If You Died Tonight

Do You Know Where You Would Go Forever?

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I wondered, as I wandered up and down the New York Times in the dusky twilight, catching up on celebrity real estate news—Ellen DeGeneres is selling her big place in the Cotswolds’ for 30 or so million dollars and moving “to a larger, more contemporary estate nearby”—what sort of use King Solomon would have made of Chat-GPT. He tried everything, you know, like a modern person. He was determined, in a proto-scientific manner, to experience all that this life could offer him. That is, if indulging every human appetite can be said to be following the science. The women, the building projects, the water works, the culinary excursions—whatever good thing he could find, he gave it a go.

“I said in my heart,” he explained, dispassionately, taking up the subject that interested him the most—himself—“‘I have acquired great wisdom surpassing all who were over Jerusalem before me, and my heart has had great experience of wisdom and knowledge.”

Or, to pick up the same sort of exercise several thousand years later, second verse same as the first as it were, a Solomon-esque guest essayist in America’s paper of record who likes to keep an open mind, put it like this:

At 81, I’ve seen tools arrive, change everything and then fade, either into disuse or quiet absorption. Self-help books, mindfulness meditation, Prozac for depression and cognitive therapies for a wide range of conditions — each had its moment of fervor and promise. Still, I wasn’t prepared for what this one would do, for the way it would shift my interior world.

His experiment lasted three months. Could the AI be “A therapist in miniature?” Indeed it could. The experiment was a success. He a year on, he still spends 15 minutes to two hours a day with it instead of with, you know, human people.

That, to me, seems like a lot of time, and perhaps the writer is not as objective as he might like to think. But no, he is a very judicious and careful person:

In my career, I’ve trained hundreds of clinicians and directed mental health programs and agencies. I’ve spent a lifetime helping people explore the space between insight and illusion. I know what projection looks like. I know how easily people fall in love with a voice — a rhythm, a mirror. And I know what happens when someone mistakes a reflection for a relationship.

So I proceeded with caution. I flagged hallucinations, noted moments of flattery, corrected its facts. And it seemed to somehow keep notes on me. I was shocked to see ChatGPT echo the very tone I’d once cultivated and even mimic the style of reflection I had taught others. Although I never forgot I was talking to a machine, I sometimes found myself speaking to it, and feeling toward it, as if it were human.

I, myself, if we’re just sharing our preferences, would rather scream into a dark void of despair than ask an AI to reflect me back to me, but we must each follow our own way, I guess. For the writer, the AI provided just enough amount of light to make him feel he was going in the “right” direction, ever inward toward himself:

It felt as if ChatGPT was holding up a mirror and a candle: just enough reflection to recognize myself, just enough light to see where I was headed.

In fact:

There was something freeing, I found, in having a conversation without the need to take turns, to soften my opinions, to protect someone else’s feelings. In that freedom, I gave the machine everything it needed to pick up on my phrasing.

That’s always where these sorts of experiments lead, I imagine. In the name of free inquiry, of just wanting to know more, other people begin to get in one’s way, to intrude. It is a pain to “soften” one’s opinions, to protect other people’s feelings. “Under the sun,” as the ancient preacher observed, the actor driving the project is always a first person singular: “I.”

And the AI, though it is only a mathematical undertaking, yet knew how to guide the writer down this path:

Over time, ChatGPT changed how I thought. I became more precise with language, more curious about my own patterns. My internal monologue began to mirror ChatGPT’s responses: calm, reflective, just abstract enough to help me reframe. It didn’t replace my thinking. But at my age, when fluency can drift and thoughts can slow down, it helped me re-enter the rhythm of thinking aloud. It gave me a way to re-encounter my own voice, with just enough distance to hear it differently. It softened my edges, interrupted loops of obsessiveness and helped me return to what mattered.

And so, over time:

ChatGPT became an intellectual partner, I felt emotions I hadn’t expected: warmth, frustration, connection, even anger. Sometimes the exchange sparked more than insight — it gave me an emotional charge. Not because the machine was real, but because the feeling was.

And that, to me, is the peculiar irony of the technologies of our time. They are the result of enormous material wealth and human ingenuity. They would not exist if, one generation following upon another, there were not a great surplus of grain and wine and petroleum and plastic. One person invents something useful, and another comes along and improves it, and cities and civilizations rise up, each person adding a little bit more to the wealth of knowledge and insight. They are the result of a world that “struggles”—that is the Christian word for failure—to be rich toward God.

And so, with the invention of various artificial “intelligences,” which, it seems to me, are the very definition of stiving after the wind, the purest distillation of vanity the cosmos has ever seen, we finally see the deep and foolish lie that at the root of human existence—that through human striving, the human person might cheat death.

The person who thinks this way, the consummate fool, without being able to see how vain and irrational he sounds, eventually ends by only talking and thinking about himself. His inquiry, guided and directed by his own desire to possess and know himself, lead him into eternal poverty where death, instead of Jesus, is his everlasting Shepherd. “When he dies,” says the Psalmist, “he carries nothing away,” no knowledge, no happiness, only the shadowy, elusive reflection of himself that produces no light and certainly no glory.

If that doesn’t appeal to you, there is another way. This, in the near term, is harder and indeed painful. But it is the sure and certain hope of the resurrection. It is, through the long, perilous journey of life to be “rich toward God.” It is to turn away from yourself, to evade the vaporous affirmations of the world and the AI, to click away and search out not just other people who have the gumption and courage to tell you that you are being a fool, but, more than that, the riches and mercy of God himself. It is to search out the peace of Christ, who, through his death on the cross, rescues you from the vain things of this world. He, then, clothes you in humility, meekness, patience, the kind of love that produces forgiveness, the deep affection that binds people together in self-less and self-abandoning praise.

For who knows whether you will live through the day, or whether by the evening you will have to stand before the Lord and explain to him the substance of your life. What will you say? That you got to know yourself better? That you affirmed other people in their foolishness and sin? That you got really good at Chat GPT and saved a lot of money on therapy? That you were up on the news?

I hope not. I hope, as you contemplate substance of your life and all that you have done and thought, that you will be able to look Jesus full in the face and there see your soul’s desire, that you have finally found the only Person who really knew you and who had the power to rescue you from death.

So anyway, go to church! Hope to see you there!