On Sunday I finished a short book by Jostein Gaarder, the author of Sophie’s World. It is called It Is We Who Are Here Now. I listened to the last part while walking in the park, and I did what I always do when I listen to something while walking. I stopped listening.
Not completely. The voice kept going in my ears. But my eyes took over, and my mind wandered off with them.
There were families. There were single people walking alone. Young and old. There were dogs, and cats, and birds.
And some people were in the park without being in the park. Walking, sitting, eyes on the phone, checking it again and again, as if something might be missing. They were in the most beautiful place for miles, and they were somewhere else.
I was not worried about anything. I was just listening, looking, enjoying. And as far as I could tell, nobody in that park was ranking anyone. The dog was not worried that the other dog ran faster. The cat was not comparing itself to the cat across the path. The birds were not building a personal brand.
The book is a long letter from a grandfather to his six grandchildren, about the world they will inherit. He writes about his own life, about the planet, about the big questions of why we are here at all, questions he admits he may not live to see answered.
And somewhere in it, as I understood him, he asks the question we almost never ask: what kind of life do I want?
Not what job. Not what next level. Not how do I grow. What kind of life.
He also tells a small story from a school meeting. Another father was complaining that children take up so much time. Gaarder’s answer was that life takes time. I liked that answer, because it is the one thing nobody in a hurry wants to hear.
Most of us think in rankings automatically. Not because we are shallow, but because the system teaches us to. My daughter is in class zero. Her school has an app. When she does the things the teachers like, she earns points, and she uses them to buy building materials in the app, to build Minecraft-style structures. She is six, and she is already learning that being liked by the teacher is a currency.
The system teaches children everything about competing. It teaches nothing about the two questions that matter most: what kind of life do I want? and what happens when it ends?
Which brings me to the one man who never got to ask the question.
Sisyphus was condemned by the gods to push a boulder up a hill, watch it roll back down, and push it up again, forever. Nobody asked him what kind of life he wanted. The gods chose it for him, and they chose it carefully: they believed there is no worse punishment than labour that is useless and has no end.
Camus wrote about him in 1942, and what interested him was not the pushing. It was the walk back down. “That hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness.” The pause when the boulder has rolled away and Sisyphus has to follow it. That is when he knows exactly what his life is, and keeps going anyway.
I thought about that afterwards. The park was my walk back down. The one hour of the week when the boulder is not in my hands, and I can see what my life actually looks like.
I used to read that line as a consolation prize. Be happy with your lot. I now think it says something sharper. Sisyphus is happy not because the boulder is light, and not because he wins. He is happy because the pushing is his, and he has stopped asking the gods whether it counts.
Here is where it gets uncomfortable for people like us.
Viktor Frankl wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning that we can find meaning in three ways. Through a work we create or a deed we do. Through experiencing something or encountering someone, which means love, beauty, a friend. And through the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering.
Look at Sisyphus again. His work is useless. His love is not mentioned. All he has is the third door: his attitude toward what he cannot change. That is what Camus is describing, and it is all that was left to him.
Most of us live almost entirely behind the first door. Our work is our meaning. The second door gets the evenings and weekends, and the third one we do not even know is a door until something goes badly wrong.
Now add the machines.
A while ago I wrote about how AI is taking not just jobs but identities, in AI Is Not Taking Your Job. It Is Taking Your Identity — And Keeping the Profit. I have been turning that over since, and the question I keep arriving at is not whether the machines will take the boulder. They will take some of it. The question is which boulders, and what we are left to push.
Some work is Sisyphus’s punishment: endless, useless, unchosen. If a machine takes that, we should say thank you. But some work is the struggle that fills a heart. A craft. A game. A child. If the machines take that too, we will have kept the comfort and lost the meaning.
If your whole life stands behind the first door, automation does not make you happier. It makes you homeless.
So what do you do about it, before it arrives?
There is a tool from psychology I like for exactly this, because it is a little unfashionable. It is called defensive pessimism, and it comes from the work of Julie Norem and Nancy Cantor in the 1980s. You set your expectations low, and you rehearse in detail what could go wrong, so that your anxiety becomes preparation instead of dread. The research found that defensive pessimists often predict they will do worse than they actually do, and they perform no worse than the optimists, as long as they keep the anxiety manageable.
I like it for a personal reason. When I read about it I realised I have been applying it for years without knowing it had a name. I rehearse what can go wrong. I expect the worst and prepare for it. I thought this was just being realistic. My wife has a different word for it, and it is not in any academic paper. The research says the anxiety becomes preparation. At home, it seems, it becomes a weather forecast for the whole family, and nobody ordered one.
Try it on this. Imagine the worst version of the next ten years: your field is automated, your title means nothing, and the boulder is gone. Then ask Gaarder’s question: what kind of life do I want? Which of the three doors would you walk through? Who is behind the second one? What would the third one require of you?
If the honest answer is “I don’t know”, good. You have found it while you still have the choice. Sisyphus never did.
My daughter is six. The system has already started giving her points. But nobody gave her the other questions, and she asks them anyway. Why is there death? She says she does not want to die. Why are there wars, and what happens if one comes?
I have answers, and she listens. What I do not know is whether she applies them.
But I noticed something. At six, she is already standing at the door that most of us walk past for fifty years. The only question is whether the world around her will let her keep asking, or keep handing her points until she stops.
I would like her to keep asking. I would like her to ask what kind of life do I want long before I did, and to have all three doors open by the time the machines arrive. The pushing she does will be hers.
I think Camus would say to imagine Sisyphus happy. Gaarder, as I understood him, would say to stop the climb long enough to ask why we are on the hill. I think both are right, and the order matters. Ask first, while you still can. Push afterwards, knowing it is yours.
