The Art of Unbecoming in the time of AI

 It's 6:30 am on a Monday morning, and the petrichor smell of the earth permeates through the room. The early rain on Sunday has made the weather more pleasant. I hear the constant whirring of the fan and feel a cloak of invisibility shrouding me, with the birds chirping in the background.

As a child, I dreamed of becoming many things: a painter who brought walls to life, a footballer dazzling across the pitch, a writer who made words pierce your heart from the page. But more importantly, the childhood version dreamt of an adult who strode confidently, whose personality was self-assured, a person who grew into himself organically.

What no one taught you was that this path isn’t linear, especially when your profession takes you down the road less travelled, and it does make a difference.  As a writer, I’m constantly hunting for the perfect turn of phrase, biting my teeth when I find it in prose or poems written by another.

Past mistakes replay themselves in my mind like a stuck tape recorder, screeching through the turntable of my mind like a vinyl that’s past its time. I’ve struggled to coherently place my thoughts in conversations, blanking out and waiting for the ground under my feet to swallow me whole. The words dessert me at the right time is a turn you wouldn’t want to hear from any writer, but it's true more often than not.

In a world where desires and thoughts are algorithmically approved, hammered in your head through content in your feeds, few people have time for original thoughts. Repetitive tasks are looked down upon, philosophy is deduced from reels, and intuition gets buried along the way.

When was the last time you watched a film and sat with it, not to dissect or review but grasp what struck you, what you deduced from it? It doesn’t have to be right, but that doesn’t matter anymore because we swim in a sea of unfathomable content where we can see easter eggs, detailed reviews and unknown trivia of almost anything at the click of a button.

There’s a YouTube video that can tell you everything from the story, plotline and how to feel about the creative choices made. If that’s not enough, you open the comments section and see what other people feel about it.

There’s a corner for everyone, echo chambers where your ideas are amplified rather than challenged. Very soon, we’d be more than happy to outsource our cognitive workload to the four horsemen of a post-apocalyptic AI World – Cladue, ChatGPT, Gemini and Grok. A sordid take indeed, but what do you say when a billionaire insinuates that human water consumption is limiting the potential of AI?

I’ve had a manager of a so-called content platform with a significant social media following yield that good content isn’t the ultimate goal. Code language for ‘I’d sacrifice quality for quantity without second thoughts’ He’d happily use one person, with an acute knowledge of Claude, who could churn out below-average content at breakneck speed.

Kunal Shah, the founder of CRED, once professed that in the age of AI, one has to be incredibly good at learning something in 24 hours. I wonder what the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dostoevsky or Camus faced with similar circumstances would have done.

Imagine Dostoevsky writing about the cruelty of AI from the debtor's prison, or a person with a Coursera certificate in ‘Editing with AI’ being affiliated with The Great Gatsby. I dreamed of becoming a righteous, well-educated man who thought and wrote deeply.

But I see that dream unravelling in front of my eyes. A little about me: I love the myth of Sisyphus. Not because I’ve consumed it wholeheartedly, but the idea of a man sentenced to the same repetitive task for cheating death sounds like the ultimate capital punishment for the modern-day consumer.

You push a boulder up the hill only for it to come rolling back down, and the process starts again. Sometimes life feels like that. At 27, I’m stuck back in the loop of an internship that feels more like hope labour – underpaid or undercompensated work done in the hope that it shall bear fruit in future. The dignity of writing seems to be fading from my existence.

So, I’m trying then to unbecome. Unbecome everything the world suggested: a marriage, a good job, a decent salary, a healthy social life, emotional maturity, and physical prowess by a certain age. That life somehow ceases to be unforgiving, that an unsettled man without a high income is not valued, that originality in a world of conformists is the eighth deadly sin.

Having to unlearn these takes a great deal of pain. Having to rely once again on others for financial support is heartbreaking, all for the mirage that it will ultimately pay off in some way. That writing is my chosen path to enlightenment. Unbecoming is carefully chipping away the parts that don’t fit anymore, with the hope that things will soon fall in place.