Oliver Burkeman on Aliveness

Oliver Burkeman argues most of us seek the feeling and experience of being alive:

Excerpts:

The concept that sits right at the heart of a sane and meaningful life, I’m increasingly convinced, is something like aliveness.

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And so an excellent question to ask yourself – when you’re facing a tough decision, say, or wondering if you’re on the right track – is: “Does this feel like it’s taking me in the direction of greater aliveness?”

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Crucially, aliveness isn’t the same as happiness. As the Zen teacher Christian Dillo explains in his engrossing book The Path of Aliveness, you can absolutely feel alive in the midst of intense sadness. 

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More subtly, it feels like our own aliveness is what’s at stake when we’re urged to get better at prompting LLMs to provide the most useful responses. Maybe that’s a necessary modern skill; but still, the fact is that we’re being asked to think less like ourselves and more like our tools. It makes you wonder if Wendell Berry had it right when he wrote: “It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.”

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Because I suspect that a certain form of naivete may be a precondition for aliveness. In a world where tech commentators confidently declare that we poor ignoramuses haven’t even begun to get our heads around what’s barreling down the tracks towards us, I think it’s good to stay fully, even slightly foolishly, committed to the idea that humans doing human things, with other humans, is and will remain at the vital heart of human existence. Because otherwise what on earth’s the point?