We are an information society, but have fallen into the trap of absorbing answers without ever asking a question. An answer without a question has no life and does not penetrate the deepest recesses of our curiosity.

It dies the moment it hits us and we are no more knowledgable, or better off, than when we started.

We fall into the delusion of knowledge because the information is there and crossed our periphery at one point, but it has never taken root. We are stripped of our ability to think because we have been prevented from the act of learning.

Stay curious. Ask questions.

Be a seed of immeasurable growth instead of a rock buried in rich soil.

I think one of the biggest things I’ve learned from getting to know someone really well is how little I know anyone.

Robert Pantano (Pursuit of Wonder)

And yet, it’s so easy to judge.

It’s taken me a while to gather my thoughts on this subject as it’s a microcosm of a much larger idea I want to elaborate on. 

But there’s a point I want to hammer down.

It was something I couldn’t put my finger on when the Internet went crazy over note taking systems and specifically, Zettelkasten. For those reading that word for the first time, it’s German for slip box. It has been appropriated today to mean a technique by German academic Niklas Luhmann, who credited his low-tech interlinked note system (using a slip box) for his prolific output. 

The discovery of this process has spawned numerous programs to replicate its process. Now, while I can appreciate these programs (especially Obsidian) as a wonderful digital note-taking tool, there’s still a bigger problem.

Luhmann remarked that his slip box was his thinking partner. 

Key word: thinking.

He is a product of his time when thinking was valued more than cramming as many cited sources into a paper as possible. In other words, during his time, it was okay for people to have thoughts. I fear that academics have rushed to his process without consideration for the jump that’s happened and might want to take a step back.

Yes, he was prolific, but he wasn’t just taking notes, filing them and calling it a night.

He was thinking about his work, engaging with it and writing about it constantly. When you have an obsession, you have no choice but to feed it. When you don’t, you’re just wearing the costume pretending to be the character.

The solution to gaining clarity in our thinking is to not adopt a system that worked for a particular academic, but rather to engage in the process of thinking and showing it to others.

There’s no shortcut around it.

It’s peculiar that I should happen to read this article by Kris Rusch as I reflect on my hesitation recently to post content here. While I’ve never had issues in the past with hitting that ‘Publish’ button after writing some thoughts, there’s been a new hesitation.

Maybe it’s just my ego trying to protect itself, but my self-doubt has been ramping up:

Do people care? 
Is this really relevant?
Should I just relegate my thoughts to paper and be uninhibited by such thinking?

At the heart of these thoughts is fear. 

And fear is a lifelong process that we all need to work through.

Despite the fact that AI can obliterate any human opponnent in chess, it is currently ranked the most popular game in the app stores. I catch my students playing it all the time, despite the many other time wasting apps they have at their disposal.

Despite the fact that voice-to-text and writing programs have made writing incredibly faster, with less spelling errors, there are massive online communities dedicated to pen and paper. In fact, they’re more popular now than they’ve ever been.

On that note, despite the multitude of calendar, list and to-do apps on our mobile devices, paper agendas are exploding in popularity.

Despite the proliferation of the video game industry into almost every home, board games keep surging in popularity.

Despite everything meant to keep us away from each other, we crave connection and engagement more than ever.

And that is something that will never go away.

In 2014, a few friends and I had a great idea to start our own little publishing imprint called eVw Press. It was a learning curve in business, marketing and publishing, all of which pushed me into areas to which I was completely unfamiliar and even uncomfortable—which I thoroughly enjoy.

However, over the years, several things happened.

The landscape of publishing has changed immensely, making it both easier to launch a book to market and difficult to get it discovered. It’s a constant game of keeping up with the latest trends (something even standard publishing is failing at this moment) while also trying to keep up with other parts of my life.

My life also became a lot busier, with great things, compounding the issue of keeping up with the trends and keeping the partnership running in the background. And like any business, there were also some difficulties behind the scenes, causing me to re-evaluate my priorities.

Hence, on good terms, we made the decision to dissolve the partnership and move on.

What that means for my books right now is they are in the process of finding a new home, which actually works out quite well as I’ve been meaning to make adjustments to them anyway. I’ll make a note when they’re finally up again.

It also means I get to focus on the one thing I enjoyed about this adventure in the first place: writing.

Since that decision, I’ve gone to bed more peacefully, affirming the choice made was the right one. And the beauty is there’s always going to be something up ahead that will push and stretch me once more.

Moving on!

It’s taken me a while to figure out how I want to approach the topic of these new AI bots (e.g. ChatGPT) that have irrevocably changed the way writing is going to work.

Not just writing, but also the way we think and search for information. In many ways, people are already using it as a more effective form of information gathering. However, it’s also done through a lens of research as opposed to thinking. I’ll write more on that in a later post.

Back to the writing portion.

I’ve already been struggling with the future of this blog. Part of me feels I should stop and relegate my writing to a more private sphere, freeing me up from maintaining one more thing in my life.

Another part of me feels much different because writing in public has led to nothing but benefits in multiple facets of my life.

While I always had a dream of being a writer, my early ambitions were typical: write a book the whole world falls in love with and be famous. Hence, my early writing was geared towards that particular, misguided and egotistical goal. Even my early stages of blogging (prior to this site) were done with the sole purpose of ego boosting and discovery.

Then I grew up and recognized I just love the process of writing. It was then I put in a concerted effort to improve my craft for the sake of pushing my abilities as far as they could possibly go. It’s a lifelong process and I’m still working at it. Fame and monetary compensation aren’t even on the radar screen.

Now I recognize writing as a form of thinking. The act of putting my thoughts down and sifting through them has helped clarify my thoughts, improve my speaking and see my life in a bigger way.

And this is where I circle back.

The craft of writing itself has always been taught as a production art. You write to produce something: essays for school, email to coworkers, proposal to the boss, etc. In other words, writing has always been held as nothing more than a utilitarian tool.

So in that sense, AI bots make sense as the next phase in making that production more efficient. Why make a cake from scratch when cake mix will get you 80% of the way without any of the effort and sometimes, identical results?

Using AI to write text becomes nothing more than a choice on how you want to communicate things. And, I suppose if I’m being honest, it does free up a lot of wasted time dealing with low level communication.

However, the act of writing also connects with thinking. It’s a way to show your thoughts, unearth what’s going on in your head and make connections. Outside the realm of production, it has numerous benefits to our well being. Just look at the many cognitive and psychological benefits of journaling or morning pages.

At the fear of being seen as an old man lamenting the loss of better times, I want to be clear my problem has been the way we’ve approached writing. Or any art form for that matter. We never teach that art can be done for the sake of doing art without any consideration of pragmatic outcome.

Which leads us to this cultural moment.

The future of writing is going to change and at some point, we will question who actually wrote what they did… and then stop caring. We will look at people who still sit down and think through every word as something of a novelty, in the same way we are amazed at people still practicing stone carving.

Online writing has already suffered from endless, bland posts that offer nothing but algorithm optimized wording in order to clickbait, rank higher on search and generate ad revenue (or my nemesis: marketing funnels). Maybe this will finally push the standard up again as people can just generate their own response instead of feeding disingenuous websites their attention.

And since AI bots falter when it comes to the edge of human knowledge, this may even be a chance for actual experts to stand out and be a source of information.

Or we may just be compounding a current problem of information overload and flooding the world with false information. Unfortunately, we are seriously lacking critical thinking skills to help us through this problem (again, a post I’ll come to later).

Regardless of the outcome, we are now in that moment. It’s anyone’s guess what will happen next.

In the meantime, I will continue to write here. If you are getting this in your email, I have to respect that you’ve given me permission to do so in trust that I will make due on my promise to deliver Vito-generated content; doing my best each time.

While my lifelong efforts may not even come close to what some AI generator can do in seconds, it can’t give me the benefit of what a lifetime spent practicing has done.

This is a big trap we can all fall in—it’s the idea that someone else’s success is dependent on our intervention. We convince ourselves their success (or failure) is a reflection of us.

As a teacher, it’s easy to slip into this thinking:

My student’s marks, or their work, is a reflection of my ability to teach… Did I do enough to make them like the course?..

Unfortunately, this form of thinking doesn’t benefit anyone.

When it comes to serving other people, we can only do the best we can and give the space for growth. Ultimately, it’s not up to us, but our ego wants to convince us otherwise.

Step in when asked, then step back.

There’s been a lot of buzz about AI recently, especially with the launch of ChatGPT. Undoubtedly, it will change a lot of things and we will be entering into a new world that has no precedent.

This will be uncharted waters in so many areas.

However, for all its potential, AI can’t sit down with a person face-to-face and have a conversation over a warm beverage.

It can’t hold your hand and squeeze it tight during an emotional moment.

It can’t go on a walk with you, sharing its deepest desires while you listen and share yours.

It’s intelligent, not holistic.

And human beings are way more than analytical minds.

My grandmother immigrated to Canada for a better life. And while she built a great life here, I still remember an off-handed comment she made at a Christmas gathering:

“You know, we had so much less growing up and we were so much happier.”

Understandably, we live in a different time and place and the needs of today are unrecognizable to the world of yesterday—so it’s important we don’t look to the past through rose coloured glasses as some golden benchmark for today. But there’s wisdom in that comment.

Our society is saturated with the need for more.

This isn’t just material goods (more and bigger), but also in every other aspect of how we function: more success, ambition, health, knowledge, social connections, etc.

The minimalist movement that surfaced in the blogosphere during the late 2000s (and still going today) is an attempt to counteract this pressure for more. From my point of view, it’s a great community suggesting a series of actions while looking for an underlying philosophy… but suffers from minimalist posturing as a status marker (“look how little I own!”).

It’s actually not a bad place to start because form can often follow function. However, it’s real strength isn’t getting you to get rid of all your stuff and commitments (both are good things to pare down anyway), but getting you to consider where your happiness lies.

I have no doubt my grandmother would’ve never given up what she had here to live with nothing again, but she understood the inadequacy of our culture’s understanding of satisfaction.

Which is something we desperately need right now.