I found this article really resonated with me.
I may buy the book but I doubt my brain will allow me to read it.
Some excerpts:
“In western democracies, ageing and dying seem to have been reclassified as soluble problems,” he writes. This is delusional – “a retreat from reality, and narcissistic”. It’s where “immortality projects” spring from, which at their most extreme involve cryogenics, plastic surgery and the digital forever. Climate-crisis denial, he suggests, in a striking formulation, can be seen as “the denial of death on an apocalyptic scale”.
"Acceptance – that we will change, and die, that we cannot do in midlife and beyond some of the things we used to do, that your childhood summers really were much brighter because the ageing eye yellows and dulls everything it sees – is cast as failure and defeatism, rather than the first step in a healthy process of development, where we learn to work constructively with reality as it is, rather than what we wish it."
"He has come to see this as the main task of the second half of our lives: to join ourselves up, to link the outer and the inner, unconscious life, and to become as whole – as integrated and therefore as resilient – as we can be, on terms that make sense to us, and to us alone."
"And we are very lonely. And never before have we had access to such levels of distraction. It used to be “that there were moments in the day when you did nothing. And often your unconscious gave you things to think about that were important. Whereas usually now, when someone has a spare 30 seconds, they will reach for their smartphone. And so the time we used to have, of just processing life, and allowing a sense of unity to evolve in terms of the self – that time has shrunk drastically.”
"If processing isn’t happening during the day, in quiet moments and daydreaming, then “you’re going to start dealing with the difficult-to-process emotions late at night”. For the first time ever, he writes in Wise, “it is possible to be so distracted that you are in danger of missing your own life”.
"This raises the currently very live question of AI – one of the advantages of which is its capacity to process amounts of information so vast the human mind cannot compete. But the method of processing is entirely different: AI proceeds by a kind of ultra-rationalism, the calculating of probabilities through an infinite progression of binaries; our minds (and hearts, and guts) do not work like this. There is now such a temptation to conflate the two, and outsource the essential work of processing to, for example, AI chatbots. “Precisely,” says Tallis, whose next book is on how the digital universe is affecting all aspects of our mental lives. “That’s precisely the important thing. Do not confuse AI with your own unconscious.”
