And yet, though we strain
against the deadening grip
of daily necessity,
I sense there is this mystery:
All life is being lived.
Who is living it, then?
Is it the things themselves,
or something waiting inside them,
like an unplayed melody in a flute?
Is it the winds blowing over the waters?
Is it the branches that signal to each other?
Is it flowers
interweaving their fragrances,
or streets, as they wind through time?
Is it animals, warmly moving,
or the birds, that suddenly rise up?
Who lives it, then? God, are you the one
who is living life?
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God (trans. Barrows and Macy)
At last, one more intolerable hardship of human existence has been lifted from our shoulders. Reading was already too much to ask of a modern person, of course — all those words, all that eye movement, the faint possibility of having to think. But apparently even watching a video is now an unreasonable demand. We have progressed from “help me understand this” to “please have the experience in my place and send me the synopsis.”
This is being sold as a way to “save time,” which raises the obvious question: save it for what? More summaries? More secondhand encounters with things you cannot be bothered to encounter? More efficient ways of avoiding contact with your own life? A video was already the shortcut. Now we want a shortcut around the shortcut. Soon the bots will attend our vacations, endure our sunsets, and perhaps even die on our behalf. The important thing is that we ourselves remain unburdened by the exhausting task of being present.
There’s a deeper problem, apart from the obvious comic squalor of it. Any intermediary decides what counts as relevant. If I ask for “the point” of Moby-Dick, I am really asking someone else to pre-sort the book for me — to tell me which parts were essential and which parts I may safely miss. But how do I know the supposedly “inessential” part is not the very thing that would have struck me most deeply? The odd image, the side remark, the tonal wobble, the long digression everyone else skips — those may be the real point for the person actually present to them. This is the telephone game elevated into a philosophy of life: more and more mediation, more and more compression, until people forget that the map is not the territory and the menu is not the meal.
Still, let us be generous and assume the dream is perfected. The bot watches the whole thing for me. It catches every nuance, every shift in tone, every expression, every implication. But then a small metaphysical difficulty appears. If the bot is having the full experience on my behalf, in what sense is that my experience at all? Is the bot me? If so, then what exactly am I — the management layer? The executive assistant to my own displaced consciousness? And if the bot is not me, then all it has really done is watch a video while I remained absent from it. In that case, what has been “saved” is not my time so much as my participation.
The whole thing begins to look less like efficiency than like a fanatical inability to tolerate unfilled attention. No moment may be silent, slow, or unrewarding; no stretch of time may simply be lived. Everything must be processed, condensed, accelerated, stripped to “the point.” But life is not an empty highway between you and the point. Life is the road, the weather, the delay, the scenery, the boredom, the sudden thought you did not schedule, the stray detail that lodges in the mind. A person can waste a staggering amount of time trying to avoid ever having to sit still long enough to notice that.
And so the grand irony: in the name of saving time, one adopts a whole philosophy of perpetual evasion — more tools, more summaries, more skipping, more fretful management of one’s own supposedly precious minutes — and ends by becoming the kind of person who cannot simply be anywhere at all.
