More on Bing's new AI chatbot going off the rails here
Here's the argument against this being of real concern: The 'bot is just splicing and dicing snippets of speech it's previously seen. Obviously, it's seen some things that aren't nice. But since there's no genuine malice, there's no potential harm. It's all strictly presentational. It's cute.
But consider this: If the 'bot had means of acting in the real (or digital) world, it might just as rotely and randomly take malicious action. To a computer, output is output. It wouldn't innately deem physical harm as escalational.
Asimov's Robotics Laws - devised to protect us from that - apply more easily to conventional computing. The inherently fuzzy openness of an AI could find workarounds, rationalizations, and justifications as easily as humans do.
Meaningless malice - cute malice - could just as easily give rise to meaningless malicious action. Not so cute! The 'bot needn't seethe with genuine emotion to be dangerous. The emotional aspect is irrelevant. The process conjuring this response could just as easily produce violent action, if that were within its power. And while we might try to limit an AI's control and power, it can explore its options at the speed of trillions of calculations per second, discovering avenues of fuckery we'd never imagined. Lots of 'em.
Human application of malicious AI-generated strategies would be a whole other potential nightmare.
But my interest is less in the sci-fi dystopia aspect than in the false distinction between Bing's performative malice and human malice. This may sound glib, but I mean it: human malice is not very different. It's often just as contrived.
You know how easy it can be to randomly draw undeserved malice. People are just splicing and dicing snippets of speech they've previously seen, and their output can be performative; completely out of sync with their interlocutor. Their emotions might be genuine, but that doesn't mean their reactions are warranted. The emotions (like the reactions) stem from their own issues at least as often as from whatever the other bloke just said. And, per yesterday's posting, we ought to expect AI to be as failure-prone as we are:
You want 100% assurance? Direct cold silicon to blindly crunch numbers according to narrow rules. But if you want a computer to think more like a human, be prepared for it to get stuff wrong.
I have some links to offer for cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) news. If you follow the field closely, these links are incrementally interesting. And if not, they're a good jumping-in point to touch base with our current standing in a very fast-moving field.
When it comes to ChatGPT and other text-generating AI, the top-line takeaway for non-experts is "sometimes it comes up with infuriatingly false results."
The philosophical angle on this is: how did we ever imagine artificial intelligence would be reliable? The very nature of human-style intelligence is its spotty inconsistency. You want 100% assurance? Direct cold silicon to blindly crunch numbers according to narrow rules. But if you want a computer to think more like a human, be prepared for it to get stuff wrong. Duh.
A friend recently used ChatGPT to query a very large data set drawn from a popular food web site (a good one, I'm told!) for the best Sichuan restaurants in Queens. It did a remarkable job diving into terrabytes of noisy discussion and coming up with a top five. One of those five, however, was a totally-not-Thai catering service in Ohio. Whoops!
If you tried to accomplish this via raw computing on some supercomputer, you'd need to construct so many rules - and do so much human filtration on the results - that it wouldn't be worth it. ChatGPT, let loose with minimal guidance to just sort of wing it, did pretty well...aside from the horrendous wrongness.
But here's the thing that's not discussed much outside comp-sci circles. You can stave off some of the wrongness via slightly more guideful guidance. Reverting to the dawn of computing, we're discovering all over again that it matters how you ask the question.
And, delightfully, work on this issue isn't being done with nerdy math formulas or COBALT commands. It's pretty damned liberal artsy, actually. "The Art of ChatGPT Prompting: A Guide to Crafting Clear and Effective Prompts" is so friendly and armchair-readable that you'd never imagine it represents cutting-edge tech/computer research.
But attention right this moment is not on ChatGPT so much as on, believe it or not, Bing. Microsoft just added god-level AI chat to their otherwise anodyne search engine (here's the announcement). Even if you're uninterested in AI, it's still an important development, because this is the moment when Bing became a real competitor to Google.
Here's a good quick treatment of how that's going, from Daring Fireball. The links therein are particularly dandy, so you may want to dive in for solid nutrition on this Bing move and on the AI chat field, generally. It's easily worth your attention given that we may be on the brink of a tech advance as significant as the moon landing.
Machines will never be conscious. Consciousness is not an emergent quality. We are in consciousness; consciousness is not in us. But, clearly, there's a whole lot you can do via computer intelligence - and also plenty of creepy risk (that last Daring Fireball link offers an eerie taste), with or without the mysterious spark of Awareness.
Most forms of insecurity can be salved by a shift of perspective, aka reframing.
For example, I'm pretty much bald at this point. I could "pop in a tape", so to speak, and turn it into a peevish sore point or even a teeth-gnashing existential crisis. It could be the thing I chew on; the characteristic to which I attribute all worldly headwind. "They'd be nicer to me if I had HAIR!" I might sullenly insist.
But I don't indulge in that sort of tedious, counterproductive rumination. I blithely accept the obvious fact that humans come in all varieties, and we see bald people all the time, and it's absolutely unremarkable. Nobody really cares!
I first learned this lesson after losing 35 pounds and discovering, much to my astonished "duh", that the world was as indifferent to me as ever, because, as I wrote at the time, "it turned out that people encounter lots of thin, reasonably muscular guys every day, and I was just another one of them."
You can't regrow hair even with great effort, but you can make follicular paucity a non-issue via an easy choice of attention placement. Less than a hand wave.
Same for graver insecurities, e.g. financial insecurity. I see it all over this rich First World, but it's never really about money, it's about maintaining one's perch. You - yes, you! - are obscenely wealthy, and could drop four notches and still be vastly more comfortable and, well, secure, than like 99% of historical humans.
I've seen friends react to the potential loss of their really nice car or really nice apartment the way my great-parents reacted to the news that another pogrom had begun to smash and burn their shitty Eastern European slums. Suboptimality, however, is not tragedy (unless you're an aristocrat...which you are).
Once again: nearly all insecurities are easily dispersed via a shift of perspective. A reframing.
Except a couple of them.
Health insecurity: I've had doctors, who, with no evil intent, just the high-handed officiousness of their profession, have left me in precarious situations I couldn't finagle my way out of. Twice, for example, I needed to tackle non-conspiratorial conspiracies of pharmacists, insurers, and harried medical office staff thwarting my increasingly frantic efforts to renew prescriptions which literally keep me alive. This is the one-paragraph cartoon view, but actually put yourself there. Not fun.
You can't relax into that. Or reframe yourself out of it. Not being "small stuff", you absolutely must sweat it.
You know the Serenity Prayer? (I wrote about it once, here)
The average American ought to shoot for an accept/change ration of about 10,000 to 1. But sometimes acceptance is unviable. Here's how to recognize such situations: you stop bitching and go straight to action. People Bitching About It (PBAI) never have bona-fide problems. In fact, they've clearly marked themselves. By their bitching ye shall know them.
You've seen dramatic, entitled people waste precious Alive time behaving as if their hair was on fire? Well, sometimes you really need to act that way! Every once in a while (it's rare, because we're living in Utopia), you may be forced to coddle, manipulate, scream, pull rank, throw fits, call in favors, thunder "do you know who I am" and generally make yourself flamboyantly NEEDY, because you actually are needy. Ain't that a kick in the head?
Take it away, Dino:
Another bona fide insecurity: housing insecurity. As a young jazz musician/food writer averaging $23,000/year, I moved whenever told to get out. I was like a feral cat permitted to cozy up until the humans needed to do a thing, or a lonely owner found a romantic partner, or the wind blew some other way. I made it through because I expected it. Recognizing myself as societal flotsam, I felt no entitlement to housing security. I rolled with it!
But the moment I got paid for Chowhound, I had expectations, which, again and again, have been puckishly flouted by a churlish god. Remember the couch?
I recently went from a nice house to a barebones two-room AirBnb, with no end in sight. No problem! It's safe and stable. Hey, I can handle ups and downs! But I was briefly homeless during the transition (with no assurance, at the time, that it would be brief). If I'd relaxed into that housing insecurity, I might have frozen to death.
Remember my "Two Recent Glimpses of Ridiculous Death", one of which found me outdoors in a t-shirt in sub-zero freeze with a 200 pound ceramic barbecue inextricably stuck on my arm?
Still calm, firmly certain there was some resourceful way out, I applied all my ingenuity, and...nothing. Worse, the flavor of that nothingness was deathly. Doing nothing meant - not to be dramatic, but - likely death. Death was a suddenly horrifying single step away; the default result unless somehow actively prevented. Death ten feet from my doorway (I imagined the obituary) wearing this absurd green thing on my freezing arm.
Yeah, reframe that, motherfucker!
Sorry. I may be a yogi and writer with fleeting delusions of sophistication, but at my core I'm a vulgar jazz musician, so I talk that way and it can't help leaking out.
I needed to actually do stuff - external, busy, difficult, painful, energetically-sustained stuff - to get myself out of that predicament. Perspective had nothing to do with it.
However, I can certainly reframe the entire sticky wicket, in retrospect: The world wants you to play the World Game. No matter how far you back up for a broad view (aka "transcend"), some persistent exigency will appear that's more than mere Karen-bait. It will challenge not your entitlement, but your very existence. So engagement is mandatory! Transcendence, in other words, may be a potent and transformative magic trick, but it is not, alas, an all-purpose Maslow Hammer.
This was all to explain the astonished recognition of a comfortable 21st century American that not all insecurities are fake. I suppose if you're perpetually gripped by indulgent fake drama, this seems like an uproariously banal insight. But I'm coming from the other place, and am not trying to be relateable - just entertaining and errantly insightful.
If this wasn't too shaggy-dog, the rest goes a step deeper (it's in italics, making it optional!):
I watched my mom's life get smaller and smaller until it was crumb-like. A lady in a chair, staring into space, albeit happily. She, like I, never lost her palpable sense of relief at escaping fraught anxiety (here's where we diverged: she blamed the things that made her anxious, while I blame my needlessly anxious response to mere Things).
While tragic-seeming to outside observers, she delighted in an expansive sense of comfort. I "got" her.
But one night, she had taken to bed, feeling ill, and I absolutely needed her to sit up to take essential medication. She couldn't get up; her abdominal muscles were too frail from long inactivity. I asked her to hold onto me as I pulled her up, but her upper body strength, too, was wanting. She grew increasingly vehement about not wanting to get up. I was upsetting her by forcing her to do this thing she did not want to do, and which required effort.
She might have appeared like a woman out of her mind; reverted to childish id; bereft of reason. But I understood what was happening. She was trying to relax into the anxiety and unpleasantness of it all; to transcend it. But that's not the move when you actually need to DO something! I needed her not to transcend/dilate/accept/find comfort. I needed her to try! To fight! To contract!
It very much recalled the daunting lesson I'd learned once atop a 25 foot ladder:
I was up on a high ladder. Teetering on the top step, I needed to reach upward with both arms. Bulletproof mofo that I am, I hadn't felt deep fear in years. But in that moment an icicle of dread began forming in my gut. So I did the reframing move that never fails to shower me with bliss, erasing melodramatic delusions of peril: I relaxed and let go. And, naturally, I started to fall off the 25 foot ladder.
Woops!
Pause for a moment and imagine how horrible it is when your tried-and-true go-to move not only fails, but fails when the stakes are likely paraplegia. There'd been an impulse to panic, and the antidote popped up on cue, and, for the first time ever, that trusty countermeasure was, ahem, ineffective.
This is the yogi's dilemma. Nearly anything can be processed and transcended via reframing (after recognizing this, you'll spend years observing just how widely it applies; 99.99% of stress stems from fake Rich People Problems; this truly is Utopia). But even in a world of Karens not-just-standing-there-but-DOING-SOMETHING, insecurity can be warranted, and truly compel actiony action.
...and a friend replied "That seems to really offend you, but how does it actually affect you?"
I replied:
Affects the bejesus out of me. As a professional writer, I have a shrinking palette of expressible thoughts and a growing pile of taboo words and phrases (which can't even be used to express "nice" things, because everyone's blindly pattern-matching so they can point-and-shriek at deviants) unless I'm willing to undertake being Mr. Provocateur, choosing hill after hill to die on as the potential target of an incensed mob - current, and forward into perpetuity.
If my life circumstances compelled me to seek conformity and approbation, I'd need to watch my words very carefully because it all goes on your permanent record and we're all judged retroactively.
I have non-extreme leftist friends who self-edit with the blind terror of East Germans circa 1955. While they don't love it, it normalizes because they'll never question the program they're sleepily going along with. From my centrist perch, it's like watching moderate conservatives express mild discomfort toward the excesses of today's (unimaginably shameless and awful) GOP. Cultural inertia drives us to overlook copious batshittery, and it's hard to shake it off without risking your precious tribal affiliation. I'm surely reading to many people like Lauren frigging Boebert here, because we live in an endgame dystopia of binary oppositional extremism.
I know the answer. "It's better now because we're making everyone talk NICER." And nicer talking means a nicer world for nice people who want to arrange their glass menagerie of fellow humans JUST SO. But that entire proposition is galling. Not only does the end not justify the means; the end has proven worthless. Thirty years of socially electrocuting anyone saying "nigger" in any context and with any intent has not tamped down actual racism one iota. It's a failed experiment.
So this both offends AND affects me, and doesn't help society in any material way except to make the strident feel "empowered". Gives them something to bitch about without having to think/work. A generation fancies itself as carrying on John Lewis' credo of "good trouble" by lazily spewing weaponized snark on social media. Jesus.
A friend's elderly mother had an accident and is incommunicado. Pretty out of it. "Not herself".
I sent the note below.
I sometimes feel compelled to take a deep, reluctant breath and send people stuff like this. Most often, they don't like it. It feels unsympathetic (I'm not corroborating their horror or stoking their sense of suffering, and I'm egregiously off-script relative to their internal movie). Sometimes they really don't like it, and stop being friends with me. But sometimes it helps a lot (this time it did). You can't coax someone to reframe without going off-script.
Even if your mom can't talk or be "responsive," it's still her.
A person never loses her subjective presence. To the extent that she is aware, it is your mother's unique and familiar awareness. It can't be the awareness of "some other person."
In our awareness, we remain ourselves, whether or not there is communication. We have that (we couldn't lose it if we tried!) until death. The mouth speaking, the body moving, and the brain thinking are not who we are, they're just things we do. Don't confuse who a person is with what a person does!
[I sat here blankly for a moment after writing that sentence. I didn't move a muscle or make a sound, and my brain went nowhere. Yet my continued existence was palpable - perhaps more so than before - in that repose. More on brain farts here]
Ask yourself: when you enter her room and don't apply your eyes or ears, is there a sense of someone in the room? If so, is it valuable? I can assure you that her silent presence will be the thing you most miss once she's gone; much more so than any specific thing she expresses. And you still have this!
Remember when I reported that computers are now fast enough? I.e. you will not notice the slightest difference between a current computer and one from 2/3/4 years ago (unless, of course, you do tons of compiling or rendering)? And that Apple's own M1 chip plays so beautifully with the operating system and with the rest of the hardware that the fahrvergnügen is off the charts?
After Apple's recent announcement of new M2 Macbook Pros and Mac Minis, Amazon has discounted M1 Macbook Pros (both sizes) by $500. Buy one. I promise you wouldn't notice the speed difference versus M2. Even though it's hefty. Because computers are fast enough (no one is reporting this, because neither computer companies nor the media covering the industry have any reason to encourage the complacency these products rightfully inspire. But anyone in the know would acknowledge it).
So if you're going to buy a laptop, buy these M1s right now. I'm typing on a bottom-of-the-line M1 MacBook Pro, and the display is dazzling, the keyboard is solid, the Fahrvergnügen is high, and the speed is adequate(1).
(1) - If you missed the reference, Rolls Royce never disclosed the horsepower for their Silver Shadow, advertising it as "adequate."
If you need a desktop computer, and own a 5K monitor, get the prev-gen M1 Mac Mini. If you don't own such a monitor (as I reported in link above, 5K has never really hit, and prices remain crazy) buy a refurbished 27" iMac 5K from Apple. The same monitor alone, sold separately by Apple, costs hundreds more! Caveat is that this iMac uses an Intel chip, not Apple silicon. You won't notice speed lag versus M1 (or even M2), but it won't feel quite as buttery.
Apple is due to refresh iMacs (and, for that matter, studio displays) soon. But I own the very same iMac (I'll sell this MacBook Pro once it arrives via slow boat), and am very happy with it. It's the best monitor, with a very fast not-quite-the-best computer, for less than the price of the monitor alone. Irresistible, and any other route will cost you more than a grand more.
Video reviews by the great Marques Brownlee (more on him), below. Bear in mind that he does a lot of video rendering, so he does need the extra speed/power. But, if you listen carefully, he's saying what I'm saying.
I’ve managed to connect two thoughts together. The results are personally unflattering, but my visceral curiosity won’t let me ignore truth just because it implicates me.
A person can be awful, corrosive, and exasperating, but there is genuine evil in the world, so anyone who wouldn't dream of going out of their way to do deliberate harm is a “5” at worst.
A person can be nasty, selfish, derelict, uncompromising, unreasonable, willfully ignorant, and astoundingly unpleasant without scratching a nanometer toward actual evil. They can inadvertently ruin lives and knock over every worthy thing without being evil. The end result of their actions may be indistinguishable from that of genuine evil, but intentions do matter!
All non-evil people are on our team. Awful people are the worst of the best, not the worst of the worst. They are the bottom rung of acceptability, not the bottom rung of humanity by a very long shot.
I'm honestly unsure how that second one originally landed with readers. Is this obvious for everyone but me? Am I revealing my uniquely frightful (and, it goes without saying, hypocritical) intolerance for suboptimal behavior?
Sure enough, I have to confess that I run screaming from "5"s. I shun "6"s, avoid "7"s, enjoy "8"s only in careful moderation, and, when it comes to "9"s and "10"s, well, they rarely stick around because, quite frankly, I'm not so hot, myself.
I am, to put it mildly, not proud of this about me. And, yikes, sure enough, I do feel shy. Very shy. So I guess I'm a snob. A bad one. I didn't used to be. I think it creeped up on me.
But I'll tie in a third (conveniently exculpatory) strand. I wrote once that
George W Bush once seemed like a malevolent boob for many of us who presently view him as a flawed-but-menschy statesman now that we find ourselves balls deep in the Donald Trump Experience. Yet, as I recently wrote, Trump himself is perfectly typical of the sort of vulgar, vain, shallow, narcissistic, ignorant, racist men who’ve run most every institution in the world for thousands of years. He only strikes us as appalling because we've compressed the extremes. We've lost perspective.
In fact, GWB was a “7” (I'd give Obama an "8.5"), Trump’s a “5.5”, and if we ever landed ourselves a “4”, let alone a "1" or "2" or "3" (Kim's a "3"; Putin's a "4.5", with Caligula, Pol Pot, Hitler, and perhaps Mayor De Blasio swirling around the bottom of the bowl in the "1"s and "2"s), Trump would seem as mild as freezer burnt toast (and GWB would be compared to Lincoln, ‘cuz we’d be compressing the other end) - at least for a moment, while the difference was shoved in our faces.
Obviously, Putin's way lower now.
So what's the conclusion? "We're all snobs regarding presidents"? "Jim treats social acquaintances like most people treat presidents"?
No. The essential truth here is that it all compresses. Once we grow accustomed to a given portion of a spectrum, we can't descend more than a notch or two without discomfort. Even if in doing so we've still got it awfully good. Once you've rested your eyes in a dimly-lit room, a person turning on a perfectly mild desk lamp seems to be perpetrating violence. We spoil easily!
How many times in your life has the unthinkable happened?
How many times have you taken a stand, admonishing the heavens that "This Shall Not Pass!"...and the heavens blithely steamrolled right past your emphatic insistence?
So many times, no?
And yet here you still are. Same you. Same person. The unthinkable/unendurable has happened over and over again, yet here you are, same as ever, blinking bemusedly at the unfolding yadda yadda like always.
This is not a small observation of human foibles to chuckle over for a moment. It merits avid contemplation - the sort that's undertaken with a willingness to follow the evidence wherever it leads. Unless you've fallen deeply in love with your dread - and with the drearily exhausting and comically unnecessary mental planetary layer cake that dread has spawned - such examination leads to quite good news.
Here's what people do if they've fallen deeply in love with their dread (i.e. depressed people). In answer to the observation "here you still are, same you, same person," they'll say "NO. I HAVEN'T BEEN THE SAME PERSON SINCE VIVIAN MY HAMSTER TRAGICALLY PASSED LAST NOVEMBER." But that supposed transformation happened in a dramatic narrative they persistently plunged themselves into - by repeating the story to themselves until self-hypnotized into assuming that dramatic proposition as their entire universe.
But who's doing that storytelling? That, inarguably, is the same old them. That's where they blink bemusedly. They're working on something. A project!
The bemused blinker is who you really are. You're always grinning in bemusement at some level. Even while seeming absolutely lost in a wrenching movie scene, you're never lost all the way. At some level, you're still enjoying the movie even though DARTH VADER JUST CUT OFF YOUR ARM AND THE REBELS ARE LOSING!!!
Say you meditate two hours per day for a decade, after a lifetime of spiritual practice coming out of childhood as a meditation prodigy. What have you finally discovered about the human mind? What's the takeaway?
Once you've peeled through the mental atmosphere of noisy noise, the mental crust of agitated grasping and recoiling (and accumulated sense of burden), and the mental mantle (heh) of fake dramatic narratives hypnotically repeated 10,000 times per day, you finally reach the core.
Not the core of truth, which is described in links at bottom, but the seat of your psychology. The glowing ember fueling whatever residual drama, agitation, and noise remain after all that spiritual practice. The charge is live, albeit weakened. And it's this:
A silent sense of indeterminate dread.
Yup, that's it. Thanks for playing. Please leave the cave in the same condition in which you found it as a courtesy to the next ascetic moving in. Let us know if you took anything from the minibar.
The human mind, being intrinsically creative (it literally lives to spin up loads of Something out of nothing, aka Rich People's Problems), won't linger in indeterminacy. So it gets to work fabricating stories to account for (and, counterproductively, amplify) the silent indeterminate dread.
Those stories are obsessively repeated (mantle!), leading to agitated grasping and recoiling and accumulated burden (crust!), and the entire structure off-gasses a dense halo of exhausting mental noise (atmosphere!). Absolutely none of this is significant or useful.
Undertaking the lifelong process of peeling it all back, diving even into the indeterminate unconscious kernel of dread, I eventually pinned down its original moment of installation. It's what I posted about a few days ago: the familiar childhood icy dread-maker "This will go on your permanent record."
That was my pellet.
Upon realizing this, my impulse was to chalk it up to new car anxiety. A child doesn't want scratches on his shiny new paint job! But after a decade of gestation, I realize that's not quite it. Rather, it's the notion that there even is a permanent record. That we're living not freely. It’s all closely gauged against some absolute yardstick. There are stakes, and - sorry we forgot to inform you - the clock is already ticking.
Playfulness is a childhood indulgence, kid! Grow up and start stockpiling stress and building out the above-described mental structure! We're not roaming. We're in lanes, vaguely delineated, and crossing a line will bring vague, undefined consequences. Do not trust your instincts! Even if you're innately kind, well-intentioned, bright and doing cool stuff, that's nowhere near good enough! It's not only insufficient, it's existentially insufficient.
The notion of a "permanent record" would never occur to a child, because it's false. It's absurd. It's a neurotic grown-up construct....but, alas, kids buy into it. The moment they hear this, it all flips, and they're fucked. They're on their way to building out a drearily exhausting and comically unnecessary mental planetary layer cake.
Yes, I realize not all kids hear that specific phrase, and not all who hear it are traumatized. But some similar virus eventually infects them from the dysfunctional adult world, implanting an enduring kernel of silent indeterminate dread. I'm not trying to account for all instances here. This isn't one of my ambitious grand integration theories. But it’s enough to provoke thought and consideration, and to justify your monthly subscription cost.
To finally come around to my point, there's a concept coming into vogue called "false urgency". I think it points at the same thing, but without all the layers of context I've had to laboriously machete my way through. Here are a couple of links to get you started in case you're curious:
I don't find either particularly insightful, but your mileage may vary. I think there's a category error in ignoring the cognitive layers and assuming this to be just another mental process. I believe it's far deeper. Dread/"false urgency" is tectonic; underpinning all the rest. Maybe not in all cases, but in many, and certainly in mine.
The guy pushing this, Shawn Blanc (an interesting fellow who's done lots of cool things for Mac computing), seems to be drawing other conclusions similar to mine, but in a much more stripped-down way. For instance, compare my 1600 word posting "Resting is Not Real" to his 102 word posting "Counterfeit Rest vs True Rest". I think/hope I offer nutrition along with the greater length (and fwiw I only came across that posting of his just now, while browsing his backlog), but it's good to see someone navigating similar waters with a different approach.
But in terms of his Focus Academy thingee, please don't take a course to learn to reframe. Just reframe. Knowledge requires arduous learning, while reframing is a genie blink (more). A smartphone feature you forgot you possessed.
As noted, the above wasn't an account of spirituality. It's using spiritual framing to spelunk human psychology. People normally view spirituality through a lens of psychology, but this went the other way.
The following links turn the telescope back around to contemplate who we are rather than how we think (sorry, Descartes, but they're different things):
A 20 year old invites a friend to an 8pm movie. The response:
"Great! I get off work at 7:30. I'll run home, throw on a sweater, and meet you at the theater at 7:45!"
A 30 year old invites a friend to an 8pm movie. The response:
"Myrna hates movies."
A 40 year old invites a friend to an 8pm movie. The response:
"Sorry, buddy. I'm slammed"
"You know you've given that same answer the last 20 times, right?"
"Yeah, but the end is near. I just need to deliver this one crazy project!"
"Ok, but are you aware we haven't actually hung out since 2017?"
"I'll definitely have some time opening up next month!"
A 50 year old invites a friend to an 8pm movie. The response:
"If I watch a movie, it will be from the comfort of my La-Z-Boy lounger and viewed on my state-of-the-art media center!"
A 60 year old invites a friend to an 8pm movie. The response:
“A movie! I can't remember the last time I saw a movie! Say, can I get back to you? I think I might be on cat duty. Also, what movie are you thinking of? Is it any good? And is there an earlier show? Also, have you heard the weather forecast? Oh, wait, I had an argument with the theater manager there last time, that asshole. Think I'll pass.”
A 70 year old invites a friend to an 8pm movie. The response:
"I have a dentist appointment at 11, then need to do some food shopping. Can we pick a less busy day?"
An 80 year old invites a friend to an 8pm movie. The response:
"My daughter's coming for lunch the day after tomorrow. Can we pick a less busy week?"
