For the last two hundred-and fifty-years machines have been superseding human workers at an increasing rate. Machines proved cleverer at transporting, farming, calculating, reproducing, healing, recollecting, cleaning, cooking, preserving, researching, pretty much any teachable task, meaning most. Each innovation, after a wary reception, was embraced for its efficiency, profitability, and elimination of monotony. “Better things for better living!” the mid-twentieth century slogan crowed. Now machines are learning to delude humans by imitating us. AI (as in “aye-aye, sir”) drives cars and writes better than most humans – and never dares a work stoppage. Feeling AI’s hot breath, I exhort my pen to compose more musically, with mixed results. No machine could have written this paragraph, could it? (Please say no.)

Hurray, right? Yes and no. Reasons yes are obvious. The no is harder to detect – a slow corrosive. Here is the confounding conundrum of modernity: the easier our lives, the less we like them. Humanity is headed wrong, wide majorities of privileged populations agree. Grievances vary but grumpiness prevails – and spreads. How come?

Conviction not convenience brings joy. While we think we crave ease, it’s necessity we sigh for. Ordeal is our ideal. The farmer with ox and plough, the doctor with his miraculous stethoscope, the mom at the washtub were necessary – were they ever! The work was hard, the consequences of avoidance dire. Folks lived exhausted and crumpled young. But they were not superfluous. The jobs they didn’t do would not get done.

Necessity vanquishes doubt. Melancholy takes time to root and fruit. In my life, sadness twice attacked when my work forsook me. I ceased to imagine I mattered, so why bother. That my purpose was a preposterous dream of glory did not diminish its allure: I was born to ______ (fill in the blank). When the blank was left blank, when I no longer trudged toward my star, my spirit curdled.

Ploughing a field and penning a poem are psychic equivalents. Other creatures do what they must and that’s that: only humans need to believe in our significance. That’s what comes of thinking. We think our way to futility, a dissatisfying conclusion, then think our way past futility to some imaginary calling. We are servants of a higher power – God, love, beauty, patriotism, duty – our ideals don many masks. The less we possess, the less debatable our significance: we’ve got mouths to feed, bills to pay, etc. The more we’re petted, the more we’re deprived of demonstrable utility. Do you, my beloved readers, really need today’s six hundred words? I must believe so or else… I don’t like to think.

The Industrial Revolution and the decline of belief systems went hand in hand. Science, which invented gadgets, punctured dreams: God, love, beauty, patriotism, duty became pathologies. Today’s moaners don’t believe in much – and that hurts. Trashing the joint is at least something to do.

Diagnosis, as usual, is easier than cure. We can’t undo the Industrial Revolution or repudiate Science, but how to recover joy? How find our way to hallelujah?

God, love, beauty, patriotism, duty must stage a comeback. We must make ourselves servants of a higher power. We must learn to repeat the distraught dad’s howl to Jesus: “Lord I believe, help thou my unbelief!” We must quit ease for hardship, complaint for affirmation, cynicism for idealism, misery for mission. We must learn again – and it takes learning – to love one another.

I count myself a corporal in that divine brigade. My bullets (and bulletins) may be innocuous, but they’re at least something. You matter and so do I. Isn’t our presence here proof?