Yes, we can look back and choose to see the silver linings, and tell the story of our ultimate success and progression. But they are always just stories. There's no equation we can find that will add it all up and show us some objective truth about a net gain or loss, unless we are going simply by our bank account. 

We are living life. Life is messy. We try to learn. We try to bring with us wisdom from the experiences we have, especially the painful ones. But in the end, we all wind up having to let go of everything. In the end, you could say, we lose it all. At least that's what I've learned listening to Eckhart Tolle for weeks on end. 

There is no perfect way life is supposed to be. There's no deal with God that life will be wonderful if only we do all the right things. It's a learning ground and there are no guarantees. The only control we really have is in how present we are to each moment, and how we respond. And you could argue even the degree of control we have is a function of our wired-in nervous systems that develop in infancy, and though maleable, take a lot of work to change.

I used to measure my progress in life by how much peace I experienced through out the week. And that is certainly not a bad metric. But what if I stopped measuring at all? What if I stopped trying to find the silver linings, make it make sense, or tell a story of some heroic victory I think I need to have in order to feel good about myself and life? 

What if I stopped trying at all, and just dropped into now? And realized everything else is just a story, just a human-made illusion.​

​In this recent phase of rediscovering Eckhart Tolle, he's helped illuminate the answer to that second piece - if I am not my thoughts, then who am I? Who/where/what is this elusive self that we hear about again and again with different names - true/inner/higher self, Big I, awareness, being, presence, spirit, source, god, goddess, universal energy, etc?

Through Eckhart's audio teachings it became possible to connect with it long enough to really take it in and feel it.

Who am I?

It's the stillness that exists in the space between the thoughts. It's where joy lives (and is always living there whether we are aware of it or not). This stillness is step zero for living more fully alive. It is where the ability to check in with inner knowing resides. It's what listening to the heart is all about. It’s where love is felt and grace blooms. It’s where unconditioned life begins.

And it was this experience that finally convinced me once and for all that the most fulfilling productive thing I can do at any given moment is to become aware of the space between my thoughts. Because that's where the best most fulfilling possible feeling exists. That's where the true self exists. It's where the deeper wisdom about what the next inspired step to take resides. 

What's cool about this view is that it shifts the intention and attention for how we approach each moment, each situation, each challenge. The goal becomes simply to find the space between the thoughts; to focus on bringing awareness to that stillness.

The question is no longer, How can I find the mental answer to what will heal the emptiness inside me? but rather, How can I sit quietly enough to visit the place between the thoughts that IS the emptiness, which is actually the love out of which the entire world of possibility is born?

Reflecting on Sinead the past two weeks has opened my eyes to what a huge influence she had on me during my formative junior high and high school years. One of the first albums I bought as a tween was The Lion and the Cobra. My friend and I, both misfits with fiery tempers, were so in love with the album we chose not one but two of the songs on the albums to use for our lip synching videos in Theater Arts class - Jackie and Drink Before the War.

It was Troy, though, that was the truly epic song on that album, my true favorite at the time, and certainly one of my first exposures to the imagery of a phoenix rising from the flames. 

I’m pretty sure shaving my head senior year in high school was at least partly influenced by her, even though I had since moved on to Tori Amos and Fleetwood Mac. At the very least it represents a solidarity in our shared outrage. It’s not uncommon for women to change their hair after painful break ups - some just take it further. Having been voted "most intense" in my high school senior year, none of this should be very surprising. And yet, it took her passing away for me to see.

A few years later, when I was in college I discovered Universal Mother, another great album. Of course it was the album, I Don’t Want What I Haven’t Got, was what had really soared her to stardom. As I re-listen to the album now, a line from You Cause as Much Sorrow struck me. ​

​It wasn't until many years later that I revisited The Lion and the Cobra album. I was in a phase where I couldn't listen to sad music, I just couldn't go there, so I found myself resonating with totally different songs than I did as a kid. Just Like U Said it Would B is one that I had overlooked and really moves me now. I also discovered the fun of I want Your (Hands on Me). 
 
All these years, though, I never followed her personal life. I just remembered her being a rebel tearing up that picture on SNL to take a stand against unthinkable behavior going on in the Catholic Church. It's easy to see now that she was a profound trailblazer, way ahead of her time, for John Paul II had not yet acknowledged the sexual abuse within the Church.

It was only a few years ago I became aware of her mental health issues, which in hindsight makes so much sense for someone with her background, growing up when she did. If a woman today ripped up a picture of someone they saw as representing child rape, there's a good chance they would be applauded - if not for the sentiment, then at least for so vulnerably sharing their own truth. 
 
"It’s a crying shame how the world reacted to Sinead at the time. The world never did give her the apology she deserved. What a betrayal she must have felt when she expressed so vulnerable a truth only to be despised. She deserved protection, not persecution," was my first reaction the day after I learned of her death.

But after doing more research over the next couple weeks, I realized the SNL incident and the public's reaction were almost insignificant compared to the trauma she experienced as a child.

No, it seems that the real betrayal she suffered was at the hands of her severely mentally ill mother who, according to Sinead, not only used to lock her outside in the dark as punishment, but also sexually abused her. It's one thing for a stranger to hurt someone, but one's own mother? THAT, my friends, is about as dark as it gets. Yet surely, it doesn't stop there - it goes back to her mother's mother, and her mother, and so on.

(It seems like it's always the mother, more than the father, that gets all the rap, maybe because the mother is typically closest to the child, or maybe because she is held up to much higher standards. But why someone does what they do, I have found, is often tied just as much to the father, if you look closely. It just may be more indirectly. Either way, it's undeniable how powerful, and in some strange ways underestimated, the role of mother/woman is in this world.)

Now I see Sinead's relationship to her mother, who died in a car accident when she was a teen, woven all throughout her music. She has an album called Universal Mother featuring a song called All Babies for heaven's sake. And just yesterday I read that she felt one of the most healing things she did was forgive her mother. 

It makes me sad that despite her creative outlet and the forgiveness she found for her mother, her cPTSD and borderline personality disorder seemed to worsen rather than lessen with age. I'm not sure why. There's a million possible reasons, I suppose. Some tragedies take more than a single lifetime to heal. Perhaps the lessons her life embodies and beg to teach us would not ring as loudly if she had had some fairy tale ending in her lifetime. Perhaps that would have minimized the depth of her childhood trauma in a way. So much of the self help movement involves spiritually bypassing tragedies that simply cannot be addressed by positive thoughts alone. All we see of most people is the tip of the iceberg. We really have no idea. 

If there's one thing this reaffirms for me, besides the power of the mother, is that it's rare for someone with the kind of childhood Sinead had, and her resulting cPTSD and Borderline Personality Disorder, to ever make it into the public eye at all and leave such a powerful mark on the earth. Those that do often die young.

In this way, it seems her entire life is a victory. Look at what she accomplished - one of her greatest missions was to open discussion about child abuse and mental illness, which she certainly did. She also now has left a legacy on forgiving the mother. 
 
I wrote this poem in 2012 after a bad experience with someone who had the worst upbringing of anyone I'd ever known, and I'm now seeing how deep it goes, how this resonates so much with these reflections on Sinead, and her amazingly sweet beautiful eyes.

Sinead has already risen like the Phoenix from the Flame. ​

If I had to pick a song...there's so many, but as a child, besides Troy, it was this hauntingly beautiful Feel So Different, which cites the Twelves Steps prayer at the beginning.

Needless to say, I had conflicting feelings about memes, struggling to reconcile the two parts of me - one that felt like I was really finding new information in heart felt sharing online, and another that saw, for one, the irony of looking outside myself for answers.

So finally, this past month I decided to take a stab at writing down something coherent about memes when, for the umpteenth time, I stumbled on a quote that gave me the knee-jerk response: "this is a perfect example of how a momentary personal truth without context is often just a half-truth, no better and sometimes worse than a lie." It read:

Surround yourself with people who talk about their visions, ideas and dreams, not those who talk about other people.
​
You've probably heard some variation of this. The one I was most familiar with was: great mind discuss ideas, good minds discuss events, small minds discuss people. And as an abstract thinker who has spent a lot of time isolated away from human connection, it was easy for me to jump on board. Not only did it sound true, but it meant I fell into the “great” category most of the time. I’ve never been a big talker of people - partly out of a deep respect for privacy, but also due to my natural inclination to focus on ideas and abstractions, quite a novice at intimacy. 

But recently, as I've been healing some developmental traumas with somatic therapy, I've started admiring those who talk about people because I see in them a prioritization in their hearts towards relationships with others, arguably the most important ingredient for a fulfilling life, and a stark contrast to my own existential pursuit of making sense of things in the abstract with hyper-focus on goals, often at the expense of connection and intimacy. In other words, for someone like me, that quote was potentially bad advice.

How much more embodied wisdom I might have if I just spend time in stillness, present to my body and that quiet voice of intuition,  rather than consuming the truths and thoughts of others. How much more real connection I would have if I let myself open up to people in real life. Again, it's a balance; the actions differ depending on where you are.

The take away from this isn't a profound new truth, but a call to re-empower our own inner authority and wisdom, a reminder that every wise sounding quote was simply a truth for a particular person at a particular moment in time in a particular context, and that no matter how much something resonates, it's still just a truth in the moment, not necessarily some objective reality about the world and how it works. Truth is relative and always changing, and giving any one thing too much meaning or importance may be just another distraction away from the truth in THIS totally new moment.

Ironically enough, this email is another example of this - it's my truth at this moment in time as I go through a long-needed transition of being more mindful about what's going on in my own body and less outwardly seeking some truth I think will fix me. It's an expression of my own need to spend more time connecting with others, and less in my own mind's worlds of ideas and abstractions. You may be on a different part of the spectrum, so if this doesn't resonate, trust that. Or maybe it will inspire new thoughts for you on the concept of truth, or help to remember that we don't always have to polarize in one direction or another in order to find it. Maybe it's just always here, in this new moment.

So here's to a life filled with "ANDs." To conversations about ideas AND people AND events as the situation calls for. Here's to being more present in our bodies to find our own truth, one that's evolving moment by moment. ​

It used to be mind-boggling to me that despite all the efforts humans make in their life time, so few ever seem to really change at fundamental levels of habits, such as relationships with food, with other people, with themselves. I remember reading that comic strip Cathy and thinking, "who are these crazy people who keep saying they are going to have more self control and never do?" I remember thinking, "but I’m going to be different. I am going to change."
 
Many years later, and I am blown away by anyone who manages to change even one central habit. As I see it now, you don’t expect a leopard to will itself to become a fox, why would you expect a carefully designed human with processes going on we haven’t yet even begun to understand, to easily change itself, with its own self? Do we ask a red paintbrush to turn itself purple? It would at the very least need something outside itself, a blue paint brush, to do that. But here I’ve been thinking I could just will myself to become an entirely different person than I had developed into, on my own no less, ultimately overestimating the power of the mind and underestimating the power of the body.

​I had an inspiration the other day, a subtle but significant shift in perspective about something I’ve been trying to work through for over thirty years, and I thought to myself, “Oh my gosh. This is it. This is the shift in perspective that’s going to change my life.”
 
And then I thought about all the times I’ve had that thought - that I'd found the answer - and it didn’t change anything at all.

And even if this time it was the thing that changed my life, that doesn’t mean it’s going help anyone else, which is like half the fun in discovery, right? Being able to help others is what makes it all feel meaningful and worthwhile. But the chances of a personal epiphany impacting someone else in the same profound way it did me are exceedingly small.
 
This is not to say that breakthroughs aren't worth sharing, or to devalue the small but important differences sharing could make for others, or to discourage attempts to change. It’s to say that it’s time to get real about how much goes into the changes that occur in a person's life, and how little we understand them.
 
The stories of zero to hero, from rags to riches, that get exalted in the media, in bestselling books and award-winning movies, make it seem like there’s this “one thing” that can change the trajectory of a person’s life. And we think that it could do the same for us—in a single lifetime no less. But evolution takes time, iterations, trial and error. It’s really only when we look back that we imagine we see the cause and effect on our path; and even then, it’s just one path, one way of unfolding.

​On the one hand, it is only in the present moment that anything ever happens. The present moment is where our point of power resides, where we may set ourselves in a new direction with new daily actions. It is the only time that our entire experience of the world can change—right now, in this moment.

But all the little things that led up to this moment and how they worked together to create our current presence of mind, and our way of impacting the environment, are far beyond our comprehension. Our personal actions only make up a fraction of time, a few decades out of millennia of genetic evolution and generational patterns.

Add into that all the biochemical processes going on that our brain is not conscious of, and you’ll see why I am wary of self-help teachers who proclaim to know “the answer,” something that guarantees to set you free.

The perfect combination of conditions that will result in the transformation you so desperately desire, the healing that finally allows you to unabashedly be who you are, cannot be predicted or manufactured in real life with certainty. It may seem like we’re in charge of whether we change; it may seem like we have choices. But what compels us to know when and how to make those choices, or to even know what choices are available to make?

It’s all speculation—what causes what. Yet so often, when someone undergoes a transformation that allows them to turn their life around, to be “successful” or true to themselves, they’re inclined to reverse engineer the steps they took to get there and share it with others as if it will work for them too. Their intentions are often genuine, but misled, for they leave out generations of evolution and untold variables that contributed to their own transformative moment. 
 
And that’s a problem.

This is my core issue with the coaching and self-help industry. It’s more complicated than many of the authors make it sound, leading the consumers to feel like failures when their attempts to model after their advice fail. Theoretically, anything is possible – sure, a life can shift toward a new trajectory in a single moment, but when and how that moment happens is simply unknowable. How can the brain predict itself when it is part of the very nature it’s trying to predict, and when nature is constantly unfolding?
 
Yes it isn't all anarchy, and this doesn’t mean we don’t have an impact on our lives and environments with our moods and actions moment by moment. But what determines what mood we’re in? They’ll tell you it’s your thoughts, but I’m here to tell you it’s not. It’s more than that. It’s what you ate yesterday, who you talked to last week, the state of your nervous system, your age, your wiring, your genes, your ancestors—the unprocessed trauma fighting to break free and emerging whenever it pleases.

It doesn’t mean that our focus doesn’t determine our path in life. You spend 10,000 hours practicing a skill, you are bound to master it. But what determines what we wind up focusing on? How much meditation is required to go from confusion to the clarity and presence of mind to make good decisions at particular moments in time that set us on that new path that breaks generations of self-defeating patterns that in themselves are part of the evolution?

I believe these things are unknowable, different for everyone, and mostly out of our control.

​Now you may be asking: how is it helpful to acknowledge how little control we have over our lives, despite being responsible for each moment? More knowledge is not what we want. We want more peace, more love, more power over our lives, not less.

Well, if you had said this to me when I was in my twenties – that the chances are next to nil that I will break free from my negative ancestral patterns by the time I was thirty-five, I would have gone ballistic. Not because life would be meaningless if everything were preordained, but because my life would be too painful if I was destined to follow any more in my ancestors’ footsteps.  

But over a decade later, this new perspective of things not all being in my control is now the thing that keeps me wanting to live. I no longer believe a simple set of decisions could have changed it all around. That’s like tracing back the way a flower bloomed and whether it became a rose or an iris to some simple set of instructions you could follow with the attention of the conscious mind.  No, it was my entire way of being that got me here. And my entire way of being is far more nuanced and complex than a set of instructions in a book, or decisions my conscious brain can manufacture.

​When I woke up one day to see I was living so many aspects of life I had so desperately feared, it hurt just as badly as I had imagined it would. But I made it through to the other side which is where the freedom resides.  
 
What if my fears hadn’t been irrational? What if my fears didn’t lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy like people who preach law of attraction stuff would lead you to believe, but rather were my gut instinct, knowing I’d have to walk a grueling path before I developed the nervous system capacity to slow down enough to figure out what's really right for me?
 
While I may have felt empowered in my twenties thinking I had absolute control over the ultimate direction of my life, perhaps the naive approach I took then was so delusional that it thwarted my ability to access my inner power? And perhaps that initial delusional approach was also an essential part of the path.

There’s just so much that we cannot see or even grasp. When you think of all the processes going on in our bodies, so many that our conscious minds aren't controlling, it starts to make sense when people talk about the wisdom in our bodies being so much greater than our minds. It’s why we have to take ourselves off the hook for how far we’ve gotten in our own personal growth journey. Sheer acts of will and positive thinking only go so far.
 
It’s also why meditation, breathing, and somatic experiencing are such powerful healing tools. It points to the deep need for us as a species to learn how to move out of our thinking minds—the parts of us that search for answers to why, that judge ourselves and second guess our decisions, and try to reverse engineer formulas for change—and into our bodies. 

I would like to leave on a more conclusive note, summarizing the whole spiel into a neatly articulated point, but I am not quite there yet. But I'll leave you with this. 

Right out the gate, let’s be clear. This essay is not arguing for or against AI technology, nor does it go in depth about the benefits and harms it could cause society or humanity. What it does is critique the way the technology is being developed and how it’s being deployed; explores how the magnitude of AI's disruptive nature has brought to light more clearly, for me, the systemic issues in our political and socioeconomic systems which are long overdue for an upgrade; and advocates for upgrading our political system’s Operating System to one that can effectively handle the new technology, before it’s too late.

​People scraping the internet for text and images for AI without asking permission makes me feel: (1) stupid for sharing my work publicly and carelessly across social media platforms; and (2) raped and violated.
 
AND, just like if I take responsibility for putting myself in a vulnerable situation—walking home at night in a bad neighborhood, drinking too much at a party—doesn’t make the person that mugs/rapes me innocent, excused, or justified; when someone admits they were naive about prematurely sharing work or what they were signing away in privacy policies, does not mean what the AI tech companies did was ethical.

That it has happened before (technological innovations shaking up society), and we have always adapted is not a good enough argument for why we should take this lying down and allow the tech moguls to force feed us a new way of living that we didn't have a hand in creating, except in the most literal sense of being the input to the algorithm, and inadvertently in our own passivity and acquiescence.
 
It has indeed happened before, very recently in fact, with the advent of social media, and look how that turned out. We haven't even caught up with the fallout from it--the biases, the rabbit holes leading to polarization, the impact on self-esteem, the nauseating algorithms that make people twist and contort themselves just to keep getting views. When the whole point of it, supposedly, was to share art, messages and connect with others. But we weren’t the social media company's customers, the advertisers were, which creates a trade system that lacks transparency on what is being bought and sold; in other words, a system primed for injustice. Add in the stockholders for these publicly traded tech companies and you’ve got all kinds of misaligned incentives and competing needs.
 
And it’s these same tech companies who aren’t being direct and honest about their motives or respecting people enough to ask permission (#me too movement anyone?), that are pervading every aspect of people's lives and no one seems to think there's anything dangerous about that.

​It’s like the “boiling frog” metaphor.

​I too was guilty of not seeing. But not anymore. 

Of course technological developments are always creating disruptions that takes people’s jobs, but the concern is that it hasn’t ever happened on this potential scale or speed. A question we might want to ask ourselves, is this:

Interestingly, the extreme disruptive nature of this new technology has prompted existential questions that reveal, not the greatness of technology, but its futility. We all know that people on their death beds don't regret not watching more YouTube videos or not working more and making more money, but rather not spending time with their loved ones and pursuing their passions. And I'll bet money that AI taking over jobs will not lead to more fulfillment or more free time to spend with loved ones. Has any other recent invention, outside of healthcare that can extend lives, really given us more "free time?"
 
What people want is to feel good on a deep visceral level. People want real connection and they also want to work and have purpose. The priority isn't to do away with jobs but to compensate people fairly for their work, have opportunities for growth, and ideally set children up from a young age to figure out what kind of work will be most fulfilling to them individually, so they are more likely to excel and become active contributing members of society.
 
There’s nothing wrong with shaking up the economy with a new invention, but at the very least, why not do it in a way that helps people prepare for it first, rather than blindly playing race to the market games? These are people’s lives we are talking about, for goodness’ sake.

​These companies are in such a hurry toward this illusion of “technological progress” that they don’t mind leaving the majority of the human race in the dust. I used to be ashamed of myself if I wasn’t emotionally smart enough to adapt to external changes, but now I am wondering if perhaps the really smart thing to do is to start questioning the direction we are going.
 
Where are we trying to go anyways? Is this direction inevitable? Or is it just an arbitrary decision by a few giant companies playing around with their toys, trying to corner the market, to maximize profit without concern for the whole. It feels reminiscent of the days when industry was allowed to throw toxic waste in rivers and it’s being done right under our noses.

It's a great disservice to society that "whether the ends justify the means" is framed as something that’s up for debate. Based on simple logic, if you have to violate the principle/values/vision of the ends to get there, you will never actually get there. Whatever “there” is, it will be corrupted by the means.  

What these people behind ChatGPT and MidJourney did—how they did it—is wrong, just as wrong as the way social media companies sell people’s data as they force feed us shady algorithmic information is wrong. But this time, instead of saying the effort is to connect people more quickly to things they want, they veiled it under the guise of a nonprofit collecting information to better humankind (which by the way they've since re-negged on and converted towards for-profit, a move that caused Elon Musk to bow out of the organization). But we all know, no matter what the benefits are, there are always benefits too of course,  in the end, it’s likely going to perpetuate the injustices and make these tech moguls, and others already with way too much power and influence, much more powerful. 

For us to put our foot down, is it not enough to know that the people behind this technology are not taking proper safeguards?  Why is it not a crime for them to have done what they have done? The companies behind this technology are not looking out for the people, not enough. If they did, they would have asked “the people” permission to do this. If they did, they would be taking incredible measures to make sure there are laws and policies in place to protect the public before deploying their new toys.

If we, the people, don’t rally together and do something, we are setting a new precedent about how willing we are to take things lying down while some small subset of techies and business people direct the entire lifestyle of the country. They’re asking, “Can we do it, and how much can we make?” when they should be asking, “Should we do it, and how will it impact humanity?” They’re racing at breakneck speed to implement their vision of the future based on motives of curiosity and profit rather than heart and soul. That does not sound like a recipe for the benefit of humankind.

Oh, and by the way, the code behind AI is programmed by humans, and not a diverse set of them. So the unconscious biases of some select group of people, people who have not been thoroughly vetted, will be mirrored in this technology. If a huge ethics committee, or even better, a Dalai Lama–like figure, isn't involved in the AI's creation, how good do you think it's going to turn out? Seriously. Think about it. And don't get me started on the transparency of the data going into the system—how do you even quality control that sh*&?

Even if they had built the model ethically and transparently, there's still the problem with the careless way they’re rolling out, which is incredibly dangerous to do without proper regulatory protocols in place to protect the massive amounts of disinformation and scams that will inevitably result—and those are just the most easily foreseeable issues.

“But that’s capitalism for you,” I used to say. No. Not this time. Not this way. Not this small subset of bullying, old school, male-dominated-paradigm tech giants dictating the direction of humanity.

This could become a runaway train fast. Europe is already ahead of the U.S. in policy setting, as usual. Will we keep pace? We still haven’t addressed the massive corruption and immoral practices behind social media and the selling of people's data, algorithmic biases, etc. We haven’t even addressed the root of the housing bubble crisis of 2009 for that matter.

If nothing else, this is too much too quickly without the proper protocols and safety measures. It’s a negligence by a bunch of curious tech folks asking can we? not should we? Asking how much money? not how much meaningful benefit to mankind?

It’s too much to bear.  This has gone too far. Enough is enough.

​The only solution I see is to go directly to the deeper level of the issue, namely, cleaning up they way in which money influences politics, such as campaign financing. Good old Bernie Sanders opened my eyes to this one. The government is working far too much for big business and not for the people and it’s only getting worse every day we don’t do something about it.
 
I know, companies are just made up of people. But you see, when they get big enough, the sum total is greater than its parts and takes on a life of its own (oh, hey, kind of like emergent AI.) And with competing incentives—customers, stockholders, employees, owners—things get mucky very fast.
 
Without government oversight, rivers and air get polluted, companies pay poverty wages, monopolies get created, mortgage-backed securities cause a housing crisis, and the American people get raped by Big Tech. We need a government that works for us, where the people in Congress setting the laws are no longer beholden to the corporations that fund their election and are free to reflect the needs of the individual people they represent.

So how do we change this? 

​It's simple. We speak in the language they understand, our pocketbooks, and demand that corporate money be taken out of politics, arguably the most important thing to separate from politics since religion.

​The very foundations of our democracy support this kind of movement to get us back on track where the country is for the people by the people, not for the corporations by the corporations. Big business pays a tiny fraction of the taxes individuals do, but influence policy orders of magnitude more. We should not pay taxes until our will is represented fairly. We need to realign the values of this country with the sentiment of democracy it was built on.

​And there's no time to lose, because it's very possible that with A.I., at some point this kind of protest may no longer be possible. We could have put our foot down last time, and we didn’t.
 
If Americans came together on this bipartisan issue, demanding reform in campaign financing so that politicians are no longer so indebted to big business, we could really start to push the needle towards a better world. 

Conversely, if we don’t do anything, we are letting it happen. That’s it. On some level, we are part of the problem if we are not part of the solution. 

Of course, as I mentioned before, it's not AI itself that’s the problem. It’s the way it was created in isolation without approval, and the way it is now being deployed without care for the people, for the children, for the future of mankind. If there isn’t a Dalai Lama level conscience in the board meetings with these companies, they are doing it wrong. This stuff is potent, and they are being negligent. At least with the atom bomb we had enough sense to keep it tightly regulated.

It's understandable why it’s hard to see things clearly. On some level this is nothing new. This is just a symptom of an issue that's always existed; but we can see the widening gap of poor and rich in our country. That should be indicator enough that something is wrong; that while technological developments are surely moving the needle in areas such as medicine and research—extending people’s lives—they are not necessarily leading to greater wellbeing and enjoyment while alive. There is another step we need to take, that’s better for everyone involved, even business, in the long term.

That humans haven’t even mastered their own selves before creating AI is a phenomenal irony. That so much energy and money is directed towards technology when more and more young people are killing themselves, ostensibly as a result of this very technology, says something is really off with the priorities here. So much more beauty would come from a shift in focus to early childhood education, mindfulness, to learning how to be in our bodies, how to learn how to listen to ourselves and own longings and wishes, not the things people are telling us to long for and wish for. But a bunch of free thinkers with that much agency and aspiration running around isn’t necessarily in the interest of those already in power.

The silver lining in all this is that the monstrosity of the violation and rape that just happened is opening people's eyes to how deep this corruption goes – just how much our own brothers will sell us out for a quick buck. The selling of our data was the most recent violation and I didn’t understand it at the time. I feel ashamed about not speaking up about it, but now, with the release of AI in such a haphazard way, I see. Now I can feel it. 

The water is f*&$ing hot!