Prologue

In Maslow’s hierarchy, self-actualisation sits at the top of the pyramid. The soul-crushing desire to answer a higher calling, to see value in oneself, to create and to be heard, to make a difference. For some, this is a privilege. For others, it’s the only thing that gives their lives any colour. It’s always been the case for me that nothing mattered if I created no value, set no change in motion. What else is there to do but create, add perspectives, and answer questions?

Most people who feel this share one thing: they don’t know what to say or how to be heard. I want to be clear about what I mean. Not people who chase fame or power as ends in themselves, but people for whom being heard is what actually fulfils them. There’s a real distinction there, maybe even a grey area I’ll keep returning to.

I’ve always wanted to create. For a long time, anxiety stopped me. The fear of being perceived. Whatever the reason, one thing changed that.

The fear of losing my humanity

As a software engineer, and honestly as an individual in this world and this time, what scares me about AI and automation isn’t the economic, social, or political ramifications. Those matter, but they’re not the real fear. It’s the pace. The pressure we sustain. The anxiety of being left behind is crushing, but that’s not the core of it either. What concerns me is the loss of our humanity in all the work we do.

I’m not interested in the hard problem of consciousness or the philosophical debate around AI. What I care about is lived experience. And here’s what strikes me: across every side of the debate, whatever people disagree on philosophically, there’s a consensus that technical advancement won’t stop. The world only moves faster. The time we have to slow down, to think, becomes more and more of a luxury. We lose more and more of what makes us who we are.

You could invoke Gregor Samsa waking up as something unrecognisable to himself. Sisyphus and his boulder. Heidegger's das Man, the anonymous They that swallows individual existence quietly and completely. Han's burnout society. Benjamin's angel of history, back turned to the future, watching wreckage accumulate while the storm called progress blows him forward. We could spend pages cataloguing how the world dehumanises, how the pace grinds us into function without feeling. And we'd probably be right. Today is June 7th, 2026. Yesterday was June 6th, 2026. Those days are gone. I’m an opinionated person, but I don’t think my anger or frustration has any utility here. So the question becomes, in light of all this, in light of how little control we actually have over what lies ahead, how do we hold onto any part of our humanity when every piece of it is being pulled in a thousand directions?

I’ve thought about this, and I have an answer that could be wrong. I understand enough logic and philosophy to be suspicious of anyone who claims certainty here, myself included. But I’ll offer something anyway.

I believe that the very act of asking a question is what makes us human. Our obsession with finding answers, our need to follow our curiosities wherever they lead. You can brute-force your way through the scientific method and be more efficient about it. But the things that actually drive us, the worlds inside us that feel just out of reach, those are what set us apart. Not the questions the world forces on you, the ones in service of output, efficiency, the next deliverable. Those are just labour wearing the costume of curiosity. I mean the ones you can't help but ask. The ones that serve no output, no product, nothing but your own need to understand. In a world that monetises every impulse, asking something for its own sake is a small act of resistance. That's how you hold on. Here's mine: whether the part of me that still reaches for something I can't name is worth protecting, or whether I've already started trading it away without noticing. I know the counterarguments. Determinism and free will debates would shred this to pieces. I don’t have a clean response to that. But I’ll keep asking anyway.

In this space, I’ll do my best to engage with the questions that matter to me, to discuss the films, ideas, music, philosophy, and art (possibly tech) that tackle our weaknesses, vulnerabilities, our stubborn need to remain human, and our equally stubborn refusal to accept that as enough. It’ll be academic at times. Other times, art and chaos will take over. I think that’s fine. I think it makes us human.