Against a canned life
Last night I was walking through Chang Hen Ge Square (长恨歌广场) in Lintong District, near Xi'An (西安市). Around me, there were several groups of people exercising together, all moving in sync. Tour groups winding through Huaqing Palace (华清宫) in long, patient lines. Hundreds of people doing the same thing. At the same time, well, and in an orderly fashion. There's a hive mind here, and you can really see how it functions.
While trying to take all of this in, something clicked for me.
For most of human history, this is how people figured out who they were. You didn't really figure it out. Religion handed you the shape of a good life, tradition handed you the script, and society decided what counted as moral and what counted as success. You became someone by molding yourself to the template — a canned version of morality, with all the answers already on the shelf, ready to use.
It works, in a way. A canned life means you wake up with the answers already in hand: what to do, who to be, what counts as good. It works because you can focus your energy and time on working and producing, instead of focusing on figuring out who you are.
There's also enormous comfort in knowing the answer. You don't have to explore the unknown, deal with false starts, or take the wrong turn.
But what happens when you take the template away and ask people to find out who they really are?
It's hard. Of course it's hard. Without the canned version, you have to do the work yourself. You have to actually ask the question, instead of accepting the answer. It's not a comfortable place to be in.
Despite this I think the West should double down on taking the template away and build the actual infrastructure to help people figure out who they are, what they want, what kind of life is actually theirs.
But why do the hard thing? Because letting people figure out who they truly are and want will allow them to live a more authentic life, where people's values, thoughts, words, and actions are aligned. A more aligned life will create a more aligned society, which is a good thing because it will re-align our world and our society to us, the humans that it is supposed to serve.
Where could we possibly find all the time needed for all individuals on earth to figure out who they want to be?
AI and automation are going to take a lot of work away from people. That's already happening. The question is what we do with the time. The default move, the one we're already making, is to use that time to produce more. More output, more efficiency, more money. Same hamster wheel, just turbocharged. Exactly what would you expect from our money-aligned society.
I don't want that. I want a society that takes the time and gives it back to people, so they can slow down, sit with the questions, and do the work of figuring out who they actually are. The work that the canned life never asked of anyone, because the canned life had already answered for you.
There's a version of this in Christianity that I find useful, even setting aside the religious frame. The parable of the talents: you were given something specific, and the work of your life is to maximize it. You don't have to be religious to feel the weight of that. You were given something. What are you going to do with it?
A society that takes this seriously also has to be honest about something else. People are deeply imperfect and flawed. People make mistakes — not because they're bad or malicious, but because that's just how being a person works. Computers don't make mistakes, people do. All the time.
So this society has to be designed for that. Mistakes can't be verdicts. They have to be part of the growth, because there's no growth without them. The job of the institutions around us isn't to punish or ostracize. It's to put structures in place so a mistake doesn't blow up someone else's life, help the person recover, and pull whatever lesson is there into the open. Then keep going.
None of this works without kindness. I mean that pretty literally. Kindness is what lets you look at a mistake and see a moment in someone's journey, rather than a final judgment on who they are. Without it, the structures collapse into another version of the template — one that just punishes differently.
That's the society I want to help build. It gives people time, and trusts them to use it to become more fully themselves. It's honest about how flawed humans are, and designs for that without flinching. Kindness is load-bearing, not decorative.
The hive mind has its appeal. I saw it last night, and I felt it. There's something undeniably beautiful in all those people moving together.
But a canned life, however comfortable, is still someone else's.
I want the harder thing. The one life that's actually mine.