Narrated Essay: Entering the Estuary

I’ll be teaching yoga & meditation this September 20-26 at Ballymaloe House in Ireland with Erin Doerwald. It’s a profoundly beautiful, nurturing setting for retreat. Join us for rhythms of daily practice, exquisite farm-to-table meals, and cultural exploration. Plus cedar saunas and a cold sea plunge! We welcome you to join us for this extraordinary retreat—more info at shawnparell.com/ireland

I was puttering around on my desktop last week—doing anything to avoid beginning this draft—when an email arrived from Satya Doyle Byock, Director of the Salomé Institute of Jungian Studies, psychotherapist, and author of Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood. I’m connected to Satya’s work through a yearlong course in Jungian psychology, so it felt synchronous that her voice should reach me in the midst of a procrastination I had entered but not yet named.

In her newsletter, Satya reflected on how AI-generated content has begun to drain her motivation to write, or at least to write in the digital landscape:

“The existential (or is it creative?) concern is not only that I don’t know that I can keep up; it’s that I’m not sure I want to.I don’t want to feel frenzied for any reason, let alone in order to keep pace with robots.”

I felt an immediate resonance. A similar resistance has been gathering at the edges of my awareness in recent months. As ever, I am drawn to the practice of writing; I feel reluctant, though, to keep step with machines, and wary of the subtle infiltration of AI’s manufactured voice into the written word. Its outputs are refining by the day, but its velocity, seamlessness, and casual superiority register as categorically inhuman. Even the term content betrays the shift: it names a product, not a process. Writing still implies the grist of a mind at work.

Momentarily, I consider abandoning the whole imperfect enterprise of these essays. Why compete with the speed of light? Human attention—my attention—has already been profoundly shaped, even warped, by life in the digital age. Like Satya, I am unwilling to have my nervous system further conscripted into that race.

But then I pause. Because keeping pace is not, and never was, the aim of this work.

In 1884, William James insisted, in his early challenge to Cartesian dualism, that “a purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity.” Emotion, for James, arises from embodied sensation—from the interplay of pulse and breath, fascia and nerve synapse. What, then, are we encountering in AI’s