Final Thought, FirstI know Pete Seeger is an unlikely guy to be listening to in 2024. But there’s an album of his that was rereleased some years ago, a recording of a performance he gave at Bowdoin College in 1960. He performs a song that Leadbelly wrote, which he and his group The Weavers turned into an apparently less good song. I guess that’s arguable.But Pete Seeger had his moments, and one was when, after the first verse of singing this song live, at Bowdoin College, he encourages the audience to sing along by saying, “If you believe it, sing it.”No computer will ever tell a person “If you believe it, sing it.” If it does, it won’t mean it, not like a person can mean it. It won’t be like when Pete Seeger said it onstage, and on a morning sixty-four years later another man felt those words in his heart, and he sat in his basement breathing, petting his cat, and looking forward to when his children would come home from school and he could hug them and ask how their days at school went. I know that tragedies happen. I know about atrocities. I know that sometimes the kids don’t come home from school. It’s a miracle, every time they do.This newsletter will largely be about artificial intelligence and the things it can make. I have some conclusions to work my way toward, but for now, right here, I want to say that while it’s not always so great to be alive, sometimes it is. Maybe I’m in an exceptional mood, because I just woke up from a nap, and kissed the wife I’m so lucky to spend so much of my one life with. But I came back down here to the basement, to finish my newsletter, and I know that while it hurts to be alive, a lot of the time, it is also beautiful. It is a great gift, to get to be a human being. I’ve never asked much of the people who read this. And I’m not asking for much when I say I want everyone who reads or hears this to spend some time today or tomorrow doing something that it takes a heart and a mind to do, something that requires humanity. Write someone a message that only they will truly understand. Take a photograph of something that has meaning to you or someone close to you. Join a protest for a cause you know is right. Tell someone you love them. Sing a song you know by heart. In your own way, make the world a little more beautiful. It’s something we all know how to do.And I’m not going to edit this part out later, when my mood changes. I’m keeping this part in, damn it. I don’t care what my future self has to say about doing things that are beautiful.The Hidden Room DreamI went out with some friends recently, in Lawrence, Kansas—not to brag or anything—and I talked with them about something I’d read recently. I don’t recall what it was exactly—an essay from online? a page from a book?—but the author, who I think was a woman, not that it matters, described a recurring dream she has had in which she discovers, in her home, a door she didn’t know was there, or knew was there and never bothered opening. She opens the door, in the dream, and finds it leads to a room full of undiscovered treasures. All this time, that wonderful room has been right there, and now she’s on the other side, and it feels so good to have crossed into it. She explained, in the essay, whoever it was, that this is a common dream lots of people have all the time. It’s the Hidden Room Dream—yes, it even has a name—and apparently I am the last to find out how common it is. What a buzzkill! Right? I thought I was the only one who had that dream.Actually, that’s not true. Last year, someone on a podcast described my recurring Hidden Room Dream almost perfectly, saying it’s a dream he has often. He goes into the hidden room and thinks, What’s this room doing here? It has all of this behind it? How have I neglected a place with such potential all this time? I thought it was a wild coincidence, that he and I had the same dream, but no, I guess our shared dream is just one of the nighttime slideshows that come with every human brain. But despite how common the dream might be, we are all free to interpret it as we please. Maybe the dream is your mind alerting you to untapped potential, or it’s a premonition of new ideas, new possibilities, maybe a cool watch that you’ll find lying on the ground outside a Citgo station that will lead you to a mystery that only you can solve.Maybe it means that. But I’d like to think that this dream is something like a preview of what it feels like to die. What if, when we die, it’s something like the Hidden Room Dream? What if it feels something like opening a door that’s been there all along, that we’ve always known was there but ignored in the name of carrying on? What if the feeling of dying, of being the one who dies, is the feeling that saturates that dream? Oh, so that’s what’s been behind that door all this time! How could I have never walked through this door before? Maybe that’s how it feels to...
