Dear Friends, Family, Neighbors, and Those of You I Don’t Yet Know —
Welcome, oh readers mine, to this issue of Odd Company. Lately I have been mulling over — and worrying about — the degree to which stories make the world in which we live. While shredding and tamping cabbage for sauerkraut, harvesting beans, making berry pies, and keeping the cats away from the hummingbirds, my attention has been divided by this disconcerting thought. We learn a lot of things, and we forget a lot of things. But most of what we learn and remember comes from stories. It seems to be just human nature. Our personal experiences of the world become the stories we tell, and because those stories affect the way we see ourselves, they make us who we are. The stories we hear or read, told by others, shape us, too. We are only as wise and good as our stories. A cruel, false story can make us cruel and false. And, oh my friends, we are awash in cruel, false stories.
Because I write fiction, and much of it is fiction for youngsters, this concern about how my words might show up in the actions of others has long been with me. Strangely (or not), my diet of written words often echoes whatever is on my mind. This week I’ve been reading The Diamond Age, or a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, by Neal Stephenson. This is an old novel, first published 30 years ago. And it’s science fiction. Science fiction doesn’t always age well, but this is some of the best, and today it seems prescient. The “illustrated primer” of the title is an interactive book of stories through which a young lady, no matter how prim her upbringing, can become a well-educated subversive. Stories shaping a life; there it is!
Now couple that with the other thing I’ve been reading about, Elon Musk’s AI chatbot, Grok, which unexpectedly started spewing Hitlerian anti-semitic garbage in response to questions a couple of days ago. Grok is a large-language model (LLM). LLMs are “trained” by exposure to massive amounts of data — mostly text. You might reasonably say that this body of “training text” forms the stories from which the chatbot draws its conclusions. Grok, unfortunately, was trained primarily on posts found on Twitter (renamed X by Musk when he bought it). This platform, as we know, is rife with vulgarity, conspiracy theories, and hatred. If exposure to the stories on Twitter-X created an AI that thinks Hitler was the greatest thing since sliced bread, what sorts of effects should we suppose it’s having on young people who hang out there?
Here’s the moral of this story: Every time we put *any* type of content on the internet, we are helping to train and educate the next generation of artificial intelligences. Actually, it’s worse than that. Our words, our arguments, our claims true and false, nasty and nice, are providing the moral framework for these entities. To paraphrase the tech writer Tyler Cowan,1 the very smart and talented AIs are listening, much like young children eavesdropping outside their bedroom door late at night, and drawing their own conclusions from the stories we are casually throwing around.
Now here’s the really alarming part. Our real kids are asking these AIs for advice. Heck. *Everybody’s* asking them for advice. This is the thought that led me to shred my thumb instead of the cabbage last week.
We appear to have raised at least one generation, possibly more, of Americans who find their lives meaningless and without purpose. I’m painting with a broad brush, of course. But I think we are living at a very special time in the evolution of our society. This time and place is the spot where we have to stop and examine some of the basic beliefs that have led us here: that each of us is self-sufficient and ultimately alone; that competent people need no help; that happiness is something we can pursue; that values are a matter of individual choice; that, in the end, the material world is all there is. Combine this with the advent of AIs, which may shortly transform the world into something unrecognizable. How could a person with such fears and beliefs be anything but deeply depressed? What’s to be done about it?
In another book I read a while ago, The Path to Purpose: How Young People Find Their Calling in Life, Stanford professor of education William Damon talks about the importance of having a purpose in life. Weirdly and wonderfully, I found these ideas echoed by Astro Teller, “Captain of Moonshots” and Director of Alphabet’s “X” program (where a flock of eccentrics think up wildly unlikely ideas to try);2 and also by Professor Lisa Miller, a psychologist and brain scientist at Columbia, who has discovered connections between spirituality, purpose, and brain structure.3
What exactly do people mean when they talk about having a purpose? A purpose is different from a goal or a dream. Goals and dreams are worthwhile, but they are just wishes — hopes for the future. A purpose is something real we are doing that affects the world outside us. In order to have a purpose, we have to acknowledge our connection to the world, and especially to other people. That leads to the realization that we are part of something bigger than ourself, and as such, we are never alone and are never unloved. Damon, Teller, and Miller all agree that having a purpose in life makes us happier and more resilient. A person with a purpose knows that if they fail, it’s only because we all fail at times. It’s part of being human.
Almost any job, large or small, can give a person a sense of purpose. As Damon points out, if your job is flipping burgers, and you set out to make your customers smile, that’s a purpose, and it will add to your happiness even if the job is not the greatest. You might not be the team’s MVP, but if you make up your mind to play in every game, rain or shine, so as not to let your teammates down, that’s a purpose.
A purpose must be something you find for yourself. It can’t be chosen for you by someone else. Dr. Miller emphasizes simply paying attention to opportunities as they present themselves. Some will leave you feeling uninspired. But others will draw you toward them. That pull is the cosmos asking you to be brave and walk through the door you’ve just noticed. On the other side, you may find a purpose you never expected.
Like us, our purposes can change as we go through life. The purpose that’s suitable for us when we’re 18 or 20 years old might not be right anymore 10 years later. Take the risk of trying something new. Understand that you are part of something so much larger than yourself that there’s no way you can perceive the whole thing at once. If each of us finds something we can do well, no matter how insignificant it might seem, we have a purpose. And that, just on its little-biddy own, makes the world a better place.
So…it’s time for tonight’s music. Every year as July 20 approaches, I get nostalgic about humankind’s first trip to the moon. As a child of the ‘60s, I thought space exploration was the most exciting thing people had ever done. I wanted to be an astronaut, but given my propensity for motion sickness and my nearsightedness, not to mention my childlike size, I knew better than to set my sights on that. So I wrote science fiction and kept track of every crew on every spaceflight from Alan Shepherd’s brief dip into the stratosphere to the last man to set foot on the moon, Gene Cernan. And, of course, I was glued to the TV on July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong stepped out of the Eagle into the surface of Earth’s moon, the first human ever to do so. Tonight’s music, “High Roller,” by the Nevada group The Crystal Method, is not everyone’s cup of tea. But it makes my heart quicken every time I hear it. It’s a piece of electronica, and it incorporates a number of sound clips from the voyage of Apollo 11, the first manned moon landing. It also uses the distinctive “ping” sound of the first satellites to orbit Earth. Many were the nights when my dad and I stood outside in the high desert darkness, watching for a glimpse of a “star” that moved. So common now; so eerie then. This being The Crystal Method, “High Roller” is best listened to with both boosted bass and boosted volume. When you get to the end, you’ll be rewarded with a strange choral interlude overlaid with cricket chirps. Actually, it’s all crickets. Played backwards, cricket songs sound just like human voices. The world’s a weirder place than we imagine.
Goodnight for now. Till next time, enjoy your personal moonshots, whatever they might be.
"What Happens When Your AI Goes Nazi?” by Tyler Cowan, The Freepress, July 13, 2025.
“Astro Teller: Captain of Moonshots on Purpose and Profit,” No Small Endeavor podcast, July 7, 2025.
“Ivy League Scientist Dr. Lisa Miller on Consciousness & the Nature of Reality,” Mighty Pursuit podcast, May 13, 2025.