When to AI and when not to AI.
A word about efficiency and bliss.
“Computers are useless.
They can only give you answers.”
—Picasso
Let’s address the elephant in the room.
The seemingly overnight infiltration of our lives by AI has raised existential questions about what it means to be human, where consciousness starts and stops, and whether it’s cheating to use it to do our work.
So ubiquitous has AI become that I was recently asked by an incredulous good friend how I still manage to get paid copywriting gigs as a mere humanoid.
Forced to consider his question, I was reminded of one of my favorite parables, retold by the inimitable Rick Rubin in his book The Creative Act, which goes something like this:
“After observing an old man in Calcutta manually lowering his pot into a well to get water every day, a young traveler asked the man why he didn’t just use a pulley system. The old man considered his question and replied, “I really have to think about each movement, and there’s a great deal of care that goes into doing it right. I imagine if I were to use the pulley system, it would become easy, and I might even begin thinking about something else while doing it. If I put so little care and time into doing it, what might the water taste like? It couldn’t possibly taste as good.””
Rubin uses the story to illustrate his point that “our thoughts, feelings, processes and unconscious beliefs have an energy that’s hidden in the work, which gives each piece its magnetism.”
What he’s is talking about here is the value of infusing Being into our doing (and also, incidentally, the Ayurvedic principle that the mental state we’re in when we prepare food is the #1 determinant of how our body receives it—but that’s outside the scope of this letter).
Could AI make me a more efficient writer? Of course. But at what cost?
Last time I checked, the purpose of life is not simply Getting Things Done.
My teacher, Maharishi Vyasanand Sarasvati, has said, “The goal of life is not 'to get things done’. It's to, with every action, interaction, and thought, allow whatever you're doing to stir the bliss inside."
His teacher, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, originally said “The purpose of life is the expansion of bliss.”
For me, writing stirs the bliss. I enjoy the conceptualizing, researching, and synthesizing of disparate ideas into something new.
That’s because writing, for me, is autotelic.
An autotelic pursuit is one that is done for its own sake—not for any expected outcome. The means and the end are one.
Maybe for you, it’s something else, like cooking or driving—more activities that are being revolutionized by AI in the name of productivity.
In his famous book Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi cites decades of research showing how autotelic work affects our sense of well-being and satisfaction with life, and how the reason we do something makes all the difference when it comes to the expansion of bliss.
“Playing the stock market in order to make money is not an autotelic experience; but playing it in order to prove one's skill at foretelling future trends is, even if the outcome in terms of dollars and cents is exactly the same. What transpires in the two situations is ostensibly identical; what differs is that when the experience is autotelic, the person is paying attention to the activity for its own sake; when it is not, the attention is focused on its consequences. Even when children are taught music, the usual problem often arises: too much emphasis is placed on how they perform, and too little on what they experience. Parents who push their children to excel at the violin are generally not interested in whether the children are actually enjoying the playing; they want the child to perform well enough to attract attention, to win prizes, and to end up on the stage of Carnegie Hall. By doing so, they succeed in perverting music into the opposite of what it was designed to be: they turn it into a source of psychic disorder.”
Csikszentmihalyi has simply validated a viewpoint the Vedas have espoused for thousands of years: when performed with conscious attention and without regard for consequences, the act itself becomes the most elevated state of living.
In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna explains to Arjuna that he should perform work in this world without selfish attachments to their outcome and find equanimity in both success and defeat.
And don’t get it twisted—this is not about complacency or indifference. It’s a strategy for success.
In Maharishi’s commentary on these lines, he explains: “the result of action will be greater if the doer puts all of his attention and energy into the action itself; if he does not allow his attention to be distracted by thinking of results. If a man is held by the fruit of action, then his sole concern is centered on the horizontal plane of life. Seeing nothing higher than the action and its fruit, he loses sight of the Self, which pervades the action and is the almighty power at its basis, leading it to ultimate fulfillment.”
It comes back to the infusion of Being into doing.
And we’ve now come full-circle to the man in Calcutta, lowering his bucket manually into the well to get the best tasting water.
Two Maharishis, Rick Rubin, and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi can’t all be wrong about the essential nature of Being in our work.
At panchakarma this past winter, I spoke to a woman there who was a PhD student at Princeton about a laborious research project she was engaged in.
The research sounded like a nightmare to me, so I suggested she might outsource some of it to AI.
Her reply was that if she were to use AI, she would miss out on being able to make novel connections in her mind between ideas found in the research—and I understood on a deeper level that she was saying she enjoyed this part of the work. So to her, outsourcing it to AI might get it done faster, but it would also remove all the fun for her.
And that’s exactly why I wrote this letter the old-fashioned way. It took about 3 hours of my 9-hour flight from LA to Ibiza, but it was a) enjoyable, which b) made it a better piece of work and c) expanded my mind by d) helping me to parse and synthesize various ideas into what I feel is a cogent thesis, which I can share with you now:
AI is a wonderful tool for increasing efficiency and productivity, and by all means should be employed judiciously in work that is not autotelic, where efficiency and productivity are paramount—but to treat all work this way is to ignore the real reason why we’re here, which is to enjoy what we do.
You may not enjoy writing as much as I do, but you’ve got different things that are autotelic for you.
So I ask you, what are the areas of your life that could be optimized with AI, and what are the areas in which you (and the work itself) might benefit from your deeper awareness and attention to it?
Let’s discuss these and other ideas during Collective Effervescence, our online group meditation series, this Sunday April 28 at 12PM ET. Drop in for meditation only (first 30 min) or stay for discussion + Q&A on this and other life topics from the Vedic perspective. Join the WhatsApp group to receive reminders 24 hours before each session, or use the below links to have all upcoming dates automatically sync to your calendar.
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Music today is a spoken word record called If Not You from Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA accompanied by a quote from his excellent book Tao of Wu.
“Right now, man is not always using wisdom. He's letting computers do it. And when a computer can logically outthink a man—that's a frightening step. I've read some chess masters saying that they can do rare pawn moves that seem illogical but will mess the whole computer up and they end up beating it. I believe they're pointing the way. We must find and use a logic that's not programmable.” —RZA, Tao of Wu