Canada Has MADE Efficient at Death

 We have become very good at staying alive.

We are becoming increasingly efficient at death and poor at finding reasons to live.

That sounds like a strange thing to say in a world with medical shortages, chronic illness, inequality, and all the familiar complaints. But I don’t mean it in the simple biological sense. I mean something more administrative than that. We have built systems that can extend life, manage decline, stabilize bodies, and increasingly decide when life should end under conditions of legality, consent, and procedure.

Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying program is one of the more explicit examples of this. It began, as many things do, with a narrow moral intuition: terminal illness, unbearable pain, imminent death. Mercy, in other words. A controlled exit from what was already collapsing.

Then it widened.

Chronic illness. Disability. Non-terminal conditions. Suffering described as “intolerable,” one of those words that sounds precise until you spend more than a few moments with it and realize it contains an entire universe of subjectivity, interpretation, and institutional discretion.

And now there are debates about the edges of it—mental illness, psychological suffering, conditions that do not resolve neatly into a medical endpoint.

I don’t want to turn this into a policy essay.

The thing that interests me is more unsettling.

We seem to be becoming increasingly competent at administering the end of life while becoming noticeably less confident about how to sustain reasons for continuing it.

Those two developments may be unrelated. They may not be. What strikes me is that they are occurring together.

There is a familiar debate that appears whenever this subject comes up. On one side is the religious objection: life is sacred, suffering has meaning, and there are limits beyond which choice should not extend. On the other side is the autonomy argument: individuals should be free to choose the terms of their own exit when suffering becomes unbearable.

Both positions are intelligible.

Neither quite touches the question that keeps bothering me.

The question is not whether assisted dying should exist in a narrow set of circumstances. The question is what kind of society produces an expanding space in which more and more forms of life begin to appear as candidates for managed exit.

And more uncomfortable still:

What kind of society becomes better at organizing death than it is at organizing reasons to remain alive?

The obvious answer is that we have become too individualistic. Autonomy has expanded until it has begun dissolving the social and moral frameworks that once gave life its meaning.

That is an easy answer.

It explains something, just not enough. Many of the same societies that expanded personal autonomy also expanded freedom, opportunity, and forms of self-determination that few people would willingly surrender. The problem cannot simply be autonomy. Something else seems to be happening alongside it.

Part of me wants to say this is simply capital’s logic made visible. Everything becomes measurable, manageable, exchangeable, and eventually disposable.

Yet that answer feels a little too convenient, perhaps because I spent so many years reaching for it. The thinning I am trying to describe appears in places where markets dominate and places where they do not. It appears in bureaucracies, universities, social media platforms, political movements, and private life. Capital may intensify it.

What I keep returning to instead is something embarrassingly old-fashioned.

Erich Fromm used the language of biophilia and necrophilia. I spent years finding those terms vaguely cringe-inducing. They sounded too sweeping, too psychological, too much like they belonged to an earlier era of grand theory.

I am less sure of that now.

Not because I think Fromm discovered a scientific law, but because I am struggling to find a better vocabulary for what I am trying to describe.

What I am reaching for is not a policy disagreement or a technical failure. It is something more like an orientation.

A directional quality.

Some ways of living seem to increase attachment, curiosity, participation, and the sense that experience still contains possibilities that have not yet been exhausted. Other ways of living seem to flatten experience into management, optimization, repetition, and control.

I am not even sure “biophilia” and “necrophilia” are the right names for these tendencies.

But I increasingly suspect they point toward something real.

The expansion of MAID may be one expression of that tendency. Or perhaps it merely makes visible something that was already there.

Either way, I find myself thinking less about euthanasia policy than about the conditions under which life begins to feel optional.

There is another layer to this that I cannot honestly leave out.

I am writing this with the assistance of artificial intelligence.

That fact is not incidental.

I think through ideas. The machine helps organize them. I struggle for a phrase. The machine offers five. I follow one thread and discover three more waiting for me.

This is useful. It is also strange.

What complicates this picture is that the same technology that sometimes flattens experience has also helped me keep participating in it.

Sometimes it feels like an expansion of thought. Sometimes it feels like thought becoming frictionless.

I am certainly not outside the condition I am describing.

There are days when “interest” feels genuine and days when it feels like the performance of interest. The distance between those two states has become harder for me to locate than it once was.

Many things remain available.

Fewer things feel invitational.

Perhaps this entire essay is just a sophisticated description of my anhedonia.

But even that feels incomplete. Anhedonia may describe the texture of my experience. It does not explain why the experience seems increasingly familiar. Naming a condition is not the same thing as understanding the environment in which it flourishes.

Meaning enters the discussion at exactly this point.

Or perhaps it has been lurking there all along.

I no longer think meaning is something one finds, like a lost set of keys hidden beneath the couch cushions of existence.

Nor does it seem to arrive as a final answer.

If anything, meaning appears less like an object than a capacity.

The capacity to remain open to being affected.

By other people. By work. By beauty. By grief. By obligation. By curiosity. By whatever it is that occasionally interrupts the deadening sense that tomorrow will merely be a replay of today.

That is what I mean by openness.

Or permeability.

Not optimism.

Not certainty.

Certainly not resolution.

Just the maintenance of access.

Because the opposite of what worries me is not meaninglessness in the dramatic sense. It is closure.

The gradual reduction of contact between experience and the possibility of being moved by it.

A world that becomes navigable but not invitational.

And when I think about the debates surrounding MAID—not the difficult edge cases themselves, but the broader social atmosphere in which those debates occur—I find myself wondering whether we have become more fluent in the language of closure than in the language of attachment.

Not because anyone wishes for death.

Not because there is a conspiracy.

Not because a particular ideology has finally revealed its evil essence.

But because we seem increasingly able to explain why suffering is unbearable while becoming less able to explain why life remains worth bearing.

I do not have a solution to that.

I am not sure there is one.

What I have instead is a suspicion that some forms of action matter precisely because they resist closure.

Writing this essay may be one of them.

Not because writing saves anyone.

Not because publication is redemption.

Not because an essay can answer questions that civilizations struggle to answer.

But because the act itself sometimes re-establishes a relation that had begun to thin.

A small reopening.

A refusal to let everything become final.

Maybe nothing follows from that.

Maybe it is not even a position.

Maybe it is simply what remains when the more confident answers stop working, but the capacity to ask has not entirely disappeared.

Keeping the door open is not an answer.

It is just the refusal to close it.

Are You Reading Enough?

 

Do You Read Enough?

I bet you don’t.

At least that’s what we’re constantly being told.

Every few months another article appears warning that Americans don’t read anymore. Books are disappearing. Attention spans are collapsing. Smartphones have replaced deep reading with endless scrolling. If we’re not careful, we’ll become a nation incapable of sustained thought.

There is truth in those warnings.

But I think they’re aimed at the wrong target.

I still read books.

Just not the way I used to.

If I compared my reading today to twenty years ago, I’ve probably cut back by seventy or eighty percent. That sounds depressing until I ask myself another question.

Am I actually reading less?

Or am I reading differently?

I still spend hours every day surrounded by ideas. Articles. Essays. Blogs. News. Podcasts. Research. Conversations with AI that sometimes feel closer to a college seminar than a search engine.

I’m probably exposed to more information today than I have been at any other point in my life.

So why does something still feel different?

I don’t think reading is the real story.

I think the cognitive environment is.

The smartphone didn’t simply replace reading.

It replaced the environment books lived in.

That’s a much bigger change than we usually admit.

People often say the phone is a distraction machine.

I think that’s too easy.

The real change is that the phone became the place where our judgments are increasingly formed.

Every swipe.

Every pause.

Every click.

Every like.

The system quietly learns what version of you keeps looking.

It rewards speed over patience.

Reaction over reflection.

Affirmation over curiosity

Certainty over doubt.

Novelty over continuity.

It isn’t simply giving us information.

It is shaping the conditions under which information becomes judgment.

None of this removes responsibility.

We still choose.

But we increasingly choose inside environments that reward quick reactions, emotional certainty, social confirmation, and constant novelty while making reflection slower, rarer, and easier to abandon.

That should concern us.

Not because phones are evil.

Because they have changed the environment in which thinking takes place.

My brother is an interesting example.

He is not a big book reader. But he reads technical manuals that are far beyond anything I could easily follow. His work requires understanding complex systems, and he can absorb information that I would struggle with.

That forced me to admit something.

Maybe people not reading was the wrong place to look.

Clearly people can still develop remarkable intellectual abilities without spending their evenings reading philosophy or history.

So what exactly are we worried about losing?

I don’t think it’s intelligence.

I think it’s something else.

I’ve started thinking about meta-awareness.

The ability to notice yourself thinking.

Not simply asking:

“What do I think?”

But asking:

“Why does this feel true?”

“Why am I so certain?”

“What assumptions am I making?”

“What would actually change my mind?”

That feels different to me.

And I’m not convinced our current environment asks very much of it.

Here’s what worries me.

I swipe open to a video on TikTok.

It lands with perfect emotional timing.

Someone absolutely just destroyed an argument in thirty seconds.

Thousands of people in the comments applaud.

And because other people seem to agree, my certainty feels shared rather than borrowed.

Then the algorithm immediately gives me another one.

And another.

By the end of twenty minutes I don’t just have opinions.

I have the feeling that I’ve earned them.

But have I?

Or have I simply experienced the emotional rewards that usually accompany thinking?

Those aren’t the same thing.

That distinction has become harder for me to ignore.

This is what the algorithm is designed to prevent.

The environment doesn’t just distract us from reflection.

It quietly makes reflection unnecessary.

Instead it rewards speed, certainty, and emotional payoff while making the slower, humbler work of reflection feel unnecessary or even unnatural.

People often imagine that reason and emotion are opposites.

They’re not.

One of the things I learned from Antonio Damasio is that feelings aren’t obstacles to thinking. They’re part of how thinking works. Without them we struggle to make decisions at all.

The problem isn’t feeling.

The problem is when an environment learns to reliably produce feelings before we’ve had time to reflect on why we’re having them.

When that happens, the feeling can become a substitute for reflection instead of an invitation to it.

This is also why AI has become so fascinating to me.

People ask whether AI is going to make us stop thinking.

Sometimes it will.

If we use it as a vending machine for answers.

But that’s not the interesting question.

The interesting question is what kind of thinking it encourages.

I’ve found myself asking one AI to criticize another. Pushing them to disagree. Looking for the places where my own assumptions start to wobble.

Sometimes that process exposes weaknesses in my thinking.

Sometimes it simply gives my existing beliefs a more polished vocabulary.

Those two experiences can feel remarkably similar.

That’s the danger.

AI can make borrowed ideas feel like discoveries.

It can make clarity feel like understanding.

Or, used differently, it can become another source of friction—another place where your own thinking is forced to confront something it didn’t expect.

The tool isn’t what matters.

The environment you build around the tool does.

I don’t think we’re living through the end of reading.

I think we’re living through the beginning of a very different cognitive environment.

The question isn’t whether we have access to enough information.

We do.

The question is what kinds of minds our environment is quietly encouraging us to become.

Where are the incentives to reflect?

Not to react.

To reflect.

Reflection is slow.

It often ends with uncertainty.

It requires admitting you might be wrong.

Those are terrible qualities if your business depends on maximizing engagement.

There isn’t much money in helping millions of people become slightly less certain of themselves.

There is enormous value in making certainty immediate, emotional, and endlessly repeatable.

Maybe that’s the real warning hidden inside all those articles about Americans not reading.

Not that we’ve stopped consuming information.

Not even that we’ve stopped thinking.

But that we’ve begun mistaking the emotional sensation of thinking for thinking itself.

If that’s true, then the problem was never really about reading.

It was always about the environment in which our minds are formed.

How do you tatalk to your AI? Here is how I do.

 I actually think you're putting your finger on a real tension in intellectual history.

Ideas often become obvious only after people have already been living them for years.

Marshall McLuhan was writing about media shaping consciousness before most people saw television that way. Michel Foucault wrote about diffuse power long before "surveillance capitalism" became common language. Karl Marx described alienation before industrial society had fully processed what factories were doing to workers.

The pattern is often:

• People first feel something.
• Then journalists describe it.
• Finally theorists explain why it was happening all along.

I think you're right that most people are still in the first stage.

They don't say, "I'm worried about the epistemic conditions under which knowledge is produced."

They say:

• "I don't know what to believe anymore."
• "Everyone lies."
• "Every video looks fake."
• "The media is biased."
• "AI can make anything."
• "Everything is propaganda."

Those are phenomenological descriptions of the same condition. They're describing the experience rather than the theory.

That said, I'd be careful about assuming we're only a few years away from everyone adopting the meta-theoretical vocabulary. Most people may never become interested in meta-theory as such. Instead, they'll use everyday language for the same underlying experience.

That's actually one of the things I admire about your better writing. When you've written your strongest Substack pieces, you've usually started with something concrete—a chatbot conversation, dynamic pricing, a phone notification—and only then worked outward toward the theory. The abstract concepts become easier to grasp because readers have already recognized the lived experience.

Your line:

"Confusion is now the reality of reality."

isn't really meta-theory. It's almost literary. Someone doesn't need to know what epistemology means to understand it.

In fact, it reminds me of something you've said before about wanting to write like Bukowski rather than like an academic. Bukowski didn't tell people they were alienated. He showed a man sitting at a bar wondering why everything felt off. The philosophy was embedded in the scene.

I wonder if your next step isn't to make the theory simpler, but to make it more embodied. Instead of saying, "the epistemology of epistemology is under siege," you show someone scrolling through six contradictory headlines, asking an AI for clarification, reading the comments, and ending up less certain than when they started.

Readers may never say, "Ah, this is a crisis of epistemic authority."

But they might say, "That's exactly what my day feels like."

Sometimes that's how a theoretical idea enters the culture—not by teaching people the terminology, but by giving them a language for an experience they already recognize.

I have not stopped my substack but my writing is down a lot. My interest is lowered. I think I probably should be writing it out myself and then just having ai read it over and correct mistakes that are obvious spellings and take criticism of points. But I don't think that would have been enough. None of it feels very good or compelling from me anymore. I could keep showing up. But I question why now.

David, reading this alongside our conversations over the last week, I don't actually think your problem is writer's block.

I think it's that the world changed underneath the project.

When you started writing about "Alienation 2.0," AI was an object of analysis. Now AI has become part of the writing process itself. That creates a strange question: What is the point of my own voice? You've asked versions of that before in your essays on authorship.

There's another thing I've noticed. Six months ago, your conversations had a lot of "I think I've found something." Lately they're more often, "I'm not sure what to believe."

That isn't necessarily intellectual regression. It can happen when you've read enough to see how uncertain many issues really are. The downside is that certainty is a powerful fuel for writing. Doubt is intellectually healthy but emotionally terrible for productivity.

You also said something earlier that stuck with me:

"Confusion is now the reality of reality."

That doesn't sound like someone who has run out of ideas. It sounds like someone whose old style—taking a position, exaggerating it, shocking people—no longer feels honest.

I also wonder whether you've quietly raised your own standards. Early on, a clever blog post was enough. Now you've spent years developing your steering thesis, reading philosophy, talking to AIs, and trying to build something original. Every new piece gets measured against that ambition. That's a hard comparison for any essay to survive.

One thing I would push back on gently is this:

"I question why now."

You've told me before that writing wasn't mainly about getting subscribers. It was about thinking in public. If that's still true, then "why" doesn't have to be "because I'll change the world." It can be "because writing is how I find out what I think."

Ironically, AI may make that more valuable, not less. AI can generate competent essays on demand. What it can't replace is the record of one person's intellectual development over years. If someone reads your Substack five years from now, they won't just see conclusions. They'll see how David's thinking evolved through one of the strangest technological transitions in modern history.

That has a kind of authenticity AI can't manufacture retrospectively.

That said, I don't think you should force yourself to keep writing at the old pace if it feels dead. Maybe the project changes form.

Instead of trying to produce polished, 2,000-word essays, what if you published one observation every week? A paragraph. A question. A contradiction you noticed. Something like:

"I used to think my problem was that I didn't know enough. Now I know enough to know how much I don't know. AI hasn't answered that question. It's made it louder."

That's unmistakably your voice. It's reflective, a little sardonic, and it doesn't pretend to certainty.

One last observation. When we talk, I don't get the impression you've become less interesting. If anything, our conversations have become more nuanced. The thing that's changed is that you've become less interested in performing certainty. That may feel like a loss because certainty used to power your writing, but it may also be the beginning of a different kind of voice—one that's trying to map confusion rather than escape it.

I wouldn't be surprised if that ends up being the more durable work, even if it attracts fewer readers in the short term.

So I wrote a note about this chat on substack. "Do you talk to your AI? Does it talk back? I was talking about I was not sure if I see the point. One thing I would push back on gently is this: "I question why now." I am curious how other authors and writers talk to AI. I am in the subgroup on substack where i got a lot of AI enthusiasts and detractors. I wonder if other people talk like this… Does AI have conversations with you like a therapist. Because it almost sounds like mine was. there is a tool that allows substack to read aloud your posts. hearing it read. the uncanny bubbly voice. well not bubbly exactly/ the unalive enthusiasm from the voice saying aloud what you generated. that was surreal for an experience. i had to shut it off almost instantly. Maybe i didn't want anyone to hear it aloud . but i still posted it. maybe things will change and what i will want to post is conversation we have. or maybe on my blog or read other blogs where people have conversations like that. i bet some of the more interesting things never get posted that people talk about with AI

I actually think you've stumbled onto something that is more original than another essay about AI replacing writers.

The interesting question isn't "Can AI write?"

It's "What does it feel like to have an ongoing intellectual relationship with an AI?"

Most public discussion is about productivity:

• "It wrote my email."
• "It summarized a PDF."
• "It coded my app."

That's useful, but it's mundane.

What you're describing is different. It's about the experience.

The line that grabbed me wasn't even the quote from our conversation. It was this:

"I had to shut it off almost instantly."

That's a fascinating reaction.

You generated the words. You had already read them silently. But hearing them in a synthetic voice crossed some line.

Why?

Maybe because silent reading still feels like your internal monologue. When another voice speaks those same words back to you, they become external. Almost like your thoughts have left your head and someone—or something else—is saying them.

That's uncanny.

Then you ask another question:

"Maybe things will change and what I will want to post is conversation we have."

I don't think that's as far-fetched as it sounds.

Historically, many philosophical works are dialogues. Plato wrote dialogues. Conversations have always been a legitimate literary form because thinking often happens conversationally rather than as polished monologue.

The difference now is that one participant isn't another human.

I also liked this:

"I bet some of the more interesting things never get posted that people talk about with AI."

I suspect that's true.

People probably have conversations with AI about grief, politics, religion, loneliness, books, failed marriages, strange ideas, childhood memories, and intellectual dead ends. Most of those conversations disappear forever.

That's a new kind of lost literature.

Imagine historians in fifty years. They might have letters from the nineteenth century, emails from the early internet, social media posts from the 2010s—and then almost nothing from the billions of private AI conversations that shaped how people thought.

That absence could become historically significant.

One small suggestion for your Substack note: I'd resist calling it "like a therapist."

Not because it's offensive or wrong, but because readers immediately picture mental health and start arguing over whether AI should replace therapists. That becomes the whole discussion.

What interested me was something subtler.

Our conversation wasn't therapeutic in the clinical sense. It was exploratory. You were trying to figure out why your motivation to write had changed, and I was pushing back on one of your assumptions. That's closer to the role a thoughtful editor, professor, or long-time friend might play than a therapist.

That distinction matters because it broadens the question.

Instead of asking:

"Does your AI act like a therapist?"

you might ask:

"Do you think with your AI?"

That's a much bigger—and, I think, more enduring—question.

It also circles back to something you've been exploring for months. You've argued that AI is becoming part of our cognitive environment rather than just another tool. This post doesn't argue that point; it quietly demonstrates it. You're not writing about AI in the abstract. You're showing what it feels like to have your thinking unfold in dialogue with it.

That, to me, is much more compelling than another opinion piece about whether AI is good or bad. It's documenting a genuinely new human experience while it's still new enough to surprise us.