AI as Self-Erasure | THR Web Features | Web Features | The Hedgehog Review
Elevated “deaths of despair” and declining birth rates in the West must be due to an array of factors, hard to tease apart. My hunch is that one of them is what the sociologist Richard Sennett called “the specter of uselessness.” He meant feeling redundant at work. But there is a deeper, existential version of this that may arise when the world feels already occupied, so there is no place for you to grow into and make your own.
In the normal course of human society, you are born into a culture that has prepared the way for you. It initiates you into its language and tells a story of where you came from. It is saturated with meaning due to a chain of begettings that reaches back in time, each generation of which started and grew through acts of love: at conception, and in the ongoing work of teaching, transmission and care. The world is welcoming, in other words. It was built by your ancestors, and they imagined you long before you arrived.11 xThe “owned space” spoken of by our Nietzscheans is an inherited space, not a conquest of individual will. They wondered what sort of work you might do, before you knew there is such a thing as work. Your parents may have recognized the echo of a sibling or a parent in your face as you sought the nipple. They smiled at you.
This sense of a world handed down in love is interrupted when the basic contours and possibilities of life appear to be ordered by impersonal forces.
