The Conditional Self and the Uncanny Pen

Intrinsic Motivation contra Doomers

There’s a peculiar fear gripping the humanities: not fear of death, but fear of irrelevance. It wears the robes of concern—about ethics, education, originality—but beneath the surface, it is much more personal. It is the fear of being replaced, of not mattering. This fear is evergreen, but particularly potent in hyper-competitive societies where dignity derives from achievement. When I visited Yale as a prospective student decades ago, the admissions officer boasted that Yale could replace the freshman class 9 times over without it mattering. I’m sure that number has only climbed since. And yet the reason why it doesn’t matter reveals a deeper problem with defining merit via a tournament.

Before English majors feared the AI-induced irrelevance of their senior theses, they feared the human-induced irrelevance of their college admissions essays.

When ChatGPT first began to write with surprising fluency, the panic was not confined to code or commerce. It came from classrooms, from writing centers, from the weary trenches of MFA programs and PhD seminars. “If AI can write,” the question went, “then why should I?”

But notice how the question is framed. Not: “What is the nature of writing?” Not: “How can we think differently alongside machines?” But: why should I? The center of gravity is the self—not just any self, but one that has spent decades being measured, evaluated, and prized for doing a very specific thing very well.

From the outside, it may seem absurd: that the arrival of LLMs could produce a quasi-spiritual crisis among poets, classicists, and cultural critics. But if you listen closely, you’ll hear echoes of a deeper wound.

We live in the long afterburn of meritocracy. From early childhood, Millennials and Zoomers were told that their worth lay in performance. They were taught to self-optimize, to gather achievements like breadcrumbs toward belonging. Their selfhood was built not on essence but on output. Not on being, but on doing. And now, a machine can do the same thing (or will be able to do the same thing), only faster and cheaper.

AI didn’t cause this identity crisis. It exposed it.

Jonathan Haidt and others have written of a generation raised on conditional love—the praise-addicted mind, the child who becomes an adult not by forming a soul but by performing a résumé. What happens when the condition for love is removed? When the thing you were good at no longer guarantees approval, recognition, or uniqueness?

As the rabbis put it:
“Any love that is dependent on a thing—when the thing ceases, the love ceases.”
But, “a love not dependent on a thing—endures forever.” (Pirkei Avot 5:16)

Much of what we call burnout in the humanities is the unraveling of that dependent love. People did not simply love writing, or thinking, or teaching. They loved being known for it. And now they are being out-written, mechanically, spectrally, by something that neither seeks nor receives praise.

This is not a condemnation. It’s a diagnosis. There is a tragic dignity to those who fear that their calling has been hollowed out. But the deeper question is whether the calling was ever rooted in something enduring. Something not contingent on praise, performance, or platform.

Aristotle spoke of the highest form of life as theoria, not theory in the modern academic sense, but contemplative delight in the truth itself. The love of wisdom for its own sake. Not for tenure.

Can AI contemplate? No. It can mimic, summarize, remix. But it does not dwell. Which means that if your love for writing or thinking or creating was intrinsic—if it was not dependent on a thing—then now is the time to double down, not to despair.

But if your attachment was conditional, AI will feel like a curse. Not because it is threatening something real, but because it is stripping away the illusion that you ever had it.

Heidegger, writing amid the technological revolutions of the early 20th century, warned that the greatest danger of modernity was not machines, but the forgetting of being. He didn’t fear automation per se; he feared that in treating ourselves like tools, we would lose touch with what it means to be a someone rather than just do something. AI, for all its brilliance, is pure doing. That is its limitation—and our opportunity.

Because if you have a self, it cannot be outsourced. All this talk of AI agents, yet a basic fact remains: Nobody can be you for you.

This is the painful gift of the uncanny pen. It forces us to ask: Who is the “I” behind the writing? What is the source of my voice, my yearning, my judgment? If I can be replaced by a machine, was I ever really here?

The answer may hurt. But it is liberating.

There is a paradox here: Only those who see themselves as more than their skills can survive the loss of those skills. Only those who love learning not for grades, writing not for awards, will thrive in the age of AI.

To these souls, AI is not a competitor. It is a collaborator. It takes the performative mask off the intellectual life and asks: Now that the applause is gone, will you still speak?