By Tabitha Bozeman
I’ve been pondering this a lot lately in my quest to honor each person’s humanity. Throughout the last year, my daily work has included a lot of challenging students to do their own thinking in this era of ChatGPT, and it feels like many of us are willing to offload much of the processing part of our human experience. I wonder why? I believe that AI has enormous potential as a tool for good, so I am not wholly dismissive of it, although the environmental and human experience cost of it does weigh on my mind. I think about what it looked like to be “human” in the past, and what will it look like in the future. What creates the human experience? All humans are alive, but not all living things are human, so what exactly makes up our human-ness? Maybe it is the search for meaning and purpose. I decided to do some more research into how great thinkers and writers in the past and today answer this “human” question and find meaning in life.
Camus dismisses searching for life’s meaning, saying “You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.” Joseph Campbell said “Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer.” Whitman echoes Campbell with his “That you are here—that life exists and identity,/That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.” Kurt Vonnegut wrote this scene about the meaning of life: “Man blinked. “What is the purpose of all this?” he asked politely. “Everything must have a purpose?” asked God. “Certainly,” said man. “Then I leave it to you to think of one for all this,” said God. And He went away.”
Goethe also had a characteristically pessimistic view on the subject stating “The human race is a monotonous affair. Most people spend the greatest part of their time working in order to live, and what little freedom remains so fills them with fear that they seek out any and every means to be rid of it.” Frankl said “If there is meaning in life at all, then there must be meaning in suffering.”
Whew. By this point in my research, I was not feeling very optimistic about being human. It is full of struggle, strife, and loss. Then, I reminded myself these were all the perspectives of dead men from long ago, so I narrowed my search to more current thinkers and writers.
More recently, Robert Brooks, a well-known psychologist and writer, lists 5 elements that create the human experience: consciousness, empathy, creativity, resilience, and the pursuit of meaning and purpose. Arthur Brooks, Robert Brooks’ son, a well-known Harvard professor and author, studies the science of human happiness, satisfaction, and dopamine. These topics seem really “human” to me. Arthur Brooks says satisfaction, enjoyment, and meaning are the keys to happiness– and feeling that your life has direction and coherence that does not come from striving and comparison. In other words, social media is not the key to happiness. Making more money is not the key to happiness. Happiness, according to the younger Brooks, comes from investing in 4 things every day: faith (which he defines very broadly as belief in something bigger than ourselves), family, friends, and work that serves others.
Ok, now this is more like it, I thought. Agency, a voice and a choice, do good to others, focus on your relationships, be happier with less. However, I noticed that all my searches resulted in a lot of men who have written on these questions, so do women agree? Next stop in my research–what did and do the women say?
Mary Wollstonecraft argued that a fulfilled life only had meaning if women had intellectual opportunities equal to those of men. Alice Walker focused on reclaiming personal power and autonomy in much of her writing. Virginia Woolf extolled the importance of space and time to sit and think and be without demands from family and friends. Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath turned the everyday experiences of being women and mothers into poetry, and Margaret Atwood reminds us that all we end up as are the stories others tell about us.
So, in this world of AI, distraction, frenetic energy and constant demands to produce more, do more, what makes–and keeps–us human? I think all these men and women of yesterday and today have thoughtfully laid out three main elements of what allows us to transcend being merely alive, machines, and producers.
First, that we each, in our own time and way, actively resist passive existence. That we actively work to identify and construct meaning in our daily lives without abdicating or outsourcing that work to algorithms or institutions. Second, being fully human means not being afraid to take up intellectual and emotional space. It is important work, building a rich inner life, and it does not happen by accident. Thinking, reading, listening, talking, looking at the world and ideas and other humans around us demands we be intentional in crafting our humanity. Third, being human is living relationally. Meaning in life is found in how we relate to one another–those closest to us, and those we barely know. Taking the time, expending the energy to stay in touch, to gather in person, to listen, to reach out–these are the things that remind us of not only our own humanity, but that of others. Our lives, after all, will eventually be summed up and passed on long after we are gone by the stories others tell about us and the impact we had on their own human experience. May we all remember as we move through our days that our humanity and that of those around us is tenuous, fragile, and demands careful and intentional care if we wish to truly live authentic, fulfilling, and meaningful lives.
