I’ve been thinking about my brain.
A few evenings ago, as I steeped my nightly licorice tea, my husband said, “I think it’s interesting that you refer to now as The Dark Ages.”
We’d been talking about Chat GPT.
This is not a newsletter about Chat GPT.
Lately, I’ve been having visions of my brain as blue cheese, corroding over with splotches of mold. There are things it does not do any longer: addition; subtraction; estimate times of arrivals; access lists of actors to figure out if the guy I’m thinking of - who I know only as a poor-man’s-Andrew-Garfield - is the guy I’m thinking of, that one in that one really weird movie about perfume who looks like Andrew Garfield.
(It is. My apologies to Ben Whishaw).
It doesn’t do these things because it doesn’t have to do these things anymore. Because even in composing this piece, I have an open Safari tab reminding me that Ben Whishaw is in fact Whishaw, not Winshaw, as an alternate-universe-essayist would have you believe.
But what have I gained in confirming that Ben Whishaw did star in both Perfume: The Story of A Murderer and Paddington (and Paddington 2, and at type of composition, perhaps Paddington in Peru)? Because in the split second it took to Google Ben Whishaw, the entirety of the history of human evolution, every knotted nerve and ancestral epigenetical neuron, began to slacken in my skull.
Okay. The above is a little extreme.
And really, objectively, my brain is fine. If we’re characterizing it as per a dessert menu, my brain is less a cheeseboard and more a tart raspberry sorbetto, softened by an ice cream scoop just dipped in warm water. Maybe what I’m getting at is the potentiality my brain has to melt. Use it or lose it buddy, and although it sits on my dish now all plump and pink and firm, if I let my phone auto-fill a verification code from my texts one more time, I’ll look down and find my brain a pink puddle of syrupy goo.
Is this newsletter about my anxiety?
No, because if you know me in real life, you’re already as bored of my anxiety as I am. Moving. Swiftly. On.
I am (I’m only half-sorry to say) Goop-adjacent, so I listen to wellness podcasts on my walk to work (it’s likely this also has something to do with my anxiety; what does a Goop-adjacent-girl order for dessert?). And during one such morning tune-in, psychologist Kat Toups, M.D., noted the moment she noticed her own cognitive decline: she couldn’t remember phone numbers.
Fuck.
I know four phone numbers. My mother’s (a given), my grandmother’s (Barnes & Noble membership), my childhood home landline (a long-since-disconnected nursery rhyme) and my own. No. I don’t even know my husband’s phone number.
This is not a newsletter about cognitive degeneration.
Being around water lowers cortisol levels in the body. Do you know why? One theory is that water is reminiscent of safety. Edible plants grow nearby. Dehydration is no longer a threat. Somewhere deep in our bodies, this stored bone-knowledge tells us water means nourishment. The same goes for the sound of a crackling fire. It’s an evolutionary memory of comfort, warmth, community. We have an entire Wikipedia in our bodies, instructions on how to engage with our surroundings.
I started having these thoughts a few months ago while watching Stranger Things. There was something so satisfying in the way Nancy Byers hung up an 80s telephone: the plastic heft of it, the click of receiver back into cradle, the thick punch of number buttons.
By the time I was born in the early 90s, the world was well on its way out of physicality. The closest I’ve come to a Nancy Byers phone was the Blackberry Pearl, a painful plastic cell phone track bead that calloused the sides of my thumbs. I miss even that sensation now that I experience the world through a flat pane of glass.
All this to exclaim: how little I am present in the world! And I’m not here to go all Puritanical on your ass, because I love my phone. I love my phone for all the stupid reasons we love our phones. The proof is in my Amazon Wish List; those with lucite fridge organizers shouldn’t throw stones. I’ll never not have a smartphone. I don’t want to not have one.
It’s more that I miss physicality: weaving fresh shoelaces through my palms as I try on a new pair of sneakers (I order them online now). Slamming a clamshell closed after a heated argument (swiping out of WhatsApp just isn’t the same). Fingering a dangerously thin movie ticket in my pocket, seconds sliced close to papercut (QR codes. Apple Wallet). I miss my fingers smelling like pennies after handling change, the taste of stamp glue. There are so many things our bodies exist to experience. Why do I feel like I’m wrapped in a cotton gauze, head to toe, tongue, eyes and fingertips?
It’s not distraction; it’s dissociation.
This experiential numbness goes for both mind and body. I am Generation MySpace, Neopets, Dance Dance Revolution. Don’t ask me to calculate a single goddamn thing without a calculator. I can’t do it. I’m not too big to admit that.
But perhaps there is something beautiful - or, potentially beautiful - the new frontier of tech can offers us: time.
This is where my husband is right and I beseech him: savor it, darling.
If you are as on TikTok as I am, you’re well aware that Pluto has entered Aquarius, foreboding systemic shifts in everything from politics to technology. Coincidentally (or. not.) Chat GPT has just unveiled its latest iteration, GPT-4, the AI program hailed as “mankind’s greatest invention to date”.
What if AI is not the way out, but the way through? Likened to the printing press, a wide scale dissemination of knowledge opens the possibility of a renewed life of the mind (I truly don’t blame you if you close out of this newsletter now.), a place where the mundane, market tasks forced upon us by capitalism are automated, leaving time, space and power to think Big Thoughts. To make Big Art. To feel Big Feelings. And share them. To experience fully, radically, what it means to be human in a world where what previously made us human - production, rather than creation - has been offloaded. Perhaps AI offers us a new era of Enlightenment, backlit by the holy blue glow of LED.
Of course, such a version of human excellence requires some kind of centralized governance for AI, and a committed, strategic economic outline that prioritizes human wellbeing over market value.
(This vision of utopia has been shamelessly brought to you by Universal Basic Income)
I am not a scientist, software developer, policy coordinator or economist. I am merely a woman with a newsletter, wondering what to have for dessert.