This is Robin speaking – the real, live, non-AI Robin Prag.
It’s Saturday morning 27 April 2024, in Perth, Western Australia, and I’m doing some revisions to my website.
I nearly cried a couple of hours ago as I lost an hour’s worth of work – changes and updates on my website – due to a computer glitch that has never happened before, and is totally unrelated to anything that I have or haven’t done.
Aaaaaaargh!!!
I search for help; I wade through and push aside multiple cobwebs of “internet fluff” preventing me from finding what I actually need to resolve this issue.
Eventually I find a “happiness engineer” to help resolve the problem for me.
It’s a long time since I’ve contacted a “happiness engineer” – in the past, when they got back to my email query, they were mostly super helpful, so I eagerly look forward to his (the name is male) help.
He gives me loads of useful information, but something in his response doesn’t ring true to what I had written. I reply and tell him that no, the issue is not resolved, but there’s no response.
Then I scroll down and wade through the morass of information he’s given me, and I’m about to reply again when right at the bottom together with a heart-warming, wonderfully politically correct, personal encouragement of me in my life, together with supporting emojis, I see the following concluding words:
Remember, if you need to talk to a human, just type ‘connect me to a human’.
!!!!!!!!
The future is NOW.
And it’s only getting worse.
Could it be that the global epidemic of depression, anxiety and multiple major mental health issues (gotta love the alliteration) is in some vague, roundabout way related to the fact that we are so DISCONNECTED FROM OTHER HUMANS???
They’ll never prove it – try and make that evidence-based!
I’m very grateful to and appreciative of AI for all it can do for us.
And some fantastic pieces of AI generated art I’ve recently seen.
I love the humour it has provided me for this post.
But I worry for the future generations as we become more and more disconnected from our fellow human beings; as we live in, get our information from, and base our Life Decisions on algorithms and ARTIFICIAL Intelligence (which, in truth, is artificial MIMICRY).
And what about the day, when our request to ‘connect me to a human’ can no longer be granted?
I’ve had a great life, and here’s hoping I won’t be around to witness that.
Great Marriages
“Great marriages cannot be constructed by individuals who are terrified by their basic aloneness, as so commonly is the case, and seek a merging in marriage. Genuine love not only respects the individuality of the other but actually seeks to cultivate it, even at the risk of separation or loss. The ultimate goal of life remains the spiritual growth of the individual, the solitary journey to peaks that can be climbed only alone.”
– oops, I lost the source of this quote!
The Partner We Choose
“If you look at the person someone has chosen to be with, you will see what they think of themself.”
– George Lucas (quoted by Carrie Fisher in her autobiography, The Princess Diarist.)
Understanding & Empathy
“Only understanding and empathy have any hope of moving the conversation forward among opposing sides.”
– Catherine Ingram.
Problems in a Relationship
“Love and war are both conditions of our human brain.
Arguably, though, the brain is wired first and foremost for war, rather than for love.
The brain’s primary function is to ensure we survive … and it is very good at this… but the things we do to keep from getting killed often are exactly the things that keep us from getting into a relationship or staying in one.”
– Stan Tatkin, in Wired for Love.
The True Purpose of Relationships
“Our most significant relationships exist for a very different reason than we believe, either personally as individuals or collectively as a society.
Their true purpose is not to make us happy, not to meet our needs, not to define for us our niche in society, not to keep us safe … but to cause us to grow towards the Light.”
– Robin Norwood
Death of a Relationship
“We may think that we want more than anything for a relationship to last, but the relationship itself usually signals its limitations, as the signs of old age signal death …
It takes courage to read the signals of fate asking for change, asking us to acquiesce to the bitter truths that are revealed slowly and painfully”.
– Thomas Moore, in Soul Mates.
I Love You
“When I say, ‘I love you’, do I come with a full bowl to be shared, or an empty bowl
to be filled?”
– Old Chinese Proverb.
A Certain Person
“We have an illusion that a certain time, a certain place, a certain person is the only way. Without it or them, we are lost.
It is not true. Impermanence teaches us this. There is no one thing to hold on to.”
– Natalie Goldberg, in Long Quiet Highway.
Loving Someone
“Happy comes and goes.
Loving someone isn’t that crazy infatuation that you feel at first. That passes.
Well, not passes, but it calms down, and then sometimes, when you least expect it, you get a glimpse of the person and it all comes back again, in a big rush.
But even that’s not what you’re looking for.
What you’re looking for is the feeling that no matter what, being with that person is always going to be better than being without that person.
Good times or bad.
That having that person around makes whatever you’re going through better, or at least more tolerable.”
– Robin Hobb.
Keep your Marriage Brimming
“Two secrets to keep your marriage brimming:
whenever you’re wrong, admit it;
whenever you’re right, shut up”.
– Ogden Nash
Listening to Life 