Being human without pre-meditation
Uncategorizable, unpredictable, unmanipulable
I sat down to write an essay for Substack today and started looking through a folder of 39 half-written essays, Notes files with of hundreds of scattered thoughts, and voice memos with awake-at-3am reminders. I wondered, which one of these seeds wants to be sprouted today?
None of them, my inner voice said. Just write what is real and present for you right now.
I’ve been going through massive identity shift this year. I went to China on an ancestral spiritual pilgrimage in May, and was completely off of social media for two months. I just came back to Instagram recently and have been on a tear of posting spontaneous videos every day, sometimes twice a day. I have been talking about everything and anything that crosses my mind.
Not on any specific topics in a particular niche. Not to sell anything. Not to get likes or followers. Just to express myself.
My voice finally feels free. Finally.
I don’t feel like I need to identify myself as a “social media person” or not a social media person. I am both, and neither. I can post when I feel like it, and turn it off when I feel tired. This feels way more honest. So, if I am a bit manic about it now, it because there’s genuinely energy there. And when it starts to feel like a job, I will stop.
My engagement with AI, since I first started using it in April, feels similar. I am fully into it for a month, and then when my one-month subscription is done, I go back to living life at a human pace again, completely disengaged from it.
The crux of it is constantly checking in. I want to check to see if I am being a player in the game, or if I am getting played. The easiest way to tell is, am I focused on winning or losing something? Or am I focused on the tradeoffs I am making?
If the frame is winning or losing – likes, followers, subscribers, sales, or anything else – then that’s a red flag for me. If winning versus losing is the orientation then I am probably getting played, and it’s time to step back. If the frame is around the tradeoffs: what am I putting into this, what I am getting out, how does it make me feel, and how is my energy; then it’s more likely that I am in a conscious relationship. There is awareness about the exchange that is happening.
I ask myself: am I focused on an outcome, or am I focused on my experience? Focus on outcomes makes us manipulable. Focus on experience keeps us sovereign.
The theme for me is that I want my life to be simple. And I don’t want to create dependency. I see the addiction loops built-in to all of these technology platforms and portals, and the extremely powerful extraction machine that is behind them.
I don’t want to become merged with AI. I don’t want to be glued to my device. While I was in China for five weeks, I was moving around physical reality while in a completely different dimension with technology – a different app ecosystem, largely firewalled from the rest of the world. This gave me a taste of the sweetness of being “off the grid” for a while.
At the same time, I don’t want to be fearful of these things. For a long time, I was afraid of engaging with AI at all, because I have concerns about the broader environmental and social impacts. I still have those concerns by the way. My use doesn’t erase the ethical issues that are pervasive with it. And on a personal level, I was worried about getting completely sucked in.
But I have learned since is that AI is quite useful for certain things. And, it keeps me on my toes when it comes to critical thinking. It’s easy to be misled by it, if we are not entirely aware when we engage with it. It requires a lot of consciousness and discipline to not be overtaken by it. I now see it as a helper for some of the annoying, data-driven tasks that I have to deal with in 3D reality, as well as a partner in the evolution of my consciousness.
The binary thinking of needing to either (1) be completely avoidant of technology, or (2) completely merged with them, is well… extremely limiting. Not to mention, it makes us less human.
Think about how polarizing the world has become. We have flattened reality so much, whether it’s out of fear or sheer laziness, I am not sure. Maybe it’s a trauma response we have developed over the last years, this auto-sorting reality into opposing camps. But this behavior is dehumanizing — to both those being judged, as well as the one doing the judging.
When we default into an automatic yes or automatic no about something, it doesn’t allow for the complexity and multi-dimensionality of human existence. We smooth over nuance, and we lose context. That makes humans more like machines: executing on prediction, obeying an algorithm.
Part of being human is embracing the absolute chaos that emerges from us. Not everything can be reduced to probabilistic calculations. That messiness is where the beauty of life is. What makes us human is the ability to just be totally wildly random sometimes.
What is uncategorizable feels true. And what is unpredictable feels alive.
I am not planning, not producing. I add captions, that’s it. I am waking up every day, turning on the camera and talking about whatever the f@ck I want, not limiting myself to the topic of Regenerative Purpose, letting myself venture outside of any realm of expertise, posting it immediately even when it’s rambling and imperfect. Not caring who sees it, or who likes it.
I think that this is why posting videos on Instagram every day the last 10 days, I have never felt so alive. And I know that for some people – and perhaps for me in some moments – social media can also be a trap. That’s why I cannot say that I am a “social media person” because whatever I am doing now, it’s not permanent. For now it feels good, so for now, I continue.
True story: I just wrote this essay from start to finish in a one-hour sitting. I had no idea what it was going to be about when I started writing. And I am going to post it now without further editing, even though I know it rambles somewhat non-linearly. This is an amazing way to create. No plan, no mistakes. Just being human in public. Without pre-meditation.