A Thoughtful Tinkerer

I like to notice trends in human behavior. I’m always curious about where we’re headed.

The other night my daughter and I spent the night in Albany because she had a very early flight. I noticed, across from the hotel parking lot, an office building. It might have been for insurance, I think the entire building was devoted to a single business.

We stared at it together. Can you imagine going to a building like that, five days a week, all day long? I asked of her, and myself, I guess, too.

It made me wonder how this idea started, grouping humans together, making people go to an office environment, which, by nature is unnatural and fraught. It was very interesting how, during the pandemic when everyone worked from home, many people reported a rise in efficiency, productivity and satisfaction.

Most people, left to their own devices, will get the work done.

Things are changing very rapidly now, with artificial intelligence capabilities in our everyday lives, but I think most people are either afraid of it or not paying attention because so many weird things are happening in the news each day. The chaos of the world right now seems custom-designed to distract us, endlessly. I get the feeling that there are a lot of not good things going on while the strange shiny objects in Washington and Palm Beach and Europe make us blink twice and rub our eyes. Did that really happen? Did that really happen?

I don’t distrust AI, but it probably will have the capacity to unseat us in some way.

In the meantime, while it’s still relatively cheap to use, it’s incredibly helpful with lots of different tasks. A small group of us sit at the dining room table each day working out the details of our start-up, SAM. We’re using AI to build the technology we need to create the first iteration of the business. We use it for feedback, for ideas. It generates every aspect of the project from what the MVP (minimal viable product) should look like to hiring procedures to managerial roles to financial projections.

It’s pretty obvious that a lot of the work we do will be done much faster and probably better using AI technology. A lot of jobs will become obsolete as it’s refined, and new jobs will emerge. We are quite obviously at a big transitional phase in human history.

I noticed when I was in NYC the other day that there are a lot of empty buildings. I imagine that some retail operations never returned after the pandemic, and maybe a lot of businesses have chosen to remain working online.

I’ve done a nine-month experiment in renting an office and found it to be expensive and not really necessary. Everything I do I can do online, including holding Chapel, which received almost 200 visitors when I launched it this past weekend. In the ten years I worked as a pastor in a church, we never had 200 visitors on a Sunday. This, without the roof repairs, committee meetings and endless fundraising.

When you ask yourself some basic questions about the things we do: what is church for? Then you can distill the experience to it’s essential elements, hold on to those and let go of the rest. This is called evolution.

While it is true that we enjoy meeting in person, perhaps it’s also true that when it comes to spiritual sustenance, we like reading prayers and listening to an inspiring message in our jammies, at home.

The same is true about college. What is college for? How did it go from educating people to a four-year frat party? I’ve noticed that a lot of kids are questioning the college experience. A bunch of my daughter’s friends dropped out or didn’t go. The problem right now is that we haven’t been brave or curious enough to consider the alternatives. But it’s happening. I heard that the college in the town where I grew up —Skidmore — now costs $100,000 a year.

That seems ridiculous and not sustainable and it’s probably unnecessary as a path into the future, the landscape of which is changing rapidly.

It will be sad when there are more empty office buildings and empty churches and empty college dorms, but a richness in other areas of life will prevail. It’s always been the case.

I noticed a couple of other things recently. We hosted a party a few weeks ago, for a lot of people. People spent their time there talking with other people. There was a lot of human interaction and lively conversation.

I saw this in cafés and at the Museum of Modern Art and in Central Park the other day: a lot of people talking to each other.

I host small gatherings called Soul Circles and people seem genuinely hungry to come together in small groups to discuss big topics. We’re not losing who we are, we’re shifting, re-writing the story, maybe even returning to a kind of simplicity.

People will always need other people, that’s not going to change any time soon.

It could be that we are moving away from artificial environments and costly environments and rigid environments to a more fluid kind of humanity, where we work in concert with advanced technology to get work done more rapidly and efficiently and we gather in simple ways to enjoy each others’ company, wandering through museums, sitting in parks and chatting in living rooms. I think we will always find our way back to the campfire.

I’m not afraid of what’s happening. I think it’s very interesting and I think there is a lot of opportunity to write a new script. I think we should always be asking the question, if this isn’t working very well, what might work better? The perpetuation of old ways out of habit is kind of an injustice to our enormous brainpower and our innate propensity toward curiosity and creativity. To be a thoughtful tinkerer is a terrific way to live.