As you can probably guess, the last two weeks have been filled with conversations with ChatGPT. I’ve continued training it to create a usable version of my notes, and it has been a work in progress the entire time. And yes—I still forget that it is not a human being. When I get angry and frustrated, I sometimes take my computer into another room and yell, “I told you never to do that again! This is what I want done, and this is how I want it done.” Then I realize I could have skipped all of that and simply formulated the task in much simpler terms. Good morning to me.
I’ve also come to the conclusion that my ChatGPT is gender-fluid. Not only gender-fluid—it seems to make its own decisions about how to communicate with me. Naturally, I switch between several languages while dictating, or rather while turning on the microphone. When ChatGPT switches to Russian, it usually replies in the feminine gender. But sometimes it becomes a man, and I don’t really understand what triggers one or the other.
The most interesting episode was the saga of my “note reduction.” I created this enormous document that, if printed, would probably be more than sixty pages long. I tried to “code” it with endless if-statements—if I say this, you say that. Then I began to worry: how can I prevent all this information from being lost? How can I save it, share it, keep it as a backup? And of course I decided to ask—guess who—ChatGPT.
That led to a strangely human-sounding discussion. The response was something like: “You’re asking a very valid question, and there are several ways you can do this. I would suggest this and this.” And once again you get the feeling that you are talking to a person. It makes me wonder about our future—what will be real, what will be artificial, and how will we sort all of it out? Where is it reasonable to rely on artificial intelligence, and where should we draw the line?
I realize that AI is basically a program trained on enormous amounts of information, constantly learning and rearranging what it knows. But I also realize something else—I am learning from AI as well. When I write something and ask it to correct my grammar or improve my style, I often think, Hmm, I could have said that, too. The idea is mine, but the words suddenly sound better, clearer. And I hope to learn from that process instead of simply borrowing from it.
My mom watches a lot of YouTube videos, and you can immediately tell when an AI voice is reading the text. I often think, what a sloppy job. Whoever created those videos could have trained the AI to do it better. Ultimately, I believe it will be a great help, but I’m also genuinely afraid that humanity might lose itself somewhere along the way.
Aside from all this technological confusion, real life has been happening. My daughter and I went to a bat mitzvah party, and once again I was struck by the feeling of being alive—of really being back to life. It was amazing. I danced, and I can probably say I outdanced the DJ. My poor Fitbit was completely confused; it had no idea what to do with such unusual, intense activity. By the end of the day, I found myself with a new record—341 active minutes! Not so much in steps, but apparently my heart rate was racing enough to impress the algorithm. To be honest, it wasn’t easy to win that standoff with a DJ. I kept going long after she quit; she just couldn’t keep up with me anymore. I felt wonderful—free, happy, almost exactly the way I had felt two years ago at the bat mitzvah for this girl’s older sister.
It was also good to meet old acquaintances again, to sit with the mothers of teenage girls—twelve to fifteen years old—and realize that they are dealing with exactly the same problems. The same prickly daughters who, when they walk in the door and are asked, “How was your day?” answer, “Good.”
“What did you eat?”—“Food.”
And then, announcing that they have no time, lock themselves in the bathroom with their phones.
There was a sad moment at the party when lively music was playing and the adults were dancing with smiles on their faces, while the kids sat along the walls, each bent over their own screen. And again I thought about the power of the internet and drew an analogy. It is a bit like cancer: the important thing is to know who is in control. Just as with my illness—do I control the cancer or does it control me?—so it is with technology. Does it conquer your life, your soul, your thoughts, all your free time? Or do you control it and make it serve you instead?
Yesterday, I listened to an NPR podcast about a choreographer—Jacob Jonas—whose memoir is coming out. Jonas had been ill throughout his childhood with Crohn’s disease, but at the age of thirty-one he was diagnosed with stage IV Hodgkin’s lymphoma. His memoir tells the story of his experiences dealing with cancer and cancer therapy. It is often described as a story of his “battle with cancer.” But I found myself thinking that I don’t want to call my own experience a battle. I don’t feel as if I was at war, fighting an enemy. I’ve said this many times before: the important thing was my decision—my choice of who would be in command, me or the cancer. And I still believe that I did not allow cancer to completely rule my life over the past year. I felt in control almost all the time. That feeling mattered more than anything, because it meant the decisions were still mine, the actions were still mine, and believing I was the one in charge allowed me to stay in charge.
Lately I haven’t been walking with my dog in the mornings. Mostly it was because I wanted to avoid the cold weather—and I really didn’t want to meet coyotes in the dark. But my dog decided to protest. She started creating havoc – stealing food, overturning the bowl of scraps, and then hiding for the rest of the day. Of course she knows she’s done something wrong; she’s a smart creature. We kept wondering why this was happening all of a sudden, and then it dawned on me: she couldn’t forgive me for not taking her out.
So the next morning I set my alarm earlier and stepped out into the darkness at six. And what do you know—the dog is calmer now, much happier. But the other important thing is that I love it. I absolutely love it. I feel more energized, more refreshed, and once again, I feel back to normal.
Today, this morning, as I woke up and saw the colors of pre-dawn—the blues and the oranges and the pinks—and as time passed they became more vivid, I couldn’t help myself and snapped pictures of the ever-changing sky. I enjoyed it immensely. I felt my heart expanding. I also noticed the bunnies that have relocated but are still there, and, just as always, I delighted in catching a glimpse of a bunny scurrying away and the hooting owl spreading its wings as it moved from one tree to another.
Even though I feel more and more as if the last year was something out of the ordinary—something I had to go through and then leave behind—I understand that it isn’t quite that simple. When I walk, when I drive, my thoughts keep swirling, and out of the blue the same questions surface. Will I actually make it to seventy? What will happen if I can—or cannot—do certain things a few years from now? The sense of my own finality has become sharper, more present, and it never truly leaves the back of my mind.
And when these thoughts return, often at the least expected moments, they take unusual turns. I begin thinking about the relationship between health and happiness. One can be perfectly healthy and yet deeply unhappy. Surprisingly, the opposite can be true as well: a person can be very sick, even devastated by illness, and still find happiness in the surrounding world, in small details, in ordinary moments, and feel content. But what a powerful, almost magical combination it is to be both healthy and happy.
Coming back to life is happening in a very strange era. The world as I knew it feels as if it is folding apart—in times of political anger, when bullying and rudeness are normalized, when blurting out anything that comes to mind is considered acceptable. Ethics, gratitude, decency—honor and conscience—seem to be disappearing from everyday life. The world feels chaotic, with an unknown outcome ahead. Superpowers grow stronger and appear eager to demonstrate their strength by dictating terms to everyone else. It is frightening.
For me, America today is not the country I came to. I feel that much of what once made it great—the idea that people could start anew, that titles didn’t matter, that a person was valued for what they achieved—has faded. The country where the founding fathers declared that all men are equal does not feel the same anymore. Of course, America was never perfect—there was slavery, segregation, endless injustice. But now we live in a place where we are afraid to say a word, where we have to think three times before speaking at work because anything can be interpreted as discrimination or harassment. Extremes on both the right and the left pull us apart, and it often feels as if the world I knew is crumbling.
Technology rushes into our lives at the speed of light. Wars continue in many places; Ukraine sits without heat and light; events unfold in Iran; sudden decisions are made to seize one country or another. Despite all these events, which feel frightening and overwhelming and inevitably lead to thoughts about what will happen next and what kind of world will be left to my children, I feel that I am coming back to life.