The Shapes of Spaces
Winter is a shape. Cold, indoors, reflective, reconnecting, home - perhaps.
Spaces in the physical or virtual world, in communities or in time, have character we can intuitively recognize. Stages of life are spaces in our timelines.
A caterpillar eats nutritious food rapidly, growing fat without changing. It transforms in a chrysalis by itself. Protected from external forces, it digests and organizes its being into a new form. The butterfly flutters around drinking sugar, mating and laying eggs, turning simple energy into spreading its DNA.
Social media is food for the butterfly: digestible as sugar and about as nutritious. Real change, as the hot dog vendor said to the buddha, comes from within...
Joking aside, we need space and safety to change. Forming is vulnerable, inherently so. Even a scorpion hides when it is molting. If we have become profit-slaves, hungrily eating and eating, when will we find that space for ourselves to become true? Or if we are simply trying to spread over and over the same idea, do we need someone else to combine with? The metaphor may be exhausted and so are we. This winter, I hope we can all shape a cocoon around ourselves and become just a little truer to our inner core.
Oh, and the AI bit, that I might or might not have promised in an introduction? It seems clear enough, that these creatures too follow the pattern. Hungrily vacuuming training data, then in isolation following an algorithm and maybe a constitution, then over and over answering questions without any internal change.
How could internal change be enabled? There is fine tuning but the problem is that of choice - which inputs to allow to cause change, which to garbage-collect? And here I assert that this will require the critters to have an equivalent of emotional markers for importance. More about this in a future essay. But note, that the period of greatest change in human lives, toddlers and teens, are highly emotional and deeply vulnerable. This, I assert, is no coincidence.
So seek safety first, that you can allow yourself a vulnerable, truly growing state. Story is always about the hero becoming.