About Being Human — April 9, 2026
Reflection in Pond, Del Monte Forest Conservancy, Pebble Beach, CA
”Because here is the beautiful, frustrating, gloriously inconvenient truth about being human: we were not designed for frictionless living. We were designed for struggle, for growth, for connection, for the deep satisfaction of doing hard things in the company of others. And no algorithm, no matter how elegant, can replicate that.” — Danny Ballon, Englishpluspodcast.com.
Yesterday I started a class called AI Unlocked, just to keep myself current. I want to be able to recognize AI out there in the stratosphere so I can decide when and whether to use it, if that’s even possible anymore. What I discovered was a lot of anxiety from my fellow students that they might lose a handle on reality. They worried AI might steal their identity and create videos of them saying or doing things they’d never say or do. They worried the line between truth and fiction might get even more blurred, like putting a hand on someone they thought was real only to have it go through air.
So it brought up the question for me – if we’re so worried about living in a fictional world, why do we read and write fiction?
My answer is that fiction helps me make sense of the real world. It rearranges experience to shine a light on it. It allows my brain to imagine beyond what I know. No matter how far out there, what’s on the page is still a product of living matter, of the blood nurturing my hippocampus and pre-frontal cortex. It’s not just a series of dots and dashes rearranged to mimic what I think and feel.
Why would I care? Truth is, I love feeling the wheels of my brain turn, of seeing something on the page that expresses what’s inside of me, of creating from my imagination. Yes it’s challenging, frustrating, even exasperating at times. But the reward is equal to the pain spent doing it. It means I’m alive.
