Being surrounded by AI-generated crap kills my soul. It is particularly bad when you are confronted by it in real life. When I'm on the internet, I can decide to stay away from platforms and "writers" who regurgitate slop, and I can even disable images on my browser so that I can focus on reading instead of looking at images, but I've already been in a few situations in real life where I saw AI-generated images right in front of me. One of them was a truck parked in front of where I live, which kind of surprised me because I didn't expect that to happen so quickly, but I guess it makes sense that most companies would go for the lowest cost solution to their utilitarian problems.
Another was at work, which can be argued is not "real life" at all because there is hardly anything more artificial and anti-life than the office, but alas my manager made a presentation of some of the projects of our team, and they used an AI-generated comic-like picture of me and some other person. That felt quite weird to say the least, to sit in the presentation and see a simulacrum of my own face beamed at me.
This post isn't specifically about AI though, simply because I find the subject tiring because of how overdone it is. Broadly speaking, I find the use of AI dispiriting because it signals again and again how little most people care about anything. They hardly care about themselves, whether their own health, their sleep schedule, the sources of information they read from, their ability to focus, or the people they spend time with. This is even more true in groups, because people who can hardly look after themselves are unlikely to do much when it comes to looking after other people, which is why so many nowadays are incredibly flaky when it comes to the things that don't directly affect their income. I understand for instance that not everyone is keen on communicating over text messages, which is why I don't take it personally when I get ghosted, but I've had one too many instances of people simply not showing up to commitments they've promised to not think that something is wrong.
It isn't too surprising that care has been slowly but surely eroding over the past decades, because care comes from connection, namely to a community, a real culture, and to the Divine, all of which have been dismantled to make room for the growth of the technological system. The system doesn't want people to live in tight-knit communities, because that means that they will tend to prefer simpler ways of living, the kind that brings them closer to the people they love, rather than needing to work in the machine-world to get the things they need. It doesn't need real culture, and prefers people to be obsessed (and addicted) to the swarm of new things produced in the "cultural" machine, even if it means that people are fueled by outrage, despair and cynicism because of all of the atrocities that the spectacle of our world beams at them. And it certainly doesn't need the Divine, what is beyond the self, because the system is entirely bound by the self, which is why everything is a matter of utilitarian goals and ideas, why death is constantly pushed away from our awareness, and why there is nothing sacred in our society.
The erosion of care sounds like an abstract concept, but it's not too difficult to see some of its implications in our lives. Let's take food for instance. Anyone who has had a delicious meal cooked by a loved one knows that such an experience is completely different than eating a ready-made meal bought at a convenience store, all by yourself. We are not purely utilitarian machines which can work independently of the context we find ourselves in, we are deeply affected by where we live, who we spend time with, and what we do on a regularly basis, which is why if we are surrounded by a community of people that we feel safe with, we will naturally want to reciprocate with our own love, because connection is central to our lives.
This is why we want our work to contribute to something we find meaningful, which is why the useless toil enforced by modernity feels like such a cruel fate. Modern people can point out that our external conditions have never been better, but we have needs not just for our body, but also for our soul. To live only for yourself is hell, which is why we have been blessed by the gift of consciousness, which allows us to tap into the Truth from our own interiority. When I act with great insensitivity, my conscience speaks to me, usually through pain, which allows me to feel what I have ignored, which brings me closer to other people. Or when someone around me is in pain, I can soften my usual sense of self, the one that is only concerned with its own needs and problems, and feel what they are feeling. This is the source of real empathy and care, feeling the other from within, because we are all connected to the same Reality.
The modern world has no need for such an ability, to reach underneath the veil of my self to tap into the qualities of the present moment. It has no need for consciousness, sensitivity, courage, freedom, unique character, great joy, or care. The system, being itself a sort of machine, requires a certain modularity to operate, working with replaceable parts that all work predictably with one another. This applies to its physical machines of course, but also to individuals themselves, who must fit into the social machines known as institutions, and it also applies to how the system as a whole is organized: atomized, predictable, utilitarian.
This machine then has no need for the unifying, soft-selved and loving qualities that consciousness brings into our lives. This is why everyone now lives on their screen, which is the epitome of atomization. Many of the people sympathetic to the modern world will say that we have never been more "connected" with one another than in our times, but this is completely false when it comes to the meaningful forms of connection we want out of life. We can communicate with one another more easily than ever, but first of all only through the interface of a screen, and second of all, communication and connection are entirely different things.
We can see this very clearly in companies. Managers make a great deal of effort to be clear in their communication, yet we feel next to no connection to them as human beings. This is the type of world engendered by an obsession with abstracting relationships from their context: an efficient form of communication, the transfer of information from point A to point B, without any of the meaningfulness of real relationships, which requires a shared context that we can both feel, because only it can unify us.
We all know deep down that context changes everything. A wooden beam taken from a gallows is not the same as the wooden beam that holds your roof. The water that comes from the toilet bowl is not the same as the one that comes from the sink, even if we can guarantee that the former is drinkable. The table that we make ourselves feels different than the table we assemble from Ikea. And the meal cooked by our partner is not the same as the one bought from a store.
Within our atomizing world however, we get tricked into thinking that we can analyze situations independently of their context. This is by and large the fantasy of Science: to be able to extract a few variables about our world that could explain the rest, which can work in certain narrow contexts, but by and large fails to deliver on its promises. Reality is far too interconnected for such a project to work.
Even the idea of an "object" itself, reinforced by how modern languages put nouns in a place of primal importance, an object separate from others and standing on its own, in an isolated snapshot of time, is already a very strange way of looking at Reality. We could equally say that objects do not exist, only processes which extend through time, and such a view would confirm our intuition that we do not feel the same about "objects" regardless of their context.
We don't just want a meal, a thing sitting in isolation and which we push through our body-machine to maintain it, we want to be nourished, we want to feel connected, we want to rest from the work that we are doing, we want to acknowledge all of the good things that we have in our lives, which is why historically, eating was a sacred activity, with its rituals and taboos.
Rituals are strange to the context-decoupling and rational mind because they provide no tangible benefit. Why spend all this time to "bless" one's food if it doesn't change the nutritional composition of the food itself? Why gather so many people and spend so much money just to celebrate the fact that two people are getting together? In general, rituals aren't about changing the material, externally verifiable world 1, but we could say they are about honoring relationships: the ones we have with one another of course, or the ones with the Gods or spirits of Nature depending on the culture you are in, or even the relationship with time itself.
Modern man, being largely against rituals, 2 has made an enemy out of time. This is why people dread getting older, because there is no greater community for which one could gracefully die for, why time passes so quickly for unconscious people, because time sort of dissolves into a homogenized paste when we do not drink from its river, and why people are so chronically tired, because they are out of sync with the natural cycles of nature and their own body.
I have spent a lot of time discussing atomization, more so than the specific issue of how care has been eroded over time, because the former is by far the main factor that leads to the latter. There are more factors of course, but all the ones that I can think of are downstream of the atomization of the modern world.
For one, care is hardly rewarded in our time, if not outright punished. In school, you are rewarded for obedience, and much is the same within companies, which do require some type of output from you, but usually it is very mediocre, very predictable and thus stupid, which is why so-called 'AIs' can indeed be said to be able to replace many office workers, not because the machines are intelligent, but because the workers have been made stupid in order to fit into the system. If you are the type of person who goes above and beyond what you are assigned to do, you are "rewarded" by ... more work. You cannot be twice as productive and need to work twice as less as the average person, you are forced to spend the same amount of time at the office, which means that people naturally do a whole lot of pretending so that they do not get swarmed with more demands. Remaining mediocre is what is incentivized, so this is what people do.
Secondly, it is difficult to justify committing to anything specific when the landscape of our world seems to change so much from decade to decade. Craftsmanship was the norm in pre-industrial times, and could be justified because one could reasonably do the same thing for their entire life, or even across generations, since family businesses and professions were common. We can deplore the loss of craftsmanship, but we can't exactly blame individuals for not wanting to commit their entire life to a path with an uncertain payoff, in a world dominated by mass-production.
Thirdly, the natural care we have for others is co-opted by the insane agenda of caring for the entire planet, an ideology which makes people feel responsible for aspects of our world which are far beyond their sphere of influence. This means that people tend to be split between the two extremes of complete selfishness, driven purely by money and external rewards, or of being oversocialized into caring about things they cannot change, and making others around them feel equally as bad for that. The healthy attitude towards care is that we naturally want to belong in a community and as a result wish to maintain it, and we of course want some amount of individual autonomy, but this is very different from the two extremes described.
It is not surprising to see that most people care about very little given the atrocious state of our world, but it is still dispiriting to see large amounts of people essentially rot in their own apathy. The screen in particular has been a rather evil force when it comes to love and connection, broadcasting atrocities, powerlessness, propaganda, nihilism and a torrent of inane distractions to regular people, who find themselves flooded by the ensuing chaos, on top of making people feel more and more lonely due to the way that it fractures social reality into digital tunnels of attention.
The fact that video games and "social" media—a very misleading term this one, for describing something which encourages narcissism and spreading bullshit information—are two of the main ways that people use their screen is more evidence that the idea that complex technology is "neutral" is hopelessly naive. Modern technology favors the system first and foremost, and individuals only through their self, not their consciousness. The screen is appealing to the self because it enjoys distraction, pleasure, and cannot distinguish the simulacrum of agency that video games provide from the real thing, but it extinguishes the flame of the soul, which is why people who live on the screen are so apathetic, care about so little, because they are not in connection with anything. They only live in their own self, their own mind projecting Reality back at them through the interfaces of the screen, which is why such a person hardly cares about anything but their self.
When it comes to society, the decline of care is very problematic because it is largely irreversible, especially within the utilitarian (and thus selfish) confines of our world. You cannot incentivize people to care more. To the extent that you pay people more to do something, they will meet whatever you require them to do, but they are unlikely to go beyond it. Or at greater scales, it will lead to the infamous phenomenon of Goodhart's Law, where optimizing for metrics renders them ineffective at measuring what they were supposed to measure, such as how students studying to the test makes it essentially useless at measuring a student's understanding.
This is why care is so important, because it is part of two diverging feedback loops. Societies mediated by complex technology lead to a constant decline in care (and trust), because the context that people find themselves in is more and more atomized. This is a societal issue, not something you can just blame on individuals, although in practice a small minority of people get blamed for those society-wide issues. 3 On the other small, small communities held by care tend to spiral outwards (provided that they can maintain themselves in the face of the technological system and their own problems) because we naturally want to care if we feel part of an abundant community.
Not everyone has the luxury of being part of such a community however. This is where we must be mature and accept the hand we were dealt with. It is incredibly tempting to see the state of our world and decide to go along with the heartlessness, cruelty and unbridled selfishness that animates many people nowadays, thinking that there is no reward for being a good person. But this is the devil's logic at hand. Love does not expect a reward, it simply is. This doesn't mean that loving people are naive and give themselves to whoever is in front of them, that would be stupidity. It simply means that generosity of heart is above the logic of accounting that pervades our world.
Love feels light in the body and is always present, whereas the expectation that we will be paid back proportionally to how much we love is directed towards the future, which creates anxiety, neediness, and more selfishness. There is no future for society, which is why it only makes sense to live as much in the present as we can. And from such a conscious life arises the natural desire to love people and things, because to be alive is a lovely experience, whether in solitude or surrounded by other people.
We cannot mend the social rupture that the modern world has led to, we cannot revert the erosion of care at a societal scale, but we can embody the love that is always there, for Creation itself couldn't be anything but an act of Love, and we can be an inspiration for others to also see their own light, because love echoes through time, which is why we still talk about Christ two millennia after his death, and why the loveless world we find ourselves in is doomed to oblivion. The machine will never triumph.
1 We could question whether there even is such a thing as a 'material', externally verifiable world. Especially because the reality that modern physics describes can only be accessed through instruments, in other words, mediation, and not our direct experience.
2 Even though the modern world still has many rituals: marriages, graduation ceremonies and Christmas still remain of course. And in our consumerist world, we find a calendar not all dissimilar to the liturgical calendar, but with sales and awards instead of religious celebrations.
3 For instance, young people are a very easy target for the problems of society and the decline of care. Not that blaming them resolves anything of course, but responsibility is essentially the last thing that society wants to promote.
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Ai Laziness Atomization Deathsoul Technosystem Apathy Interface
2026-03-31