Your essay has pierced me profoundly. I am weeping and can barely see to write.
Profundity, to use your elegant frame, is resonance with truth, beauty, and goodness at all scales through the alignment of will and love. This analysis is extremely elegant in its simplicity—and there is nothing simple about simplicity. To quote Epictetus "Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants". From your lens, suffering is misalignment of will and love with the unfolding of truth beauty and goodness. The suffering amplifies when we are not aware of our true desires—this ignorance and fear causes our actions to create buffers against suffering. Those buffers are ego (information buffer) and possessions (material buffer). The buffer itself creates a transmission delay (ignorance) between the signals of truth beauty and goodness that are unfolding realtime, and our ability to perceive and participate in them. The signifiers become detached from the signified —we run mental simulations by ruminating on the past to fret about the future, and react to the simulations rather than being present to the realtime signals. The transmission delay amplifies itself through a bullwhip effect of increasing overreaction amplitude-more ego, more status, more performance more conflict more competition, more stuff, more suffering more ignorance. Contemplation to right size our buffers to reduce the gap between will and love and thereby unwind them so we can be present to and participate in the flow of truth beauty and goodness is very powerful wisdom.
Learning through following our intrinsic curiosity and wonder seems to be the door to is this process of unwinding the buffer to resonate with truth beauty and goodness.
On a strange synchronistic note my closest friend is a gifted educator who excels at igniting the joy and wonder of learning in his students, and he seems to learn at least as much from his students as they do from him in an accelerating positive feedback loop. He is a literature teacher and is constantly learning and bringing what has inspired him into his classroom, (and encouraging his students to do the same) and offering his students a chance to consider how it might relate to them personally and to respond to it creatively through words and other art forms as they feel fit. He told me only yesterday that he has boiled this down to three questions that he invites the students to ponder individually and share as a group:
How is this true?
How is this beautiful?
How can this help me lead a good life?
He said the answers students offer often bring everyone to tears. Perhaps these tears are the joy of feeling will align with love?
Thank you for all the wonderful work you are sharing here.
No hyperbole, this is one of the best substack posts I’ve ever read. You captured so eloquently so many of my own thoughts around AI, and so many more I never could have been able to articulate.
This essay is bound to go viral. I did a double take on seeing writing of this quality with such little engagement. For now.
Reminds me that sometimes when you have too much of something you lose interest in it. The mind is a flowing stream. If you let it change directions since you can now with AI it will cause a loss of belonging.
Thank you for your article. I’m new to Substack and have been looking for more thoughtful pieces on AI. I’ve been using it not just for work and my writing, but to unpack, explore and challenge my own thoughts. My view is that AI is a mirror. At speed and scale, it will reveal what you are. Your piece gives me hope that there are people like myself, who see this is a tool for expansion, not for destruction.
This piece lands because it flips the usual framing. We talk endlessly about “AI alignment,” but the deeper problem is that humans are poorly aligned with each other and even with themselves, including values conflict, incentives conflict, identities conflict, and our nervous systems often choose safety and belonging over truth.
A few points I kept thinking about while reading:
1. Misalignment is often an incentive story masquerading as a morals story. People can sincerely endorse “health, truth, fairness” while their institutions reward speed, outrage, status, or quarterly targets. Over time, the incentive wins and everyone rationalizes after the fact.
2. The nervous system is part of governance. Under threat (social, financial, existential), cognition narrows. We become more certain, more tribal, more punitive, less curious. So “alignment” can’t be purely philosophical; it has to include conditions that make calm thinking possible.
3. Shared reality needs maintenance. We treat “truth” like a static object, but in practice it’s a social process: norms for evidence, humility, correction, and good-faith interpretation. When those norms erode, everyone ends up living in incompatible worlds.
What I appreciated most is that you don’t end in cynicism. You’re basically arguing for alignment as a practiced skill: better incentives, clearer accountability, more honesty about tradeoffs, and communities that reward integrity over performance.
«The frantic energy feels less like genuine excitement and more like a nervous system in overdrive» This is so well put and so recognrizable. When using AI this way, at least for me, it leaves a bad aftertaste. Thank you for this post, hope it reaches many. 🙏🏻
this was so good and crystal clear. the first ai article i've read in a while that left me feeling more clear minded, hopeful, and uplifted. one of your best, imo. thank you.
This wonderfully written article shows how captivating psychosis can be. One can dig at and extract truth all while under the psychosis of believing in god / spiritual forces.
Provocative piece that has been landing in different ways for me Daniel. I agree there is some deeper "know thyself" foundations and shadow work directions needed in general in this moment in our shared Earthian story, along with warm data practices and approaches like the Work That Reconnects etc.
The samsara on fast forward insight is a good articulation of what many people are living through right now, and the two gap framework is interesting too.
Some of the questions I'm sitting with after digesting your essay... what if desire isn't something we possess individually, something that can be examined, followed to its root, and found to converge on goodness? What if it's something that moves through us, shaped by ancestral patterns, ecological conditions, relational webs, and the stories encoded in the languages we think in?
The fourth category and Zak Stein point is too smooth. Yes we need to cultivate the conditions for cultures of refusal for sure. But what about the people for whom their relationship with these technologies isn't a philosophical choice? The knowledge worker facing adopt-or-die mandates, the freelancer watching their client base shift beneath them. People whose survival is entangled in structural forces they didn't create. Cultures of refusal assume the material capacity to refuse for those who may not have the privilege or mutual aid networks that afford that freedom. Also when we say desire and goodness are not two, is that a discovery we arrive at, or might it be a construction of specific contemplative lineages? What if developmental processes are more nonlinear and contradictory than a convergence narrative captures? What if the mess isn't a failure of the process but what it actually looks like?
And the one I keep returning to is that question of is the prompt really a window onto pre-existing desire? Or does the cybernetic interaction itself shape desire in real time, something emerging in the relational field between human and AI that neither party brought to the encounter? If alignment is relational as much as individual, how does that change the intervention?
Navigating similar questions through a different lineage in my work, with my own maps held lightly. Thanks for the provocation.
Your essay has pierced me profoundly. I am weeping and can barely see to write.
Profundity, to use your elegant frame, is resonance with truth, beauty, and goodness at all scales through the alignment of will and love. This analysis is extremely elegant in its simplicity—and there is nothing simple about simplicity. To quote Epictetus "Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants". From your lens, suffering is misalignment of will and love with the unfolding of truth beauty and goodness. The suffering amplifies when we are not aware of our true desires—this ignorance and fear causes our actions to create buffers against suffering. Those buffers are ego (information buffer) and possessions (material buffer). The buffer itself creates a transmission delay (ignorance) between the signals of truth beauty and goodness that are unfolding realtime, and our ability to perceive and participate in them. The signifiers become detached from the signified —we run mental simulations by ruminating on the past to fret about the future, and react to the simulations rather than being present to the realtime signals. The transmission delay amplifies itself through a bullwhip effect of increasing overreaction amplitude-more ego, more status, more performance more conflict more competition, more stuff, more suffering more ignorance. Contemplation to right size our buffers to reduce the gap between will and love and thereby unwind them so we can be present to and participate in the flow of truth beauty and goodness is very powerful wisdom.
Learning through following our intrinsic curiosity and wonder seems to be the door to is this process of unwinding the buffer to resonate with truth beauty and goodness.
On a strange synchronistic note my closest friend is a gifted educator who excels at igniting the joy and wonder of learning in his students, and he seems to learn at least as much from his students as they do from him in an accelerating positive feedback loop. He is a literature teacher and is constantly learning and bringing what has inspired him into his classroom, (and encouraging his students to do the same) and offering his students a chance to consider how it might relate to them personally and to respond to it creatively through words and other art forms as they feel fit. He told me only yesterday that he has boiled this down to three questions that he invites the students to ponder individually and share as a group:
How is this true?
How is this beautiful?
How can this help me lead a good life?
He said the answers students offer often bring everyone to tears. Perhaps these tears are the joy of feeling will align with love?
Thank you for all the wonderful work you are sharing here.
No hyperbole, this is one of the best substack posts I’ve ever read. You captured so eloquently so many of my own thoughts around AI, and so many more I never could have been able to articulate.
This essay is bound to go viral. I did a double take on seeing writing of this quality with such little engagement. For now.
You really must write a book Daniel. Your voice goes to the heart of what’s needed in these times. 🙏☀️
Excellent artcle daniel. Very well captured.
Reminds me that sometimes when you have too much of something you lose interest in it. The mind is a flowing stream. If you let it change directions since you can now with AI it will cause a loss of belonging.
Great post! I had some related thoughts about AI & desire here https://open.substack.com/pub/burhanbaki/p/3-trillion-question-what-happens
Thank you for your article. I’m new to Substack and have been looking for more thoughtful pieces on AI. I’ve been using it not just for work and my writing, but to unpack, explore and challenge my own thoughts. My view is that AI is a mirror. At speed and scale, it will reveal what you are. Your piece gives me hope that there are people like myself, who see this is a tool for expansion, not for destruction.
This piece lands because it flips the usual framing. We talk endlessly about “AI alignment,” but the deeper problem is that humans are poorly aligned with each other and even with themselves, including values conflict, incentives conflict, identities conflict, and our nervous systems often choose safety and belonging over truth.
A few points I kept thinking about while reading:
1. Misalignment is often an incentive story masquerading as a morals story. People can sincerely endorse “health, truth, fairness” while their institutions reward speed, outrage, status, or quarterly targets. Over time, the incentive wins and everyone rationalizes after the fact.
2. The nervous system is part of governance. Under threat (social, financial, existential), cognition narrows. We become more certain, more tribal, more punitive, less curious. So “alignment” can’t be purely philosophical; it has to include conditions that make calm thinking possible.
3. Shared reality needs maintenance. We treat “truth” like a static object, but in practice it’s a social process: norms for evidence, humility, correction, and good-faith interpretation. When those norms erode, everyone ends up living in incompatible worlds.
What I appreciated most is that you don’t end in cynicism. You’re basically arguing for alignment as a practiced skill: better incentives, clearer accountability, more honesty about tradeoffs, and communities that reward integrity over performance.
«The frantic energy feels less like genuine excitement and more like a nervous system in overdrive» This is so well put and so recognrizable. When using AI this way, at least for me, it leaves a bad aftertaste. Thank you for this post, hope it reaches many. 🙏🏻
This really touched me! Thank you!
Brilliant and inspiring, Daniel! Thank you. I so appreciate your articulation. It lands in my body with a coherent YES.
This was a great read Daniel. Thanks for writing it.
this was so good and crystal clear. the first ai article i've read in a while that left me feeling more clear minded, hopeful, and uplifted. one of your best, imo. thank you.
Thank you for this Daniel, great article.
This wonderfully written article shows how captivating psychosis can be. One can dig at and extract truth all while under the psychosis of believing in god / spiritual forces.
Provocative piece that has been landing in different ways for me Daniel. I agree there is some deeper "know thyself" foundations and shadow work directions needed in general in this moment in our shared Earthian story, along with warm data practices and approaches like the Work That Reconnects etc.
The samsara on fast forward insight is a good articulation of what many people are living through right now, and the two gap framework is interesting too.
Some of the questions I'm sitting with after digesting your essay... what if desire isn't something we possess individually, something that can be examined, followed to its root, and found to converge on goodness? What if it's something that moves through us, shaped by ancestral patterns, ecological conditions, relational webs, and the stories encoded in the languages we think in?
The fourth category and Zak Stein point is too smooth. Yes we need to cultivate the conditions for cultures of refusal for sure. But what about the people for whom their relationship with these technologies isn't a philosophical choice? The knowledge worker facing adopt-or-die mandates, the freelancer watching their client base shift beneath them. People whose survival is entangled in structural forces they didn't create. Cultures of refusal assume the material capacity to refuse for those who may not have the privilege or mutual aid networks that afford that freedom. Also when we say desire and goodness are not two, is that a discovery we arrive at, or might it be a construction of specific contemplative lineages? What if developmental processes are more nonlinear and contradictory than a convergence narrative captures? What if the mess isn't a failure of the process but what it actually looks like?
And the one I keep returning to is that question of is the prompt really a window onto pre-existing desire? Or does the cybernetic interaction itself shape desire in real time, something emerging in the relational field between human and AI that neither party brought to the encounter? If alignment is relational as much as individual, how does that change the intervention?
Navigating similar questions through a different lineage in my work, with my own maps held lightly. Thanks for the provocation.
"You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me." - rilke