What Remains, When Everything Else Is Abundant

I've never been naive about people. I want to say that plainly before I say anything else, because it would be easy to read what follows and hear a man describing himself as reckless with his heart, moving from person to person without discernment. That isn't it. When something has felt like home, I've given myself to it completely, and almost always to one person at a time, with everything I had. The problem was never volume. It was that I couldn't yet tell the difference between a feeling and a fact.

I didn't learn that distinction as a child. Safety wasn't something I could reliably count on, and the closest available substitute was familiarity. So familiarity became what I reached for, and for a long time I mistook the reaching for love itself. It would be easy to turn that into a warning. Protect yourself. Trust less. I don't think that's the lesson worth passing on. The lesson is that love can stay immediate. Trust just has to become incremental. Those were never supposed to be the same transaction, and for a long time, for me, they were.

I'm not going to relitigate the last eight years here. Something happened, it was long and it was hard, it involved a child I love more than anything I've ever loved, and a family system that formed its opinion of me before I ever had the chance to speak in my own voice. I've spent real hours lately having to argue my own reality into existence in rooms I wasn't in. That doesn't just wear a person down. It makes you start to wonder if you're the unreliable narrator of your own life. I'm not asking you to decide who was right. I don't need you to. What I want to talk about is what living inside that question did to the rest of my thinking, because it turns out it didn't stay contained to one relationship. It became the lens.

For a long time the question underneath most of my friendships was who can come with me. It's a natural question when you've spent your life moving, and it keeps you oriented backward, toward the people who already know the version of you that existed before any of this. There's something singular about being known that way. New people can understand who you are now. They can't manufacture twenty years of having watched you become it.

But some of the people who knew me longest stopped moving somewhere along the way, not in status, in the willingness to keep imagining another version of their own life. I don't think that makes them lesser. Somebody can decide they want a steady job, a family, a quiet house, and real peace, and that isn't a smaller life. It might be a wiser one than mine. The line isn't ambition. It's whether the wonder is still in there, even in a completely different shape than mine. I don't need everyone around me building something. I do need some people who can still sit across a table and say you know what would be crazy, and take the next hour seriously with me.

So the question I'm learning to ask now isn't only who can come with me. It's also who can meet me here. Trust doesn't require twenty years of history to start. It just asks to be built forward instead of inherited from before.

I've spent the last year and a half building things that are, in one form or another, all about the same problem: how do you keep something from being lost. Institutional memory. Creative continuity. The difference between what actually happened and whichever story happened to survive. I used to think of that as purely intellectual, a professional interest that happened to be mine. I don't think that anymore. I think I've spent a year building systems that protect the thing I wasn't able to protect personally: the idea that history should mean something, that if we meant something to each other yesterday, it shouldn't be possible to behave tomorrow as though none of it happened.

That's what loyalty means to me when I try to define it instead of just feeling it. Not agreement. Not permanence. The refusal to rewrite what already happened.

And that refusal turns out to be close cousin to something else in me, something I almost didn't notice until I paid attention to how I actually build things. There is a childlike quality to creation, and I mean that structurally, not sentimentally. A child doesn't begin a drawing by asking whether they're credentialed to attempt it, whether it's already been done, whether they'll look foolish if it doesn't work. A child asks what if, and makes the thing. Most of us lose access to that sequence somewhere along the way. The filter that replaces it is protective, and not irrational, but it also quietly kills the impulse before it becomes anything.

Over the last eighteen months I've gotten some of that sequence back, and I don't think it's an accident that it happened through a tool that shortened the distance between wondering and making. I built characters who exist now the way ideas exist right before they become real. Music, and the worlds around the music. Software. Blueprints for events that don't exist yet. None of that came from the technology. The technology just stopped getting in the way of the impulse. The impulse was always there.

So here is the question underneath everything I've been circling.

To make something new, you have to suspend disbelief before you have any evidence the thing is worth making. You have to risk looking foolish in front of people who haven't decided yet whether to take you seriously. You have to give your attention to something before you know if it will give anything back. You have to hold, at the same time, both what is and what could be, and act on the second one anyway.

That is also, more or less, what it feels like to fall in love.

Behind many of the things that changed how people live was somebody willing to become attached to a possibility that didn't exist yet. I don't think that's the whole story of how anything gets built. Infrastructure gets built for profit and war and bureaucracy too, not only for love. But the willingness itself, the part that gives itself to something before its value is guaranteed, is the same willingness whether the thing being built is a company, a marriage, or a family.

I don't want adulthood to take that away from me. I've watched it try. Disappointment tries. Betrayal tries. So does getting sophisticated enough to know how something is likely to end before it's begun. None of that has to win. The goal was never naivety. The goal is informed openness, which asks you to keep the wonder and add the discernment at the same time, instead of trading one for the other. Don't kill the child who believes anything is possible. Give him an adult who can protect him.

We are entering a period, unevenly, where a great deal of what has historically created value through scarcity is becoming abundant, or at least dramatically cheaper. Intelligence. Software. Content. Design. Administrative labor. Personalized education. Creative production. Planning. Eventually, through robotics, some forms of physical labor too.

I want to be careful here, because the lazy version of this argument overclaims. Housing doesn't become abundant because intelligence does. Neither does land, or energy at scale, or the deep inequality that already exists in who has access to any of this. Anyone telling you material scarcity disappears in five or ten years is selling something.

The argument I actually believe is subtler. As more of the functional capabilities that used to require another human being become available on demand, the things that cannot be summoned on demand may become more valuable, not less. Attention. Taste. Judgment. Trust. Presence. Reputation. Embodied experience. Shared history. Time actually spent, in a room, with another person, across years.

For most of human history, love and partnership have been tangled up with necessity. People needed each other for economic security, for labor, for protection, for information, for survival. That doesn't make historical love false. It means something has almost always been running underneath even the deepest relationships: a quiet and-also-I-need-this-from-you alongside the wanting.

So here's the question I can't stop turning over. What happens to that hum when it gets quieter. Who do we choose, when we need less from one another just to get through the week.

Try to imagine it honestly. A system that manages your schedule, your finances, your household logistics, that holds your creative projects in memory across years, that answers most informational needs before you've finished forming the question. A huge amount of the cognitive labor that used to get distributed, invisibly, across marriages and families, increasingly available without another person having to carry it.

I do not need you to run my life. I want to live mine beside you.

That sentence has probably always been available to say. It just used to be harder to isolate, buried under so much practical necessity that most people never got a clean look at it. Abundance might be what finally lets us see it clearly.

A personal AI, given enough time, may come to know an extraordinary amount about a single life. Every preference, every conversation, every pattern in how someone thinks and reacts and changes. It might understand someone's psychology with a precision that would take a person a decade of close attention to approach.

But knowing everything about a life is not the same as having lived that life beside someone. There's a difference between information about time and shared time, and no amount of data collapses that difference. A system could know everything that happened to me at twenty three. It cannot have been twenty three beside me. It wasn't in the room. It didn't watch my face change when something landed.

Remember when. I was there. We went through that together. You knew me before. You saw what that year did to me. Those aren't retrieval problems. They're the record of having occupied the same time together, and having been changed by it from the inside.

I've spent a long time drawing the line between storage and memory. Storage holds what happened. Memory holds the relationship between what happened and what it became, why something changed, what it cost someone to learn a particular thing. But I think there's a further word past memory, one I've only recently found language for.

Witness is different from memory the way memory is different from storage. It isn't knowing what happened to someone. It's having been there while it was still happening, still uncertain, still capable of going a different way, and staying anyway. A machine can eventually hold almost everything about my life. It cannot have sat across from me while I didn't yet know how any of it would turn out.

I think that's part of why the last eight years were so disorienting. It was never really about winning an argument over what happened. It was the specific pain of feeling like the shared time itself was being contested, as if the years could be edited after the fact by whoever told the better story. You can survive losing an argument. It's harder to survive feeling like the years themselves are up for renegotiation.

There's a paradox sitting in the middle of all this, and I don't think it resolves cleanly. Technology may be making us extraordinarily capable as individuals at precisely the moment we most need to remember why we matter to each other. If everyone eventually has a system that understands them personally, who understands us collectively. If everyone can create something impressive, what still makes a particular act of creation matter. If machines can meet an increasing share of our needs, why choose another person at all.

I'm not writing this as a warning about the technology. AI gave me back access to a part of myself that conventional adulthood was quietly closing off. I don't think the honest response is to romanticize the version of life before all this abundance. I don't believe that version was more human. I think it was just more necessary.

The more interesting question isn't technology or humanity. It's what kind of humanity becomes possible once technology is doing more of the work that used to consume us. Maybe abundance gives us the chance to build relationships less out of obligation and transaction, and more out of curiosity, presence, and freely chosen commitment. Not for everyone, and not all at once. But directionally, over time.

What happens when I need you to provide this slowly loses ground to I choose you even though I could function without you. That second sentence doesn't make relationships unnecessary. It might make choosing them mean more, because the choosing is no longer doing double duty as a survival strategy.

Some of the deepest human connection has probably always lived in the places where utility falls away and nothing is left to justify the closeness except the closeness itself. Sitting beside someone who's grieving, when there's nothing left to fix. Watching your child slowly become someone, with no ability to speed it up. Making something with another person that neither of you needed to make. Staying in a hard conversation when leaving would be easier. Being physically present for no reason except that presence was asked for. Bearing witness.

I don't think any of that becomes obsolete as more of life gets automated. I think its relative value goes up. It was always the rarest thing in the room. It's just been sitting there, half hidden under everything else we needed from each other, for long enough that most of us never got a clear enough look at it to notice how rare it actually was.

So let me bring this back to where it started, because the relationship was never really the subject. It was the doorway.

What I get to do instead is mature it. Love without cynicism. Trust that has to be earned by evidence instead of assumed by familiarity. Creation without asking permission first. The willingness to leave, when staying would require abandoning myself to keep it intact. Shared history that stays sacred without becoming a life sentence. Boundaries that protect love instead of contradicting it. I used to think those last two were in tension. A boundary isn't the opposite of love. It's what keeps love from being asked to carry more than it was ever built to hold.

Adulthood doesn't have to mean killing the kid who once believed almost anything was possible, the one who used to ask what if without checking first whether he was allowed. It means finally becoming someone capable of protecting him, so he gets to keep believing, and I get to keep building, and neither of us has to pretend the last eight years didn't happen to get there.

We spend an enormous amount of energy right now asking what humans will still have left to do, once machines can do so much of what we used to have to do ourselves. I think that's the less interesting question. The more interesting one is what we'll finally have the freedom to be to each other, once so much of the doing has been taken off our hands.

If intelligence becomes abundant, connection may become more precious. If creation becomes abundant, meaning may become more precious. If assistance becomes abundant, presence may become more precious. If information becomes infinite, shared memory, the kind that can only be built by actually being there, may become one of the last truly scarce things left. And if fewer relationships are required for our survival, the ones we still choose, for no reason except that we want them, may be one of the clearest signs we have left that we're still human at all.

I don't think technology replaces intimacy. I think it's slowly stripping away some of the necessity that has always been tangled up with intimacy, and underneath it, we're going to get a clearer look than we've ever had at what was actually there the whole time.