on_staying_alive ovenbird This morning the algorithm handed me a suicide note. I don’t know why it thought I would want to begin my day with someone’s self-inflicted deletion. My chosen work aims to prevent this very thing. I’ve spent innumerable hours on the phone trying to show people, people who I only know by the fragile cadence of their voice, people covered in spit-up and milk, people who haven’t slept in months, people whose last nerve is frayed to the point of breaking, that there is a reason to live. I know what it is to desire endless sleep. I also know what it is to keep my crusted eyes open, looking for meaning in the mess of being alive. This morning the internet handed me the final words of a man with a name I’d never heard. He said his good-byes to everyone who had wounded him and to everyone he felt he was letting down. He said his “fuck yous” to god. He was tired of swimming against a rip tide, he said. He couldn’t do it anymore. The part that won’t leave me is his clear articulation of meaninglessness. His marriage had failed, his life’s work didn’t change the world in the ways he’d hoped, every system he accessed in an attempt to heal his own childhood trauma failed. What killed him, in the end, was not despair but this breakdown of meaning. I’m sure there’s truth in this, because I’ve felt it. It’s not suffering that leads people to end their lives. We can endure unimaginable suffering if there is meaning sewn into it, if we can find a way to see our pain as contributing to a cosmic arc of narrative that hums with poetry, love, yearning, beauty, purpose, delight, agency. When meaning falls away and we are left without a story, that’s when people give up. Meaning can be found in the smallest things. We don’t need our lives to be fantasy epics in order to see threads of resonance moving through them. My dog’s ecstatic face when I come through the door is enough. The wonder of witnessing a web weaving friend is enough. One hand reaching for mine is enough. This man who left his final note to the world had lost the arc of his story and succumbed to darkness. One of the things that scares me most about the sudden rise of AI is that it is a technology hell bent on stealing the meaning that keeps us alive. If we can no longer be bothered to do the work of digging in creative soil, if we outsource the very means of intellectual exploration, if we are no longer patient enough to sit with our ineptitude or determined enough to struggle towards knowledge, if we discard the slow process of growth in favour of soulless immediacy…what meaning is left? I’ve grappled with suicidal depression my whole life, but in this past year I’ve felt more alive than I have in ages. That sense of vitality is tied to an intensification of meaning, and that meaning is generated by focused, creative acts of seeing. I’m reading more, writing more, having deep conversations, paying closer attention to the world, and making a concerted effort to stay away from endless scrolling feeds of AI slop and click bait. I am giving my mind room to make connections, and connections are at the root of meaning. When we see ourselves as essential to an unfolding story, we can access the resilience required for our own continued survival. AI cannot, ultimately, make meaning on our behalf, though it does a frighteningly good job of pretending it can. I’m afraid that by the time we see through to its hollow core it will be too late. We’ll forget how to see those shining webs of meaning that flow between us and we’ll forget how to do the creative work of tending to them. In a world like this, the pursuit of “having words” is a radical act of resistance. It might even, at its most powerful, be the very thing that keeps a soul alive. 260630 what's it to you? who go blather from