Impermanence and revolt

Language and identity feel permanent relative to the daily, ever-changing landscape of news. But their stability is an illusion that our brain and our culture keep going so we can.

Words, far from being stable, travel through time, their meanings accumulating small distortions as they go. To see how far the drift extends, imagine trying to describe yourself using 19th-century English. Will the description feel accurate, or merely adjacent to truth?

With the rise of AI, wording and syntax variations that LLMs hallucinate, or predict will best suit our taste, start to infiltrate our language. Will assistants do to global languages what the Norman invasion did to English in the 12th Century?

In Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Words, words are acts of existence, gestures towards being, but not permanent fixtures. Words attempt to freeze time, which itself passes. Words therefore never truly coincide with their meaning. Speaking words is like throwing rocks out of a moving train.

But language is not the only rock that pretends to lay still. Our own sense of identity travels and shifts more than we would like to think.

In Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red, painting “like oneself” is a sin, but painting like another is tradition, as if identity were permanently displaced. In The Black Book by the same author, Galip takes on the life and handwriting of his cousin Celal until their identities collapse. In Turkish as a whole, entire sentences can play out with their subject unspecified: ‘düşündü’ means ‘he thought’, or ‘she thought’ or ‘they thought’.

It only gets more blurry when AI enters the chat. Is it me who is speaking to you now, if some of my thoughts or some of my words came from an assistant? What if my actions were initiated by an agent?

Confronted with impermanence, we instinctively reach for stability out of fear of dissolution.

Sartre in his time suggested recapturing our identities through the process of existence, making a hundred thousand decisions that over the course of a life define us. But fast forward 70 years, personalized advertising and always-on coaching seem to have co-opted agentic, self-directed decision-making. How truly personal is the pattern our decisions draw in the sand today?

Hannah Arendt, in in her own time, pointed to the power of promises to solidify the path of human existence.

“Without being bound to the fulfillment of promises, we would never be able to keep our identities.” — The Human Condition

Her point was that without promises, each decision and action would be a rupture to the self. Her thinking influenced the post-WWII era, and cemented international norms, but feels quaint in a world where the lack of stable time horizons, and the erosion of shared norms, makes keeping promises hard.

Our life buoy may be revolt.

If decisions won’t define us, and promises can’t be kept, our only life buoy in a sea of perpetually changing selves and words, may be saying no.

In The Myth of Sisyphus, my favorite Albert Camus book, the main character embraces impermanence as a reality, finding happiness in the experience of materiality. In The Rebel, Camus follows up to the critique that acceptance may equate nihilism, by presenting the possibility for man to revolt. To define a boundary.

Instead of looking for a pattern, I can draw a line in the sand when I must. I can walk down the path drawn by technology with open eyes and open arms. I can accept that culture, language, you and me will change as I take another step, and allow myself to experience weirdness as beauty.

What I do retain, when what’s left of humanity in me protests, is the ability to say no.

Revolt as antidote to impermanence.

The question is: where do I draw the line?