Moving from Alienation to Connection
In turning to AI for answers, we may have forgotten to ask the one question only we can face: Who am I?
I’m sitting at my computer this morning thinking of Artificial Intelligence (AI), its exponential growth, and how it’s going to entrench the sense of alienation that so many feel all around.
It strikes me, however, that it’s not easy to nail what the word alienation means. Alienation, yes, but from what or whom?
I sense this is a question to hold, rather than answer right away.
Let’s look at what the word could mean, and what we actually feel (or suppress) when we speak of alienation.
I’m not hitting up the dictionary, because, well, I want to figure out what it means to me. It feels like I’m finally sinking my teeth into something I’ve been tiptoeing around for a while.
To be alienated, for me, is a state of estrangement, becoming a stranger in my surroundings, and by extension, in my own life.
I feel alienated when I don’t know how to be fully present to my life in all the ways in which it calls to me to be present: living and dying; hurting and healing; grieving and growing; losing and learning.
In short: responding.
In a state of alienation, I don’t really understand what is happening to me and my life, nor do I know what to do with myself when I’m faced with these forms of experience. So I disconnect. I respond from an automatic space—I react.
So alienation is the state in which I feel fundamentally out of place. It’s the sense that something is off, and the urgent need I feel to make it go away.
Technology is not the cause of my alienation. It’s how I use it, and how it plays out in my relationships and interactions that brings this feeling into sharper relief.
AI and digital content doesn’t cause the disconnection I feel, but it mirrors it back to me. It offers simulated connection or quick fixes that help me bypass the discomfort I feel, rather than grapple with it, take it on.
In that sense, technology becomes a force multiplier: Not just of the alienation I feel (for I look out into the world projected by digital technology and I see so many like me), but also of the ways I avoid confronting it.
I look into the void within and without.
Many of us are turning to ChatGPT and other language models for answers we once sought in conversations with friends, co-workers, family members, mentors, or even within ourselves…
Children are seeking deep friendships with AI companions, confiding their most private thoughts to an algorithm…
People are having exchanges with chat boxes that never challenge them, rather than speak to human beings who are difficult, full of contradictions and demand full attention…
And all the while, many are continuing to search for their “tribe,” those with whom they feel a fit, people whom they can call ‘their own’, hoping that technology will help them—and us— stitch together an enduring community…
But can it, unless we go back to some core questions?
So we come to a point where we must face a difficult truth about ourselves, and the societies we have built, person by person—the fact of our loneliness.
The loneliness of having to endure what feels like a life of no meaning.
We can fill up this deep and unyielding sense of lack in our lives with technology— upto a point—but it won’t help us address a very fundamental human question screaming and kicking for us to look at it.
That question is simply this: Who am I?
Do I really know anything about myself, or am I just working on handouts given to me by society and culture—and now increasingly AI?
Unless I make an effort to know myself, how will my loneliness be met?
How will my alienation be seen and embraced, if I don’t take a step towards it instead of turning away from it?
My loneliness is not someone else’s job to fix—not the media, not the entertainment industry, not my job, not my family and relationships, not my community or country, not anything that can be used as an answer to this question.
I who am lonely—who am I?
Unless we answer that question, or begin to face it, we cannot move towards connection.
Connection not to what or whom, but living as a connected being, as we are, as life itself.
Lovely read. I like reading about alienation, as that almost instantly brings me into connectedness. For me, it’s like someone who sees and talks about the disorganised corners in a home is most likely to have organised corners in their home. To organise something, I need to have the ability to notice the disorganisation. In a strange but very logical [as stated above] manner, sitting with the discomfort of alienation simultaneously moves one into connection imo.
I agree with the premise of needing to sort this out ourselves but answers are difficult to find. The distractions that you have talked about are ourselves running away from having to face the lack of solutions. There is this dialogue from an old Tamil movie where the hero says “odinaal odinaal .. vazhkaiyin orathirkae odinaal” meaning “she ran and ran until she reached the end of her existence itself”.