Becoming More Human

In an age of distraction, optimization, and artificial intelligence, perhaps the deeper question is not what machines are becoming, but what kind of people we are becoming alongside them.

Inspired by Ezekiel’s Valley of Dry Bones, this image imagines humanity being gathered back together and breathed into life again after slowly surrendering its soul to distraction, consumption, and technological overwhelm.

I should probably apologize a little, as my past couple of posts may feel like a departure from my usual sharing.

I suspect it is my marvelously loopy ADHD brain at play with my heart. Perhaps it is also my tendency to overexplain when I feel like I’m not quite getting through, or caught in my own interior circles, tugging on threads of ideas until something begins to unravel into clarity.

Still, I keep circling back here.

Not because I’m especially interested in technology itself. Honestly, I’m probably less fascinated by AI than many people I know.

What keeps pulling at me is the human part of the conversation.

Beneath the headlines, hype, promises, and panic, something deeper seems to be surfacing. Conversations about artificial intelligence rarely stay technical for very long. Before long, people begin talking about fear, exhaustion, loneliness, purpose, meaning, work, identity, creativity, and whether anything distinctly human is quietly slipping through our fingers.

Writers wonder whether their words will still matter. Artists wonder whether creativity itself is becoming automated. Teachers wonder what happens to learning when answers arrive instantly. Workers wonder whether they will eventually be replaced by systems that are faster, cheaper, tireless, and endlessly scalable.

Even therapy and emotional support are increasingly being handed over to machines.

And if I’m honest, I think the anxiety many people feel makes a great deal of sense.

People are not only worried about employment. Many are wondering about meaning, purpose, dignity, and what it actually means to be human in a world where increasingly sophisticated systems can imitate portions of what once felt deeply and distinctly ours.

History gives us reason to take these fears seriously. Every major technological shift has disrupted human labour and reshaped society. Human beings adapt. We usually do.

But adaptation often comes with loss.

Not only economic loss, though certainly that. There can also be a loss of identity, rhythm, craftsmanship, local belonging, and meaning. Entire ways of life can disappear within a generation.

The danger of machines displacing human beings is real.

But perhaps equally tragic is the possibility that human beings themselves become increasingly digital-mechanical.

Efficient but emotionally diminished. Connected but isolated. Informed but unwise. Constantly stimulated but unable to experience wonder. Productive but unable to love well.

And perhaps this should not surprise us.

We are being formed within systems that increasingly reward greed, dominance, spectacle, and accumulation. Money, power, prestige, influence, winning. These have become virtues in much of our late-stage capitalist world.

The poor be damned. The planet be damned. Kindness, fairness, equity, even justice often pushed aside whenever they interfere with profit or power.

It would be easy to scapegoat the machine for all of this. Technology did not create these impulses. But in the hands of malformed hearts, it has become an extraordinarily effective amplifier.

Still, I suspect the deeper issue runs further beneath the surface.

We live in a world overflowing with information, stimulation, optimization, and explanation. All with grandiose promises of making life better, yet many people are more exhausted, fragmented, lonely, anxious, and spiritually undernourished.

Human beings do not merely need information.

We need transformation.

Not transformation into some idealized version of productivity or success, but into deeper forms of humanity. More presence. More compassion. More courage. More capacity to love and be loved.

Because what ultimately contributes to overall flourishing is certainly not a “Wonder Valley” and the endless accumulation and consumption of data.

We are shaped by relationship and heartbreak. By grief and beauty. By forgiveness, struggle, awe, belonging, meaningful encounter, and love. We become human together.

I don’t say this because I believe there was once some idyllic past where humanity lived in perfect harmony with nature, one another, or God. Human history has always carried violence, fear, tribalism, and suffering.

Still, I do think we have experienced genuine losses.

Many people now live with little connection to the land beneath them, the rhythms of seasons, or the communities around them. Neighbourhoods can feel transient. Families scattered. Work detached from tangible meaning. Relationships increasingly mediated through screens. Even silence has become difficult to encounter.

The irony is hard to miss.

We are more connected than ever, yet loneliness and isolation continue to rise.

Somewhere along the way, many of us lost regular contact with experiences that once grounded human beings in something larger than themselves.

Shared meals around crowded tables. Neighbourhood friendships. Ritual and story. Embodied presence. Long walks. Dirt beneath our fingernails. Silence. Wonder. The fragrance of blossoming trees. The feeling of belonging somewhere and to someone.

And perhaps that loss leaves us more vulnerable than we realize.

I sometimes think our imaginations sensed this before our philosophies did. For decades, popular culture has been trying to tell us something about ourselves. In The Terminator, machines overtake humanity through relentless efficiency and control. In Star Trek: The Next Generation, the Borg absorb individuality into a collective consciousness shaped by the blending of machine and humanity for optimization and conformity.

These stories endure because they stir something recognizable within us. The fear of losing agency. The fear of losing identity. The fear of losing … our soulful humanity.

In lots of ways, the greater danger is not a sudden catastrophe. Perhaps the greater danger is the erosion of what it means to be alive. Forgetting:

• How to listen.

• How to remain present.

• How to sit quietly beneath the night sky without reaching for distraction.

• How to hold and be held.

• How to grieve honestly.

• How to wonder and stand in awe.

• How to be alone without feeling abandoned.

• How to belong to one another beyond transaction, performance, and utility.

Recently, I’ve been thinking about the song “Comfortably Numb” on Pink Floyd’s album The Wall.

Comfortably numb.

Not because people feel nothing. Many people feel too much. Anxiety, outrage, exhaustion, loneliness, fear. But increasingly, we seem caught between overstimulation and disconnection. We scroll endlessly yet struggle to remain present. We avoid discomfort so instinctively that even ordinary stillness can feel intolerable. And yet growth rarely happens without discomfort.

To be human is not merely to function efficiently.

It is to feel, to risk, to grieve, to love, to fail, and to begin again. To experience the experience of Zoë.

It is to experience heartbreak and wonder. To be embodied and vulnerable. To wrestle with meaning. To create and desire and dream. To mature without becoming hard. To remain open despite disappointment.

Wholeness does not mean the absence of pain. If anything, increasing wholeness may involve increasing capacity to hold it. The capacity to remain present. To endure uncertainty. To stay tender in a brutalizing world. To hold complexity without fleeing into simplistic certainty. To remain open to awe despite grief.

The Persian poet Rumi once described human experience as a Guest House, where even sorrow and difficulty arrive as visitors to be welcomed and learned from. Thomas Keating’s Welcome Prayer carries a similar wisdom. Not every difficult feeling needs to be avoided, fixed, or numbed. Some things can only be transformed by being honestly faced.

That feels increasingly important in a culture trained toward avoidance and acceleration.

I suspect many people today feel caught between stories.

Older frameworks of meaning no longer hold in the same way they once did. But newer ones built primarily around consumption, branding, productivity, and technological progress often feel spiritually hollow.

We know how to optimize, but not always how to belong. We know how to consume information, but not always how to cultivate wisdom. And perhaps this is where the deeper work begins. Not by rejecting technology. Not by romanticizing the past. Not by retreating from the modern world.

But by becoming more intentional about nurturing the deeply human capacities that help us remain alive to one another, to the earth, to beauty, to grief, to mystery, and to love. Because perhaps the future will not be shaped primarily by the intelligence of our machines, but by the depth of our humanity.

By whether we continue allowing ourselves to be formed into isolated consumers and efficient performers, or whether we choose the slower work of becoming more fully human.

More grounded. More awake. More compassionate. More courageous. More capable of wonder. More capable of loving, diverse, community of faithful, forgiving friends.

Not perfect.
Not finished.
Still becoming.

And perhaps this is part of the deeper work before us now.

Not simply resisting dehumanization, but participating in the ongoing becoming of humanity itself.

The slow, difficult, beautiful work of becoming more whole.

The lure of Love quietly calling us toward the fullness and beauty of what it means to be human.

Sola Caritas,

𝞃Michael