Do Not Resign From Life - by L. M. Sacasas

The Convivial Society

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Do Not Resign From Life<br>The Convivial Society: Vol. 7, No. 3

L. M. Sacasas<br>Jun 02, 2026

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Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology, culture, and the moral life. The gaps between posts have been longer than I’d hoped, and, in my experience, writing is a bit like going to the gym: the longer you stay away, the harder it is to get back. Getting yourself back to the gym that first time is the key. Once you overcome that psychological hurdle, then going again is a little easier. So consider this short post something like a psychological trick I’m playing on myself. Just a quick thing I’m writing to get the habit going again. But I do hope it’s encouraging to you on its own terms. Finally, below this brief reflection, you’ll also find links to some recent essays and conversations published elsewhere.<br>Cheers,<br>Michael

For more than three years now, AI has remained a salient topic of public discussion, debate, and controversy. I suspect that this will remain the case for the foreseeable future. Not surprisingly, then, I’ve been asked to talk about AI quite a bit in recent months. But I confess that I find it difficult to comment on “AI” in a general or abstract way for the same reason that Joanna Bryson gave more than two years ago: “AI is not a unitary actor. It is not unitary, and it does not act.” “It is a set of software engineering techniques and digital services,” she adds, “Thus it is meaningless to discuss what AI will do, or to look for singular solutions about how to govern it.”<br>Despite the fact that AI is not one thing, however, there are some discernible patterns in the way that “AI” is marketed, hyped, and otherwise foisted on the public. Much of this amounts to the manufacturing of inevitability that I noted a few months back.1 But despite these efforts, or perhaps, in part, because of them, anti-AI sentiment continues to build. Viral clips of commencement speakers being loudly booed are one striking manifestation of this trend, but a team led by reporter Karen Hao has recently published a website mapping various more substantive and organized efforts to resist the encroachments of AI. Oddly enough, it turns out that loudly and frequently touting your product as a potential threat of world-historical proportions to human well-being was a bad marketing strategy. Human beings, after all, have no particular obligation to cheerfully cooperate with our own purported immiseration.<br>This purported immiseration would have both economic and psycho-social dimensions, but it is with the latter that I am mostly concerned right now. My working thesis about the generalized impact of “AI” as it is currently deployed can be summed up in the observation that the arc of AI bends toward demoralization. As a generalization, there are surely exceptions. But it is hard for me to ignore the mounting anecdotal evidence emanating from diverse and varied quarters.<br>I continue to think, for example, of something Clay Shirky, who I hardly think of as a technological pessimist, wrote about a year ago describing the state of professors and students at NYU, where he serves as a vice-provost:<br>“Since the arrival of generative AI, I have spent much of the last two years talking with professors and students to try to understand what is going on in their classrooms. In those conversations, faculty have been variously vexed, curious, angry, or excited about AI, but as last year was winding down, for the first time one of the frequently expressed emotions was sadness.”

Shirky goes on to describe the prevalence of sadness among students as well. This sadness is one form of the demoralization I have been encountering and attempting to understand.<br>I believe that one dimension of this sadness or demoralization can be attributed to the simple fact that we are increasingly invited to outsource a class of activities that grant us a measure of satisfaction, accomplishment, and purpose.2 But it is not only the case that we outsource these activities and thus fail to reap their existential rewards, it is also true, as Marc Watkins recently noted, that the demoralization can set in as a function of AI’s ambient presence in a social ecosystem, such as, in Watkins’ case, the university, where he suggests “the true crisis here is purpose.” “The most galling thing,” Watkins argues,<br>“is that you don’t have to use AI to still question if your skills matter. You see it in advertising, watch your peers do their homework with it, listen to your professors talk about resisting AI or giving you demonstrations about how to use it, all the while you ask the fundamental question about what is the point anymore?”

There is much that one could say in response, and maybe this isn’t the most pertinent of those potential replies, but I think it should be said: If there is some thing that you are meant to do, who the hell cares if there is a...