do.  And if you think it doesn’t have its own biases, remember two things: it was created for profit, and it has no ethics. Already AI is biased toward capitalism and away from “wokeness.”  As its usefulness seduces us, we will be easy prey for collateral damage.

Earlier times were more skeptical about technology.  They warned us.  In the 19th century, as technology spread in the form of trains, gas light, and electrical power, there were many thoughtful discussions about whether it was good or bad.  Two major utopias of that period were set in worlds where the decision had been made to discard most technology.  One thinks of Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872) or William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890).  These are “post-technology” narratives, where humans have taken life back into their own hands.  Here is Samuel Butler:

True, from a low materialistic point of view, it would seem that those thrive best who use machinery whenever its use is possible with profit; but this is the art of machines – they serve that they may rule.  (from Erewhon)

To avoid this despotism of technology, Erewhon destroyed all the machines created in the past three hundred years.

Similarly, William Morris created a world that has severely limited the invention and use of technology.   Both utopias were in stark contrast to Bellamy’s Looking Backwards (1890), which more or less predicted that science and technology would solve all our problems by the year 2000 – albeit it had also replaced capitalism with socialism, so it wasn’t a profit-based technical utopia.  Hard to imagine.

But, again, as I said at the start, old folks know what happens to our mental and bodily functions if we don’t use them enough.  We also have a long view of the kind of change that technology engenders; we have watched the dumbing down of culture, the plague of obesity, the destruction of our attention span.  Elders are cautious folk, and we are worried.  In the Middle Ages and earlier, when cartographers had gotten to the end of their knowledge of geography, they labeled the unknown areas with warnings:  Hic Sunt Leones (Here Be Lions) or Hic Sunt Dragones (Here Be Dragons).  All warnings about AI and related technology seems to have disappeared – it is now blessed by the President, the media, higher education, and the venture capitalists.  But I, for one, will be looking for lions and dragons.

“Like Foreigners in Their Own Country”

I have been thinking a bit about language these days for at least four reasons.  First, I have been taking a French class at the local senior center.  I passed a French translation test for a graduate degree, but that was decades ago, and I never learned to speak it very well.  Second, I have been rereading my old journals, and realizing how much my memories diverge from the words that I wrote down at the time.   Third, I have been dealing with communicating with my grandchildren (ranging in age from five to sixteen) and recognizing that we are seldom speaking exactly the same language.  And, lastly, having embarked on my “rereading” project, I have realized how language changes in the context of its historical period and in the context of the age of the reader.

Learning a new language in old age is supposed to be good brain exercise.  OK – I hope that’s true.  More importantly, spending time with another language’s constructs and idioms makes you realize that all language is more arbitrary than we realize.  It is not only the words that are different, but the structure is also different.  In French, for example, the pronoun “ils” (meaning “they”) applies to groups of men or groups of men and women – even if women are in the majority.  Groups of women (only) are “elles.”  Even one male in the group changes the pronoun.  It makes me pause and consider more seriously the messages encoded in all language.

Reading old diary entries has reminded me of how slippery language and memory are.  It is not unlike the old game we used to call “Telephone” or “Gossip,” where a message whispered in ear after ear in a big circle comes out differently at the other end.   Words that were written down at the time and survive are intact, and I must believe they represent what I experienced at the time.  However, some memories have apparently morphed to become perhaps more interesting or easier to bear.  I have been amazed.

Language changes over time are nothing new.  My maternal grandmother, who never learned to drive, called their car “the machine.”  Movies were “the pictures,” and the radio was “the wireless.”  When her granddaughter took to wearing blue jeans in college, she insisted on calling them “dungarees” and elongated the word so it was clear what she thought about dungarees as female attire.  With my own grandchildren, I am struggling with my pronouns, my technological ignorance, and a lack of words to describe the kind of relationships teenagers have these days.  Some of their truisms drive me to distraction – like “it is what it is” or “whatever.”  And when did wait and sales staff begin to answer any question with “of course”?

Reading old books is a challenge; can we really understand the context – not just of the vocabulary – but of the situation? Of course, one can more properly understand Shakespeare or Chaucer with notes to explain what certain words meant at the time they were written. But can we realize what it might have felt like to be pregnant and unwed at the time of Tess or imprisoned in the England of Moll Flanders?  Also, the age at which we read a book matters.  As I re-read books that I first opened in my youth, I find that they are totally different – because I am totally different?

This is nothing new.  Montaigne (whose essays I have been rereading as part of my “nothing new” project) said that he realized his words were not eternal:

I write my book for few men and for few years.  If it had been durable matter, it would have had to be committed to a more stable language. In view of the continual variation that has prevailed in ours up to now, who can hope that its present form will be in use fifty years from now? It slips out of our hands every day, and has halfway changed since I have been alive.  We say that at this moment it is perfected.  Every century says as much of its own… (Essays, Book III)

In Gulliver’s Travels, Swift has his hero visit the eternal Struldbruggs, who – like poor mythical Tithonus – get old but never die.  After a number of years, however, they cannot communicate with those around them:

The Language of this Country being always upon the Flux, the Struldbruggs of one Age do not understand those of another . . . and thus they lye under the Disadvantage of living like Foreigners in their own Country.

One of the Buddhist daily reminders is that my body will age and decay.  So will my language.  AI wants to bring me up to date; it will gladly edit my work so it doesn’t seem so … old-fashioned.   Incidentally, it would also like to bring Montaigne up to date.  Cosmetic surgery for the written word.  Spare me.  What is all around me might be a “foreign” language, but, again, all the research shows me that struggling to understand a foreign language is good for old people.  And it doesn’t mean I have to give up my native tongue.

For one of my stories that thinks about language, you might try, “Why My Aunt Josie Has a Limited Vocabulary.”  If you want to surprise yourself, look at a diary entry or letter you might have sent about an event that happened a decade or more ago.  Does your memory fit the facts?  And what does that mean?  Should we school ourselves to accept reality or take refuge in our edited memories?

Charlotte Brontë, Luddites, and AI

After Charlotte Brontë wowed her world with Jane Eyre in 1847, she disappointed her reading audience by stepping away from Gothic romance to write Shirley, at least in part about the Luddites of the early 19th century.  (Both books were published under the masculine pseudonym Currer Bell.) The Luddites, you might remember, were a group of craftsmen who were protesting the installation of semi-automated weaving machines, making skilled weavers redundant.  Shirley, as it turns out, is more about gender, class and economic roles and less about the Luddites per se, and yet is a truly wonderful book with notable and quotable insights on all facets of life.  But, in the end, it shows us a world that is capitulating to technology with the same inevitability that our own world is.

I reread Shirley because I was thinking about Artificial Intelligence.  AI is everywhere.  AI is trying to help me (go away!) write this blog.  The very existence of AI makes me doubt the pictures I see and facts I read.  In the past, mechanization and automation have threatened manual workers and artisans the most (think about type setters), but AI threatens the white-collar worker, the computer programmer, the teacher, the content provider.  The Luddites in Brontë’s novel flail against “progress” to almost no avail.   Similarly, it is beginning to look like the creeping hegemony of AI is inevitable.

But back to Shirley.  When the Luddites initially destroy a loom in transit, this message is sent to the mill owner: “Take this as a warning from men who were starving, and have starving wives and children to go home to when they have done this deed.”  And not all the children are at home, as the mills take root and hire the cheapest unskilled labor:

The mill windows were alight [because it was still dark out], the bell still rung loud, and now the little children can running in,  in too great a hurry, let us hope, to feel very much nipped by the inclement air; and indeed, by contrast, perhaps the morning appeared rather favourable to them than otherwise, for they had often come to their work that winter through snowstorms, through heavy rain, through hard frost….

[Later] It was eight o’clock; the mill lights were all extinguished; the signal was given for breakfast; the children, released for half an hour from toil, betook themselves to the little tin cans which held their coffee, and to the small baskets which contained their allowance of bread.  Let us hope they have enough to eat; it would be a pity otherwise.  (from Chapter V)

Our anonymous but omniscient narrator clearly has his tongue in his cheek.  These children never have enough to eat.  And yet the mills expand, the new equipment is finally delivered, and we move from the plight of hungry children to the romantic interests of the local gentry, including the mill owner.

In fact, Shirley ends in a double-wedding and a brilliant future for the local textile mill.  Brontë’s narrator wraps up by looking into the future and telling us about his visit to the area long after the weddings and the new machinery:

The other day I passed the Hollow, which tradition says was once green, and lone, and wild; and there I saw the manufacturer’s daydreams embodied in substantial stone and brick and ashes – the cinder-black highway, the cottages, and the cottage gardens; there I saw a mighty mill, and a chimney ambitious as the tower of Babel…. (from Chapter XXXVII)

Yes, there are worker’s cottages with gardens, but there is also the chimney and the ash in this once green corner of England.

For many years, optimistic thinkers envisioned labor-saving technology as helping to create a kind of utopia, as giving everyone a chance to use their minds instead of their bodies. Manual workers would unbend their backs and pick up a book or a musical instrument.   Eric Hoffer envisioned university-like campuses for adults, freed from the workplace, who wanted to study in any area they were interested in.  Edward Bellamy imagined a world full of music, books, study, and communal dining.  But instead of having technology free us up to use our minds, it appears that we will have no need of our minds – AI will take care of it.   It might also be noted that Samuel Butler and William Morris wrote utopias where technology is strictly controlled for the benefit of humankind.

Just as the pastoral town in Brontë’s book ultimately and inevitably succumbs to the mill, I have recently watched one area of life after another capitulate to AI.  You might look at the front-page article in today’s NYTimes: “AI on Campus Casting Chatbot as Study Buddy.” The most disappointing defeat has been the way AI has been accepted by educators.  “The students are going to use it anyway,” they often plead, “so we might as well encourage them to use it well.”  That might be true, but I’m suspicious that it would be AI doing the “using” and not the student.  If things are made too easy for us, we get soft – in mind and body.  And if we don’t resist AI now, it is unlikely we will have the mental resources to do it years from now.  The Luddites lost and they lost badly.  But, at least, they realized what they were losing.  And they tried to do something about it.

For a story about how artificial intelligence is not always the answer, you might try my “Two New Apps,” or read almost anything by Ray Bradbury.

The Aging Buddha and the Aging-Resistant Tech Boys

The news in the Sunday NYTimes last weekend was challenging, to say the least.  To make it worse, there was an article on the front page entitled “Gilgamesh, Ponce and the Quest to Live Forever.”  Besides the lack of an Oxford comma, the article was just a reminder how hard the tech boys out in Silicon Valley are working to make 90 the new 50, to make their minds outlive their bodies, to challenge nature.  There was an even more alarming article in the New Yorker a few years ago appropriately entitled “The God Pill.”  The tech boys (and this group is mostly male) are treating old age as a disease to be eradicated.  You might think about that.

The death and aging-resistant tech boys seem to be divided into two camps: the Meat Puppets (who think that we can “fix” the biology and thus stay in our bodies) and the Robocops (who think that our “essence” will move to mechanical bodies/brains).  Both methodologies are attracting huge investment from rich people, presumably in lieu of donating money to soup kitchens.

The technology and the money are new (the article says that “any scientific breakthrough that added another decade to global life expectancy would be worth $367 trillion”), but the sentiments are not.  People (again, mostly men like Gilgamesh, Ponce de Leon, and Isaac Newton) have been fighting old age for centuries.  “Do not go gentle into that good night” says Dylan Thomas.  But does warring against the inevitable really change anything?  And at what cost?

The Buddha, that truly enlightened being, grew to be very old – into his eighties we think.  He made adjustments: he taught while lying down because he had a bad back, he had disciples deliver his talks when he wasn’t up to it.  Here is an exchange between the Buddha and his bumbling but lovable assistant Ananda:

Then Ven. Ananda went to the Blessed One and, on arrival, having bowed down to the Blessed One, massaged the Blessed One’s limbs with his hand and said, “It’s amazing, lord. It’s astounding, how the Blessed One’s complexion is no longer so clear & bright; his limbs are flabby & wrinkled; his back, bent forward; there’s a discernible change in his faculties — the faculty of the eye, the faculty of the ear, the faculty of the nose, the faculty of the tongue, the faculty of the body.”  

“That’s the way it is, Ananda. When young, one is subject to aging; when healthy, subject to illness; when alive, subject to death…” (translation by Thanissaro Bhikkhu)

Acceptance that things will change is what the Buddha is preaching.  I recently read an interview with one of my favorite writers, Lewis Mumford, which took place when he was in his eighties and still producing books:

“The really annoying part of the aging process is not what happens externally—one has plenty of time to get prepared for that—but what happens internally,” he says. “One knows one isn’t quite as good. One’s energies are lower. When I was writing my major books, I would do between 3,000 and 4,000 words in the morning, between 8 and 11:30. Now I’m very happy to do 1,500 or 2,000 words.”

“Now I’m very happy to …”  This is an acceptance of reality that is graceful and wise.

The Buddha and Mumford have learned one of the most important lessons of life – to live with and adapt to reality.  I have recommended the Buddha’s five daily recollections before, but one of them is that the body is “of the nature to grow old and decay.”  I would guess that the Silicon Valley boys might delay the inevitable, but they are going to be pretty miserable if they don’t accept it at some point.  And even if they manage to live long, they will still outlive their time – think of Swift’s Struldbruggs, who outlived the language and culture around them and became “foreigners in their own country.”  Trying to talk to my grandchildren, I know what that feels like.

None of this means we have to like everything or anything about old age.  The Buddha spoke the following poem (memorized by the monks and later transcribed):

I spit on you, old age —

old age that makes for ugliness.

The bodily image, so charming,

is trampled by old age.

Even those who live to a hundred

are headed — all — to an end in death,

which spares no one,

which tramples all.

And, as for the tech boys, they might want longevity, but they don’t necessarily want everyone to have it (link here): 

“I don’t think we should have people live for a very long time,” Musk says (in a WELT Documentary interview). “It would cause ossification of society because the truth is, most people don’t change their mind; they just die. And so, if they don’t die, we’ll be stuck with old ideas, and society won’t advance. I think we already have quite a serious issue with the gerontocracy, where the leaders of so many countries are extremely old. Look at the U.S.—its very ancient leadership. It’s just impossible to stay in touch with the people if you’re many generations older than them.”

Like the Struldbruggs.  Or maybe like some of the people Musk has been hanging around with lately.

If you want to know more about the Struldbruggs, try Gulliver’s Travels (Part III, Chapter X), and see if you don’t relate to their feeling of being “foreigners in their own country.”  I also wrote about them in my blog from a few years ago, “Covid-19 and the Generational Wars.”

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Build Your Own World, Create Your Own Day, Construct Your Own Life

When I was young, I thought I would have figured things out by the time I was old.  (Old then being about 50.)  Yet I seem to be fighting many of the same battles with myself that I have been fighting for seven decades.  I know I don’t need another book to tell me how to fulfill my purpose, stop procrastinating, live according to my values and priorities.  I have read a slew of those books and know what it is that I am supposed to do.  That is not the problem.  Actually doing what I know is the best thing is the problem.

Moving closer to my teenage grandchildren and hearing them interact with their parents has been somewhat enlightening in this regard.  The conversation goes like this.  Parent: “Do you think eating all that candy (or staying up late playing video games or spending your allowance on silly things) is a good choice?”  Child: “I know, I know – but I really wanted…” You get the picture.  Many days this same conversation is going on in my head, but both characters are… me.  I know what the good choices are, but as Saint Paul laments in Romans 7:19, “For the good that I would, I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do”.  Or as Ado Annie says in Oklahoma, “I’m just a girl who can’t say no.”

I have won the battle in some cases.  I keep a serious journal and have an exercise routine of sorts.  I take my vitamins and see my dentists and doctors as required.  I make my bed and remember birthdays and get a blog posted a couple of times a month, yet my life is overshadowed by the things I want to do and do not do.

Friends have told me just to climb out from under the guilt.  Retired people don’t really need to do anything, do they?  And yet this is not an answer for me.  I want to end every waking day by being satisfied by what I have accomplished, but I also am looking more closely (than I would like) at the end of my life.  The big deadline looms.

Three pieces of advice have helped me lately, and I am glad to pass them along.  Two are quotes from the Transcendentalists, first from Emerson in “Nature:” “Every spirit builds itself a house; and beyond its house, a world; and beyond its world a heaven. Know then, that the world exists for you: build, therefore, your own world.”  Birds single-mindedly build their nests; we should do the same.  In old age, our nests are for nurturing ourselves and not our babies, they are for cradling us to the end.  No better reason for building your own world.

If Emerson seems to call for too much, Thoreau parses it into to smaller chunks for us to consider.  In Walden, he tries to whittle his life down to the marrow; he trims his expectations to the day in front of him.  “To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.”  Make this day a good one – and our days will add up to a life, a world.   Thoreau’s gentle exhortation has gotten me through some rough patches.

Lastly, I have been reading a wonderful novel, This is Happiness, by Niall Williams.  The book was recommended in a recent NYTimes piece by Ann Patchett and is narrated by a very old man who is recalling the coming of electricity to his Irish village.  Read it to find out if the residents are happier before or after technology catches up with them!  In any case, the seventy-eight-year-old man reflects on this very subject:

Not that you ever quite know what that is [the better version of ourselves], still there he is, that better man, who remains always just ahead of you.  I write this now. Having come to realise it’s a lifelong pursuit, that once begun will not end this side of the graveyard.  With this I have made an old man’s accommodation and am reconciled to the fruits of a fruitless endeavour.

And what are the fruits of this fruitless endeavour?  Perhaps that we affected the quality of our days with Thoreau and built our own (yet imperfect) world with Emerson.  I am happy to make an old lady’s accommodation with these truths.

The Threat of Singularity and the Promise of Perennial Philosophy

As I have aged. the pace of technology has surely surpassed my interest in “keeping up.”  I have been intrigued, however, by the notion of the singularity, which is defined in many ways, but often as “a hypothetical point in time when technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible.” Technology already feels “uncontrollable.”  It forces me to deal with chatbots and answer yes/no questions.  It fights to supplant me.   Even as I write this. Microsoft is pestering me to let its AI “Copilot” help me; it wants to co-opt my place at the keyboard, convinced (and trying to convince me) that it can do whatever it is better than I can.  What AI fails to recognize that it is the doing that matters, not a uniformly “perfect” product.

As I was thinking about this, I was strangely reminded of Aldous Huxley and his “perennial philosophy,” which represents a different kind of quest for doing things in the best way, for improving ourselves, or – more specifically – for living life well.  Seekers for the perennial philosophy pursued ageless universal truths, laws, dharmas, which might enable mankind, individually and communally, to reach their utmost potential.  There was no place in this philosophy for technology or even much science.  It had more to do with getting to know the nature of the kind of beasts we are, the kind of world we live in, and how the two interrelate.  “Know thyself,” said Socrates. 

Huxley’s book was a bestseller in 1945, as shocked and tired people were emerging from the nightmare of WWII.  Reviews were good, with the New York Times noting: “Perhaps Mr. Huxley, in The Perennial Philosophy has, at this time, written the most needed book in the world.”  Perhaps, after Hiroshima and the gas chambers, no one was looking to technology to solve our problems.  In the last 70 years things have changed; we have become beguiled by technology.  As Wordsworth predicted, “Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers, / Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!”  Indeed.  Our hearts, our minds, and maybe our souls.  We are apparently far more interested in knowing what machines can do for us than knowing ourselves.  Why? It’s easier.

The machines enticed us, seduced us, slowly. Old folks are very much aware of this. When I was a child, technology (in the guise of Western Auto) gave us a big TV with a tiny screen and one to three channels.  It stood in the heart of the house, and we watched it together.  Step by step, it led us to the internet and streaming, and now watching anything is seldom a communal experience.  In my youth, technology gave us one telephone in the center of the house, so that communications were communal (hard on teen-age girls). Now cell phones are stopping any sort of real face-to-face communication.  The internet has made information easier to find, but harder to verify; common wisdom is no longer looked for or found. No wonder they call it the singularity; in wisdom, as in most things these days, we are “bowling alone.”

I think that Huxley’s perennial philosophy is probably the opposite of singularity; it assumes that the answers lie in the truths of the past and not the unknowns of the future, that we can both formulate the questions and find the answers without mechanical help.  The singularity assumes that machines will find the answers, machines which will soon be smarter than us, and that is a scary thought – unless you think that we will always be in control.  Have we ever been in control?  Did we consciously end up with children in their bedrooms sending pictures to strangers and old folks entranced by online “friends” who are trying to scam them?

Literature has long worried over the ascendency of technology.  RUR (Rossum’s Universal Robots) was written by Karel Capek in 1920.  The play warned us not to turn our back on a robot.  Arthur Clark wrote the novel and screenplay for 2001 A Space Odyssey in 1968, based on stories he started in 1948.  HAL (Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer) was definitely the enemy by the end.  Technology was much cruder in those days, but people were already concerned. As creatures being slowly ingested by technology, we seem to be less worried now than we were then.  It would seem that HAL has made us fat and happy.  And what is the alternative?  A recent bill putting limits on AI development in California was vetoed by the governor after Silicon Valley got incensed.  There is no hope for such legislation on the federal level. 

The perennial philosophy was defined by Aldous Huxley and others as “a school of thought in philosophy and spirituality which posits that the recurrence of common themes across world religions illuminates universal truths about the nature of reality, humanity, ethics, and consciousness.”  In other words, a search for a commonality in proven human thought, faith, and ethics which could give us clues on the way to live better individually or communally.  But no one thought we could outsource that search, or google it, or that the answer would be a complex algorithm.

Computers are yes/no machines.  In the words of E. F. Schumacher, the real questions of life are divergent rather than convergent problems. Designing a diesel engine is a convergent problem; scientists can work on it and eventually arrive at an answer. AI could do this. How to use such an engine for the benefit of society (i.e., transportation of goods vs. preservation of the environment) is a divergent problem.  Adolescents often think all problems are convergent and often think they know the solutions.  Most old people know that the important questions are divergent and can (and should) be grappled with, but cannot be “solved.” Schumacher reminds us that, again, it is the doing that matters: “Divergent problems, as it were, force us to strain ourselves to a level above ourselves.” 

I appreciate the good that technology has done for us – many of us, including myself, would not still be here without advances in medicine, education, transportation.  But let’s not give away our hearts (“a sordid boon”) – or our lives.  Science may have given us increased longevity, but, as Mary Oliver asks, “What is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?”  Show me the answer to that question in an algorithm.