Busy

 

Sara Kazemi

I am busy, so busy

I don’t have time to think

I am busy, so busy

So close to the brink 

I am busy, so busy

I can’t face the demons inside

I am busy, so busy

So I can allow them to hide

I am busy, so busy

Just keeping up with life

I am busy, so busy

Trying to keep out of strife

I am busy, so busy

That’s why I don’t call

I am busy, so busy

So close to a fall

I am busy, so busy

There is no time for sleep

I am busy, so busy

That’s why I say bleep

I am busy, so busy

Please be kind whilst I am away

I am busy, so busy

It’s me, not you, who cannot stay

I can’t be controlled

But I am in a rut

You can’t make suggestions

I will just say ‘but’

So please be kind

Let me speak my mind

And one day I will reveal

What I can no longer conceal

The loss, the pain, 

the grief from the past

The sadness, the despair, 

the disappointments that last

I need your love

Your listening ear

Your kindest words

Some jolly good cheer

I just need somewhere safe

To deal with this stuff

I don’t want to fear

An unfortunate rebuff

When I find it within

Or through people who tune in

I will start to heal

And begin to be real

I might slow down

Or completely stop

For a moment

A month or even longer

I hope it doesn’t take a major disaster

To get off this train that keeps going faster

For my heart truly knows that it is just an excuse

To avoid slowing down and making a truce

To once and for all

Forgive and grieve

Everything unresolved

That is hidden in me

Little by little

I can change my pace

And find new ways

To enjoy my own space

Then I won’t be so busy

And I will have time to think

To plan what to do

Without turning pink

Harmony will return

As I find a new rhythm

With stops and starts

On my very own mission

Then one day I will look back

On my busy phase

And wonder why

I wasted so many days

Chasing, pushing, fighting, sighing

Tired, lonely and nearly crying

It’s time to stop being so busy

And live a life that’s much more cruisy!

There is no need to be perfect

Or wait until when

Live life right now

The door is open…

Accept those tears

And face those fears

Take a quick look around

To find what you have already found

 Sue Ellson

The Quiet Death of Hurry

 

João Cabral

Speed can steal your soul

There is a tiredness that no sleep repairs. 

You feel it late on a Sunday, when the house has gone quiet and the week's list lies conquered. 

You met every deadline. You answered every message. Yet something inside you did not arrive. 

The days moved through you like water through a sieve, and though you were busy from dawn to dusk, you cannot remember one hour that truly belonged to you.

The Daily Meditation

"Everyone hurries his life on and suffers from a yearning for the future and a weariness of the present. But he who bestows all of his time on his own needs, who plans out every day as if it were his last, neither longs for nor fears the morrow." 

— Seneca

The Diagnosis

You did not choose hurry. It was handed to you, quietly, over many years, and you learned to wear it like a uniform. Somewhere along the way, movement became a moral quality. 

To be still was to be lazy. To be slow was to be lost. 

And so you began to run — not toward anything, but away from the shame of not running.

The tragedy is not that you are tired. 

The tragedy is that your tiredness does not feel like yours. It feels like a bill someone else has left you to pay. 

See if these are familiar:

• A tightness in the chest the moment your phone lights up, before you have even read the notification.

• A strange guilt when you sit still, when you drink your coffee without a screen in your hand — as if rest were a small theft.

• A dullness at meals, at conversations, at your child's story — where you are present in body but already three tasks ahead in mind.

These are not personal failures. 

They are symptoms of a life lived at the wrong speed. 

The soul has a native pace, and yours has been dragged, for years, above it.

The Unpacking

Seneca did not say that you have too little time. 

He said that you spend it as though it were counterfeit. 

Hurry is not a fact about your calendar; it is a posture of the soul. 

It is the belief, held in the body long before it is spoken in the mind, that this moment is only a hallway to a better one. Something more important waits behind the next door. And so you stop inhabiting your life and begin only to pass through it.

The Shadow is the belief that speed is proof of worth. In the shadow, you rush not because the task demands it but because slowness feels like exposure. If you stop, you might see what you have been running from. You might feel the ache of a friendship grown quiet, the fear of a career built on other people's ambitions, the small grief of a self you have not visited in years. Hurry is a merciful anesthetic. It lets you avoid an appointment with yourself that you have been postponing since you were young.

The Light is the courage to let each moment be full. In the light, you understand that a life is not measured by the number of things done but by the depth at which they were done. One meal eaten with attention feeds you more than a week of rushed swallowing. One conversation held without a phone in your hand marks you more than a hundred half-conversations. Slowness is not sloth. It is the refusal to trade your presence for the illusion of progress.

Hurry does not only move the body faster. It thins the world. 

Colors dull. Faces blur. The bread on your table becomes fuel, no longer bread. 

To slow down is not to do less. It is to be more here — and to discover, with something between relief and grief, that here is where your life has been waiting all along.

The Parable

In a mountain temple in old Kyoto, there was a monk whose only task was to sweep the courtyard. Each morning before dawn, he took up the same broom and walked the same stones. Novices came and went, restless boys who wanted to study sutras, debate philosophy, become someone. They watched the old monk sweep the same courtyard he had swept for forty years, and quietly, they pitied him.

One winter, a young monk asked him — with the polite cruelty of the young — whether he did not find it dull, this endless sweeping of a courtyard that would only be dirty again by evening. The old man did not stop moving. He said only, 

"I am not sweeping the courtyard. I am sweeping the courtyard."

The novice did not understand for many years. 

What he eventually saw was this: 

The first sweeping was labor, done to reach some other, better moment. 

The second was worship. It went nowhere because there was nowhere else to go. 

The courtyard was not a task standing between the monk and his life. The courtyard was his life. 

Each stroke of the broom was a small, complete world.

The novice grew old in that temple. When at last he took up his own broom, at his own dawn, he understood that the master had been teaching him, without a single lecture, the only lesson that mattered. Presence is not a technique to be added to a busy life. It is a devotion that reshapes what a life is.

The Modern Mirror

You do not sweep a courtyard. 

You attend a nine o'clock stand-up while writing a Slack message while glancing at a market ticker. You are told that this is competence, and you are told it by people who wear their exhaustion as a medal. The calendar is a colored wall. The notifications are a tide. On the drive home, you cannot remember a single thing you did, only that there was a great deal of it.

This is the corporate version of the same disease the old monks knew. You are not living your work; you are passing through it, hoping the next promotion, the next quarter, the next role will finally be the one where you can breathe. It will not be. The shape of your relationship to time does not change with the size of your paycheck. A person who cannot eat lunch without their phone at forty thousand a year cannot eat lunch without their phone at four hundred thousand.

The cure is not to quit your job. The cure is smaller, and harder. 

Choose one thing today — one meeting, one conversation, one meal — and enter it as if it were the only thing. Close the other tabs. Put down the second screen. Let the task be the task, and nothing else. You will feel, at first, a strange withdrawal, a low panic that something is being missed. 

That is the anesthetic wearing off. Beneath it, still there, is your life.

in, Stoic Wisdom

A Different Look at the Unconscious

In today’s article, we will explore Carl Jung’s theory of the unconscious as he presented it in the book Man and His Symbols, which we are currently studying because we have returned to its fundamental concepts. There is great value in revisiting these ideas, even if we already know a great deal about Jungian psychology, because they are the foundation of Jungian theory and can also become the foundation of our own inner work. For that reason, a review is always worthwhile.

Let us remember that the theory of the unconscious is the central foundation of psychoanalysis. Its development marked the beginning of a revolution in modern psychology. That is why Carl Jung’s work is essential for understanding it, and that is precisely what we will do in this article.

Let us begin with the following quotation:

Anyone who denies the existence of the unconscious assumes that our present knowledge of the psyche is complete. And this belief is clearly just as false as the assumption that we know all there is to know about the natural universe. Our psyche is part of nature, and its enigma is as limitless. We cannot define either the psyche or nature. We can merely state what we believe them to be and describe, as best we can, how they function. Apart, therefore, from the accumulative evidence supplied by medical research, there are strong logical grounds for rejecting statements like “There is no unconscious.” Those who say such things merely express an age-old “misoneism” — a fear of the new and the unknown.

By the middle of the last century, when Jung wrote these words, there was still widespread ignorance about the unconscious, along with considerable denial of its existence. Today, the unconscious is a much more widely accepted theory, but at the time the work of Jung and Freud was heavily criticized, even within academic circles.

It was not merely the arrival of a revolutionary theory that was difficult to believe. It also challenged humanity’s image of itself as rational, conscious, and fully in control of its actions. Freud’s famous statement that psychoanalysis represented the third great “wound to human narcissism” captures this idea well. For Jung, however, it was simply misoneism, an aversion to, rejection of, or deep fear of novelty and change.

Nevertheless, it is worth emphasizing that although the theory of the unconscious is now widely accepted, we still live as though the unconscious did not exist. This is partly because our way of life and our culture seem designed to make room only for the dominance of consciousness, without truly recognizing how little conscious control we actually have over ourselves. Our lifestyle is far from being adapted to that which remains in the darkness of the psyche and quietly influences us.

On the other hand, the comparison between our ignorance of the mind and the vastness of the universe is remarkably accurate. Like the cosmos, the mind remains profoundly mysterious and largely unknown, even after centuries of scientific progress and discovery. There are still unanswered questions such as why anything exists instead of nothing, what came before the Big Bang, whether the universe is infinite, whether there are other universes, and whether there are other forms of intelligent life.

Likewise, the psyche remains largely unexplored despite the advances of psychology and neuroscience. We are still far from fully understanding what the mind is, how consciousness arises, and why a collection of biological processes can give rise to a subjective experience of the world. Yet what is even more complex and paradoxical is that the mind is the very instrument we use to understand the mind itself, while that same instrument remains, to a great extent, unknown to itself.

The outer universe can be studied through telescopes, particles, and physical measurements, but the inner universe presents a unique difficulty because the observer and the observed are part of the very same phenomenon. In other words, the mind is trying to understand itself, much like attempting to see our own eyes without the aid of a mirror.

Yet these very limitations of consciousness, this inability to grasp the full extent of our own nature, are themselves one of the strongest arguments for the existence of the unconscious. The fact that we cannot fully comprehend our own psyche reveals that there are dimensions of ourselves that remain beyond our immediate awareness.

What Is Our Unconscious, Really?

In alchemy, the prima materia and the stage of nigredo symbolically referred to the exploration of an unknown dimension within the human psyche.

Carl Jung goes on to say something that helps us better grasp what the unconscious is:

If we listen to a continuous note that is just at the threshold of hearing, the sound seems to stop at regular intervals and then begin again. These fluctuations are due to periodic decreases and increases in our attention, not to any change in the note itself. But when something slips out of our consciousness it does not cease to exist, any more than a car that disappears around a corner dissolves into thin air. It is simply out of sight. And just as we may see the car again later, so we come across thoughts that we had temporarily lost.

I like this passage from Jung because it makes it possible to understand the unconscious from a much simpler perspective, one that moves away from the idea that the unconscious is merely “something hidden.”

The absence of something from our conscious awareness certainly does not mean that it has ceased to exist. It simply means that consciousness has a limited capacity to keep certain contents in the foreground of attention. We cannot pay absolute attention to everything at the same time, so some stimuli naturally move into the background.

According to Jung, something similar happens with certain psychic contents. A thought, an emotion, a memory, or an inner image can disappear from consciousness without being destroyed, remaining beyond the threshold of our attention. All of this demonstrates that the psyche contains far more than what happens to be present in consciousness at any given moment.

Thus, the unconscious refers to everything that escapes our attention and focus, disappearing from the field of consciousness while continuing to exist. Yet the unconscious can also be verified in the opposite direction, through the emergence of new contents. 

That is why Carl Jung says:

Just as conscious contents can vanish into the unconscious, new contents, which have never yet been conscious, can also arise from it. We may have, for instance, a feeling that something is about to enter consciousness, that “something is in the air,” or that we “smell a rat.” The discovery that the unconscious is not merely the storehouse of the past, but is also full of germs of future psychic situations and ideas, led me to my new approach to psychology. There was much controversy over this point. But it is a fact that, besides memories from the remote conscious past, completely new thoughts and creative ideas can also arise spontaneously from the unconscious. Such thoughts and ideas have never before been conscious. They grow from the dark depths of the mind like a lotus, and form a most important part of the subliminal psyche.

Jung argues that the unconscious is not merely a place where forgotten contents or experiences that slip beyond our awareness are stored. It is also a creative source of new psychic contents. In other words, the unconscious is not merely an archive of the past, but an active force that constantly participates in shaping our mental life.

This would explain why our psyche, like our body, undergoes a series of transformations throughout life. It is not only our personal experience that shapes the mind, but also an inner natural process with its own functions and inherent creative capacity.

This idea also helps us better understand creativity. 

You have probably read that many creative people describe their best ideas as arriving unexpectedly. 

A melody suddenly appears in a musician’s mind as inspiration. 

A solution emerges after a problem has been set aside. 

A writer discovers an image or a sentence that seems to have arisen spontaneously. 

Even many of history’s greatest scientific discoveries came to their discoverers in the form of sudden revelations.

For Jung, not only do all these things arise from the deeper layers of the unconscious, but we also carry within us something like a library containing the accumulated wisdom of humanity, known as the collective unconscious. 

Carl Jung says the following, which is important for understanding how the Swiss analyst came to formulate the idea of the collective unconscious:

…we find that many dreams present images and associations that are analogous to primitive ideas, myths, and rites. These dream images were called by Freud “archaic remnants” a phrase that suggests they are surviving psychic elements in the human mind from ages long ago

The psychoanalyst is referring to what he later called the collective unconscious. 

The symbols that appear in dreams, along with associations analogous to primitive ideas, myths, and rituals, would be expressions of a layer of the mind that lies far beyond our conscious awareness.

Throughout his long career as an analyst and psychiatrist, Carl Jung observed that some of his patients’ dreams, fantasies, and even visions pointed back to ancient symbols. Moreover, through his extensive study of mythology, religion, and alchemy, he found that these symbols appeared over and over again, even among cultures and religions that had no connection with one another. This led him to the realization that such symbols did not come solely from the outside world, but also emerged from the deepest layers of the human mind.

Freud called these images “archaic remnants,” intending to suggest that they were psychological residues inherited from humanity’s distant past, a kind of survival of primitive ways of thinking. 

Although Jung found this idea interesting, he disliked the term because calling them “remnants” suggested that they were merely leftovers from the past, like psychological fossils stored in the mind without serving any purpose, when in fact they played an active and vital role, as we will see in a future article on archetypes.

For this reason, Jung later says the following, with which we conclude this article:

There are no “dead” or meaningless remnants. They still function, and they are particularly valuable (as Dr. Henderson shows in the next chapter of this book) precisely because of their “historical” nature. They form a bridge between the ways in which we consciously express our thoughts and a more primitive, more colourful and pictorial mode of expression.

This confirms exactly what we have been saying.

These “archaic remnants” are still alive and continue to shape our psyche. 

If they appear again and again in dreams, myths, religions, and great works of art, it is because they continue to serve an essential psychological function and are not merely “leftovers,” as Freud’s terminology might suggest.

Finally, if the meaning and function of symbols were still unclear, Jung explains here that they unite two worlds that normally remain separate. 

On the one hand is rational consciousness, where we think through concepts, definitions, and logical reasoning. 

On the other is what he calls “a more primitive, more colourful and pictorial mode of expression,” which is nothing less than our deepest nature, the patterns of human behavior engraved into our very genes.

Juan Duran

The Busyness of Life

 

Sergey Kichigin

We are too busy in the moving bus that we forget our bus stop

We are too busy in the moving train that we forget our train station

We are too busy to find happiness that we leave it behind our shadows

We are too busy to find freedom that we find the freedom in boxes

We are too busy to fly that we leave our compass

We are too busy on the journey that we forget our destiny

This busyness has left us all in the ocean of complexities

All on a journey of no return

It only takes greater will to find the anchors of hope.

Athan Oparaji 

Leisure

 Laura Martinez

WHAT is this life if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare?—

No time to stand beneath the boughs,

And stare as long as sheep and cows:

No time to see, when woods we pass,

Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass:

No time to see, in broad daylight,

Streams full of stars, like skies at night:

No time to turn at Beauty's glance,

And watch her feet, how they can dance:

No time to wait till her mouth can

Enrich that smile her eyes began?

A poor life this if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare.

W. H. Davies

The ‘Busy’ Trap

 

Freepik

If you live in America in the twenty-first century you’ve probably had to listen to a lot of people tell you how busy they are. It’s become the default response when you ask anyone how they’re doing: “Busy!” “So busy.” “Crazy busy.” It is, pretty obviously, a boast disguised as a complaint. And the stock response is a kind of congratulation: “That’s a good problem to have,” or “Better than the opposite.”

Notice it isn’t generally people pulling back-to-back shifts in the I.C.U. or commuting by bus to three minimum-wage jobs who tell you how busy they are; what those people are is not busy but tired. Exhausted. Dead on their feet. It’s almost always people whose lamented busyness is purely self-imposed: work and obligations they’ve taken on voluntarily, classes and activities they’ve “encouraged” their kids to participate in. 

They’re busy because of their own ambition or drive or anxiety, because they’re addicted to busyness and dread what they might have to face in its absence.

Almost everyone I know is busy. 

They feel anxious and guilty when they aren’t either working or doing something to promote their work. They schedule in time with friends the way students with 4.0 G.P.A.s make sure to sign up for community service because it looks good on their college applications. I recently wrote a friend to ask if he wanted to do something this week, and he answered that he didn’t have a lot of time but if something was going on to let him know and maybe he could ditch work for a few hours. I wanted to clarify that my question had not been a preliminary heads-up to some future invitation; this was the invitation. But his busyness was like some vast churning noise through which he was shouting out at me, and I gave up trying to shout back over it.

Even children are busy now, scheduled down to the half-hour with classes and extracurricular activities. They come home at the end of the day as tired as grown-ups. I was a member of the latchkey generation and had three hours of totally unstructured, largely unsupervised time every afternoon, time I used to do everything from surfing the World Book Encyclopedia to making animated films to getting together with friends in the woods to chuck dirt clods directly into one another’s eyes, all of which provided me with important skills and insights that remain valuable to this day. Those free hours became the model for how I wanted to live the rest of my life.

Not long ago I Skyped with a friend who was driven out of the city by high rent and now has an artist’s residency in a small town in the south of France. She described herself as happy and relaxed for the first time in years. She still gets her work done, but it doesn’t consume her entire day and brain. She says it feels like college—she has a big circle of friends who all go out to the café together every night. She has a boyfriend again. (She once ruefully summarized dating in New York: “Everyone’s too busy and everyone thinks they can do better.”) What she had mistakenly assumed was her personality—driven, cranky, anxious, and sad—turned out to be a deformative effect of her environment. It’s not as if any of us wants to live like this, any more than any one person wants to be part of a traffic jam or stadium trampling or the hierarchy of cruelty in high school—it’s something we collectively force one another to do.

The present hysteria is not a necessary or inevitable condition of life; it’s something we’ve chosen, if only by our acquiescence to it.

Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day. 

I once knew a woman who interned at a magazine where she wasn’t allowed to take lunch hours out, lest she be urgently needed for some reason. This was an entertainment magazine whose raison d’être was obviated when “menu” buttons appeared on remotes, so it’s hard to see this pretense of indispensability as anything other than a form of institutional self-delusion. More and more people in this country no longer make or do anything tangible; if your job wasn’t performed by a cat or a boa constrictor in a Richard Scarry book I’m not sure I believe it’s necessary. I can’t help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn’t matter.

I am not busy. I am the laziest ambitious person I know. 

Like most writers, I feel like a reprobate who does not deserve to live on any day that I do not write, but I also feel that four or five hours is enough to earn my stay on the planet for one more day. On the best ordinary days of my life, I write in the morning, go for a long bike ride and run errands in the afternoon, and in the evening I see friends, read or watch a movie. This, it seems to me, is a sane and pleasant pace for a day. And if you call me up and ask whether I won’t maybe blow off work and check out the new American Wing at the Met or ogle girls in Central Park or just drink chilled pink minty cocktails all day long, I will say, What time?

But just in the last few months, I’ve insidiously started, because of professional obligations, to become busy. For the first time I was able to tell people, with a straight face, that I was “too busy” to do this or that thing they wanted me to do. I could see why people enjoy this complaint; it makes you feel important, sought-after, and put-upon. Except that I hate actually being busy. Every morning my inbox was full of emails asking me to do things I did not want to do or presenting me with problems that I now had to solve. It got more and more intolerable until finally I fled town to the Undisclosed Location from which I’m writing this.

Here I am largely unmolested by obligations. There is no TV. To check email I have to drive to the library. I go a week at a time without seeing anyone I know. I’ve remembered about buttercups, stink bugs, and the stars. I read. And I’m finally getting some real writing done for the first time in months. It’s hard to find anything to say about life without immersing yourself in the world, but it’s also just about impossible to figure out what it might be, or how best to say it, without getting the hell out of it again.

An ideal human life lies somewhere between my own defiant indolence and the rest of the world’s endless frenetic hustle. My role is just to be a bad influence.

Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration—it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done. “Idle dreaming is often of the essence of what we do,” wrote Thomas Pynchon in his essay on sloth. Archimedes’s “Eureka” in the bath, Newton’s apple, Jekyll and Hyde and the benzene ring: History is full of stories of inspirations that come in idle moments and dreams. It almost makes you wonder whether loafers, goldbricks, and no-accounts aren’t responsible for more of the world’s great ideas, inventions, and masterpieces than the hardworking.

“The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That’s why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system.” This may sound like the pronouncement of some bong-smoking anarchist, but it was actually Arthur C. Clarke, who found time between scuba diving and pinball games to write Childhood’s End and think up communications satellites. My old colleague Ted Rall recently wrote a column proposing that we divorce income from work and give each citizen a guaranteed paycheck, which sounds like the kind of lunatic notion that’ll be considered a basic human right in about a century, like abolition, universal suffrage, and eight-hour workdays. The Puritans turned work into a virtue, evidently forgetting that God invented it as a punishment.

Perhaps the world would soon slide to ruin if everyone behaved as I do. 

But I would suggest that an ideal human life lies somewhere between my own defiant indolence and the rest of the world’s endless frenetic hustle. My role is just to be a bad influence, the kid standing outside the classroom window making faces at you at your desk, urging you to just this once make some excuse and get out of there, come outside and play. 

My own resolute idleness has mostly been a luxury rather than a virtue, but I did make a conscious decision, a long time ago, to choose time over money, since I’ve always understood that the best investment of my limited time on earth was to spend it with people I love. 

I suppose it’s possible I’ll lie on my deathbed regretting that I didn’t work harder and say everything I had to say, but I think what I’ll really wish is that I could have one more beer with Chris, another long talk with Megan, one last good hard laugh with Boyd. 

Life is too short to be busy.

Tim Kreider

Go to the Limits of Your Longing

Pranab Basak

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,

then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,

go to the limits of your longing.

Embody me.

Flare up like flame

and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.

Just keep going. No feeling is final.

Don’t let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.

You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

Rainer Maria Rilke

in, Book of Hours: Love Poems to God  

I Know What You Think of Me

Frank Sonnenberg

Recently I received an e-mail that wasn’t meant for me, but was about me. 

I’d been cc’d by accident. 

This is one of the darker hazards of electronic communication, Reason No. 697 Why the Internet Is Bad — the dreadful consequence of hitting “reply all” instead of “reply” or “forward.” 

The context is that I had rented a herd of goats for reasons that aren’t relevant here and had sent out a mass e-mail with photographs of the goats attached to illustrate that a) I had goats, and b) it was good. Most of the responses I received expressed appropriate admiration and envy of my goats, but the message in question was intended not as a response to me but as an aside to some of the recipient’s co-workers, sighing over the kinds of expenditures on which I was frittering away my uncomfortable income. The word “oof” was used.

I’ve often thought that the single most devastating cyberattack a diabolical and anarchic mind could design would not be on the military or financial sector but simply to simultaneously make every e-mail and text ever sent universally public. It would be like suddenly subtracting the strong nuclear force from the universe; the fabric of society would instantly evaporate, every marriage, friendship and business partnership dissolved. 

Civilization, which is held together by a fragile web of tactful phrasing, polite omissions and white lies, would collapse in an apocalypse of bitter recriminations and weeping, breakups and fistfights, divorces and bankruptcies, scandals and resignations, blood feuds, litigation, wholesale slaughter in the streets and lingering ill will.

This particular e-mail was, in itself, no big deal. 

Tone is notoriously easy to misinterpret over e-mail, and my friend’s message could have easily been read as affectionate head shaking rather than a contemptuous eye roll. 

It’s frankly hard to parse the word “oof” in this context. And let’s be honest — I am terrible with money, but I’ve always liked to think of this as an endearing foible. What was surprisingly wounding wasn’t that the e-mail was insulting but simply that it was unsympathetic. 

Hearing other people’s uncensored opinions of you is an unpleasant reminder that you’re just another person in the world, and everyone else does not always view you in the forgiving light that you hope they do, making all allowances, always on your side. There’s something existentially alarming about finding out how little room we occupy, and how little allegiance we command, in other people’s heads.

This experience is not a novelty of the information age; it’s always been available to us by the accident of overhearing a conversation at the wrong moment. I’ve written essays about friends that I felt were generous and empathetic, which they experienced as devastating. I’ve also been written about, in ways I could find no fault with but that were nonetheless excruciating for me to read. It is simply not pleasant to be objectively observed — it’s like seeing a candid photo of yourself online, not smiling or posing, but simply looking the way you apparently always do, oblivious and mush-faced with your mouth open. 

It’s proof that we are visible to others, that we are seen, in all our naked silliness and stupidity.

Needless to say, this makes us embarrassed and angry and damn our betrayers as vicious two-faced hypocrites. Which, in fact, we all are. We all make fun of one another behind one another’s backs, even the people we love. Of course we do — they’re ridiculous. Anyone worth knowing is inevitably also going to be exasperating: making the same obvious mistakes over and over, dating imbeciles, endlessly relapsing into their dumb addictions and self-defeating habits, blind to their own hilarious flaws and blatant contradictions and fiercely devoted to whatever keeps them miserable. (And those few people about whom there is nothing ridiculous are by far the most preposterous of all.)

Just as teasing someone to his face is a way of letting him know that you know him better than he thinks, making fun of him behind his back is a way of bonding with your mutual friends, reassuring one another that you both know and love and are driven crazy by this same person.

Although sometimes, let’s just admit, we’re simply being mean. 

A friend of mine described the time in high school when someone walked up behind her while she was saying something clever at that person’s expense as the worst feeling she had ever had — and not just because of the hurt she’d inflicted on someone else but because of what it forced her to see about herself. That she made fun of people all the time, people who didn’t deserve it, who were beneath her in the social hierarchy, just to ingratiate herself or make herself seem funny or cool.

Another friend once shared with me one of the aphorisms of 12-step recovery programs: 

“What other people think of you is none of your business.” 

Like a lot of wisdom, this sounds at first suspiciously similar to idiotic nonsense; obviously what other people think of you is your business, it’s your main job in life to try to control it, to do tireless P.R. and spin control for yourself. Every woman who ever went out with you must pine for you forever. Those who rejected you must regret it. You must be loved, respected — above all, taken seriously! They who mocked you will rue the day! The problem is that this is insane — the psychology of dictators who regard all dissent as treason, and periodically order purges to ensure unquestioning loyalty. It’s no way to run a country.

THE operative fallacy here is that we believe that unconditional love means not seeing anything negative about someone, when it really means pretty much the opposite: loving someone despite their infuriating flaws and essential absurdity. “Do I want to be loved in spite of?” Donald Barthelme writes in his story “Rebecca” about a woman with green skin. “Do you? Does anyone? But aren’t we all, to some degree?”

We don’t give other people credit for the same interior complexity we take for granted in ourselves, the same capacity for holding contradictory feelings in balance, for complexly alloyed affections, for bottomless generosity of heart and petty, capricious malice. 

We can’t believe that anyone could be unkind to us and still be genuinely fond of us, although we do it all the time.

Years ago a friend of mine had a dream about a strange invention; a staircase you could descend deep underground, in which you heard recordings of all the things anyone had ever said about you, both good and bad. The catch was, you had to pass through all the worst things people had said before you could get to the highest compliments at the very bottom. There is no way I would ever make it more than two and a half steps down such a staircase, but I understand its terrible logic: 

If we want the rewards of being loved we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known.

Tim Kreider

A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning

 

Maria Dorota

As virtuous men pass mildly away,

   And whisper to their souls to go,

Whilst some of their sad friends do say

   The breath goes now, and some say, No:

So let us melt, and make no noise,

   No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;

'Twere profanation of our joys

   To tell the laity our love.

Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears,

   Men reckon what it did, and meant;

But trepidation of the spheres,

   Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers' love

   (Whose soul is sense) cannot admit

Absence, because it doth remove

   Those things which elemented it.

But we by a love so much refined,

   That our selves know not what it is,

Inter-assured of the mind,

   Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,

   Though I must go, endure not yet

A breach, but an expansion,

   Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so

   As stiff twin compasses are two;

Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show

   To move, but doth, if the other do.

And though it in the center sit,

   Yet when the other far doth roam,

It leans and hearkens after it,

   And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,

   Like th' other foot, obliquely run;

Thy firmness makes my circle just,

   And makes me end where I begun.

 John Donne

I Stumbled Across My Boyfriend's ChatGPT and It Ended Our Relationship

Adobe Stock

It wasn't cheating or 

some dramatic betrayal. 

What I found was worse: 

his uncertainty.

I find out my now ex-boyfriend had been questioning his feelings and attraction to me in the most dystopian, laughably modern way possible: ChatGPT.

Laid on his couch, midnight on a Friday, I was working late as he snoozed blissfully on my shoulder when my phone died in the heat of a client exchange.

“Shit,” I mumbled. Pivoting, I grabbed his laptop off the floor to run my final, fatigued, glassy-eyed client response through AI.

As I powered his computer, his ChatGPT - almost poetically - was already front and center on the screen.

As I copied and pasted my email — I peered to the left side of the screen and that’s when I saw it in the sidebar: a past chat titled relationship issues and uncertainty.

I stared at the words.

Now, here is where I am certain many will piously tell me I dug my own grave. I invaded his privacy. That I never should’ve read what I read. That the man is allowed to share private thoughts with a robot he never intended for me to see.

And of course all of that is true.

But I dare you to come across your partner’s ChatGPT, read those words, and not too unravel moral senses.

And let me tell you, I wish that I had never read what I did. If only because there is something uniquely humiliating about coming across someone’s merciless, uncensored stream of consciousness about you - especially when that someone has been kissing you, sleeping beside you, introducing you to family, and making you feel chosen.

All of us who embark on the quest of love move through relationships and intimacy believing, maybe a tad foolishly but also maybe just humanly, that a person who has chosen to be with you is happily viewing you in a forgiving light. That even when you are difficult, messy, neurotic, inconvenient, they are still, fundamentally, on your side.

It’s jarring to then be faced with how provisional our place can really be in someone else’s mind.

At first, I clicked the chat assuming - with mounting annoyance - that the focus would be about my cats.

Three cats had been an issue from the start. When we met, I had one. But by the time we actually went on a first date, I had acquired two more.

(The rescues had happened in Montenegro last summer which had the roughest stray culture I’d ever seen. Two kittens looked at me with sickly eyes and suddenly I became Florence Nightingale with a litter box.)

So I was already mentally prepared to heavy sigh at his usual concerns: too many cats, too small a space, too chaotic a life, too much long-term feline commitment for a man who prizes order and peace and clean surfaces.

“Oh for the love,” I was basically muttering as I clicked. Either accept them or let’s be done with this.

But the first thing I saw was indeed not his cat complaint. It was ChatGPT’s final response.

“From what you’re sharing, you should consider ending the relationship.”

I froze.

Oh.

That’s not where I thought this was going.

I scrolled up to the beginning.

“Should I be in love after 3.5 months?” My boyfriend began the conversation to his robot Freud.

My stomach dropped: the inference of that question so clearly not in my favor that my hands grew clammy instantly.

Doing the math, we were over five months in by the time I read this conversation, so immediately I understood this chat had happened weeks ago. Beside me, a line of drool slid down his cheek as he slept peacefully against the body I would soon learn he had been privately workshopping concerns about with his robot.

I kept reading.

The conversation, I’d understand soon enough, would not go any better for me. Short sentences of nearly entirely unfavorable comments: he laid out his doubts in clipped, almost clinical fragments: my lifestyle, my sensitivity, my past, my van, my online writing, my eating disorder history, my cats. And then I saw a sentence that would lodge itself in my brain with the force of shrapnel:

“Well the cats definitely, and then there’s the whole attraction thing.”

The whole attraction thing.

My ego evaporated on the spot.

Look it’s not that I think I’m a dime - I’m a realistic lady - but this man’s entire love language was rooted in physical affection. It was quite literally the only type of love I felt certain from him. It was the category in which I had felt the safest. It was the one thing I had not questioned (because of course as a woman I had already felt some of his other uncertainty intuitively, only I just thought it was about far less crucial aspects… like cats).

I reread it over and over because I genuinely could not make my brain process.

And yet there I was, inches from him, reading that in the backdoor of his own mind, he had been questioning what I assumed was the most basic part of wanting to be with someone - their looks.

A few lines later came the body of it. I was too petite. Too frail-looking getting out of the shower he noticed once. In the beginning my hair looked damaged (This one made me extra salty. Like excuse me sir, I had been on a European beach all summer OKAY. I needed a keratin treatment CHRIST give a girl a break.) My eating disorder history made him worry what would happen if I relapsed and he lost all attraction.

I was, in short, being methodically assessed, only there was no ‘pro’ list.

That was the part that floored me.

Not that he had concerns about my body or my past or personality, though that felt awful enough. But that, in the privacy of his own thoughts, I was not being held in the warm and forgiving light I had imagined. I was not someone he adored. I was a set of liabilities. A ruminating amount of concerns. An accumulation of negative variables to be sorted and weighed and dissected through… and apparently alarmingly easy to summarize (or so it felt).

There is something existentially jarring about seeing yourself rendered that way through someone else’s eyes. You become humiliatingly aware that you are simply another person in the world: observable, discussable, reducible. Not the heroine of a RomCom, not the sum total of your intentions and tenderness, but a body and a history someone else may find embarrassing, inconvenient, or hard to love.

Then I read the line I think I will probably remember to my grave:

“I’m just not proud of her.”

He repeated it with three dots.

“… I’m just not proud of her.

“Then you should consider ending it,” Chat guided.

No. Shit.

As I finished that Chat, adrenaline running, I wondered: “how many of these conversations are there?”

To my horror, I would find handfuls.

Like those who relish in trauma porn, I could not peel myself away from the unfavorable things documented.

When I was done, I sat there, stunned into a kind of silence I didn’t know what to do with: too shocked for coherent thinking. Too confused to feel anger. Too shellshocked to evoke a reaction.

This man, I thought, looking over at him asleep beside me. This man whose country I had just visited. Whose family I had met. Whom I had left that trip feeling almost sure loved me.

This man does not love me.

It seems this man does not even really like me.

I slid out from under him carefully, gathered my shoes and charger and the little belongings I’d left around his house over the months, and packed them into my purse in silence. It was eerie how calm I was. But I think there is a kind of calm the body enters when it has passed the point of immediate feeling and gone straight into evacuation mode.

I left without a word.

I drove home at 1 a.m. in total silence, and by the time I got through my front door the calls had already started.

Where are you?

What is going on?

Are you okay?

I couldn’t answer. Every inch of me lit with humiliation. Every prideful cell in my body writhed in anger and shame. I would not show how hurt I was to this man. I did not want to offer him the intimacy of watching me react to what he had written.

I turned off my phone.

Half an hour later, his headlights lit up my bedroom window.

By then, the rage I’d initially stifled was now beginning to coarse through my body.

The fact this was on ChatGPT, in its own way, made the whole thing feel even more grotesque and surreal. It was like accidentally reading someone’s diary, except the diary was a fucking robot - predisposed to agree with him, ready to take his cruel thoughts and shape them into something that sounded reasonable.

I flinched, wondering how often (and intensely) he must’ve been mentally suffering with his concerns about me that he felt he needed to use AI to decipher them.

I was all around horrified. And when he rang the doorbell incessantly, I opened the front door and hissed in a Gollum-esque voice: “Get the fuck out of here.”

He looked terrified. Truly bewildered.

“What is going on,” he pleaded in my doorway. His voice shaky. He paced back and forth. “What did I do?” He asked over and over.

And when I said nothing, but instead turned my head as tears began to burn, he ran his hands through his hair and fell to his knees. Grasping onto mine tightly.

In that moment I had the strangest flashback. A déjà vu.

Years earlier, a different boyfriend had left me in our Boulder house — full of our cat and four dogs we were watching — while our neighborhood was under a fire evacuation warning, because he still wanted to go to some forest rave with friends. Emergency sirens down the street, smoke on the hill, and this absolute buffoon gives me a hug goodbye and as my jaw hung open - he peels out of the driveway to go do party drugs in the woods with no WiFi.

I had left that boyfriend in a similar manner as this present situation. Eerily calm and resigned. Once the fire warning ended, I waited til morning when I knew our friends would soon be back to pick up their dogs, and I grabbed our cat, packed everything I owned into my Honda Accord, left a note that I was done, and I walked out. I disappeared for days to a hotel nearby, responding only to a roommate to let her know I was fine but did not want to speak to him.

When I finally chose to text back, some thousands of pleading texts later, he arrived to the hotel unshowered, unkempt, a sobbing mess, and he too crumpled to the floor, clutching at my knees and begging for forgiveness through muffled pleas for our cat, who remained judgmentally staring from the hotel window.

So standing there on my porch now, watching yet another man unravel in the wreckage of his own emotional blockage, I felt not just hurt but haunted by recognition.

I had seen this movie before. I have already lived this plot.

How many times, I wondered, does a woman have to stand in the aftermath of a man’s lack of emotional wherewithal and then be asked to comfort him because the consequences become real?

I peered down at him.

This man.

A strong man, a brilliant one too. Respected by the community, admired by many.

How scared and childlike he appeared in this situation. How unsettling it was to see him disoriented.

A part of me wanted to hug him, crouched pitifully, looking so unsure and shaken.

The maternal instinct in me activated: torn between hurt but also a protective nature to help those close to me when they suffer.

But the words I’d read repeated themselves like banner ads.

I’m just not proud of her.

Finally I said it.

“I read everything,” I hissed. “I read your whole fucking ChatGPT.”

His face changed instantly. He looked stricken. Horrified. Instantly ashamed.

His shoulders slumped. “Oh God, he muttered “No. No. Oh no.”

And what followed was what you’d assume follows these types of chaotic situations: tears, apologies, explanations, clarifications, hours and hours of talk. He reiterated he did care about me. That it was more nuanced than it looked, which I’m sure is all true. That he had been confused, scared, and trying to sort it out. That he was attracted to me. That he did not want to lose me. That he was sorry.

And, against my feminine intuition, we tried to continue dating.

This is the part I probably judge myself over as much as the reading.

Because in my heart I knew that night that between me violating his privacy coupled with the depth of the criticisms he wrote, the relationship was likely unsalvageable.

But there is something quite disorienting about being wounded by someone and then immediately witnessing their anguish over hurting you. It blurred the edges of my reality. It turned pain into a shared emotional event, laying in my bed the entire weekend dissecting what had happened. It tempted me into mercy before I’d had the chance to fully recognize my own feelings and the aftermath of what this would mean.

To be fair to him, he really did try after that. For the next few months he was nothing but an attentive boyfriend. More expressive. More deliberate. Kinder. More reassuring.

But the problem was no longer what he wrote.

The problem was that I knew what he once thought - unfiltered.

I knew that beneath the affection and the tenderness and the effort, there had recently been a private record in which I had been repeatedly tallied and found uncertain. I knew that somewhere inside his care for me there had been deliberation. Qualification. Massive hesitation.

And once I knew that, I could not not-know it.

After that, every reassurance had an echo under it. Every compliment felt slightly unstable. Every act of love arrived with a shadow question attached: do you mean this, or are you still trying to convince yourself?

I could stomach his doubts.

What I could not do was build a foundation with someone on top of them.

That was I suppose the biggest revelation of the whole ordeal: not that he privately had unflattering thoughts about me — I’m sure other exes have said worse, and I’m fully aware I, too, have had unkind thoughts about people I cared for and ‘icks’ unjustified. Intimacy does not erase judgment. Loving someone does not mean being blinded by their flaws.

But I do think there is a difference between loving someone despite their absurdities and trying to decide whether they are, on balance, tolerable enough to actually choose.

It is one thing to suspect that the people who love you also find you difficult, absurd, exasperating, even disappointing at times. It is another thing entirely to read the actual transcript. Some knowledge alters the chemistry of a relationship beyond repair. It removes the protective blur that makes intimacy obtainable.

And I ultimately could not bear the possibility that he might have stayed with me, anyway. That he might have kept trying, kept sliding further into a shared life, kept reasoning his way through it, maybe even married me and had a whole few decades together — all the while some part of him remained fundamentally unsure and he just never quite chose otherwise.

That, to me, felt intolerably lonelier than being alone again in my 30s.

So a few months later, in my car after I had arrived 20 minutes late to our date (I had admittedly inadvertently started ‘punishing’ him with behavior like this like a petulant child, yes I’m now in therapy), I said what I knew would be true from the moment I saw that ChatGPT glowing at me from his laptop screen: I would never be able to stop doubting his love.

Through tears and long sighs, I think we both understood.

Ultimately, I want to share that I forgive him. As I hope he does me for violating his inner world. This is certainly not intended to be a hit piece on an ex as I know by even sharing this story I too will (and perhaps should) receive flack for betraying someone’s private thoughts, robot or not.

I don’t come away from this believing he was a villain, or even that he wronged me in some exceptional way. If anything, what made it so painful was how ordinary it probably was. We all have private thoughts we would never want subpoenaed. We all contain some humiliating mixture of tenderness, impatience, loyalty, vanity, fear, and occasional cruelty. The problem was not that he had doubts, or which I suspect most relationships do. 

The problem was that unfortunately I saw them in their raw form, stripped of tact and timing and love’s softening language.

I was never meant to read what I read. And he was allowed to be human and conflicted and imperfectly loyal in private.

I am not an easy person to be with. I suppose no one is but I am not blind to my defects.

The logical side of me - devoid of ego - understood some of why he felt the way he did.

I do battle with an eating disorder that at times has made me look unhealthy (naturally, I don’t see that but alas). And at times has made me unreliable and flaky.

I do have a big, full, nomadic, van-living past with a lot of uprooted stories.

I get why a friend once called me “high risk high reward.”

So maybe this event is simply, as Tim Kreider wrote, “the price of being known”: 

that if you want the rewards of intimacy, sooner or later, you risk colliding with the version of yourself that exists outside your own narration and in somebody else’s unvarnished language … and finding the result less poetic than you hoped.

Truthfully, we were probably just not right for each other and it simply bled out into this situation. His ordered life was never going to be a natural home for my hurricane tendencies, my stray cats, my intensity, my desire for novelty. And I was never going to thrive inside the cool logic of a man who prefers to checklist his way into certainty.

At this point in my life, I am not asking for a fantasy romance. I am not asking for some teenage version of love untouched by disappointment. I have had way too much heartbreak for that innocence.

But I do know I do not want to be chosen by a man who has to continuously talk himself into me.

I do not want to spend my life beside someone who may stay, may commit, may even be loyal … and yet remain, in some private chamber of himself, unconvinced.

In the end, I had wandered by accident into the back office of his love for me and found the paperwork. The doubts, the calculations, the small private notations beside my name. Maybe this is ordinary. Maybe all love looks less romantic under fluorescent light.

But after that, I could not return to the front of the house and pretend I had not seen the ledger.

Lindsey Hall

“If we want the rewards of being loved we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known,” 

Tim Kreider