By the last page of my last novel, the doubts had become a certainty: I couldn’t keep writing fiction.
I’ve ridden a remarkable trajectory: growing up in the prehistoric era before Wi-Fi and stumbling into midlife during the panicky present, when so much from the before-times has dissolved. My first novel, “The Imperfectionists,” was a best seller when I was in my mid-30s. But as tech blipped and beeped and barged in, I watched contemporary fiction lose relevance each year. Or maybe it was just my novels. Anyway, I had decades more. Could I become something else?
So last year, in my late 40s, I enrolled alongside 20-somethings in a master’s program at the London School of Economics to study the science of behavioral change while attempting behavioral change on myself. This plot twist — writer to student — proved more disorienting than I’d expected. It resuscitated me, yet tested my pride.
The experience also exposed a mistake that many of us make. I’d glued my dignity to my occupation, and it was a struggle to pry them apart. I suspect that many people will agonize over this during the coming A.I. transformation, which may overhaul jobs and eliminate entire occupations. But these changes also present many of us with an opportunity: to ditch the wounding notion that we each must find a calling, then retain that identity or admit failure. Perhaps the dignified life involves several versions of you.
Or this is what I told myself, wandering around campus with my fire-engine-red backpack, living scenes from a comic novel about a middle-aged fool. “You’re faculty,” the security guard said, as I searched for the new-student mixer.
“No, the faculty are much younger,” I explained, flashing my student ID, and puffing up the stairs to a room packed with others starting my program. At the threshold, I hesitated in pre-mingle, that condition of wince-smiling because you don’t know these people and must launch yourself at them.
Surely I had outgrown self-consciousness. Except, you don’t age out of it. You just assemble a life story, an alibi for your present self, to recite whenever entering unfamiliar rooms. In this context, I had no credentials. I could snatch for the old ones, tediously recounting what I’d been, or I could regress into adolescent thoughts like, Where in this room should I stand?
A fellow student approached. “So,” she asked, “what do you teach?”
I explained that I’d be sitting in class myself. “Though I did do a master’s once before,” I noted. “Back in the ’90s.”
“I wasn’t in the ’90s.”
“How so?”
“I wasn’t in the ’90s,” she repeated. “I didn’t exist.”
I did, and even recall college from that era. Much remained unchanged. The dingy student pubs. The doctoral students scowling past boisterous boy-men hogging the outdoor spaces. Communists still lurked and still believed, prompting me to smile at my shoes when a pamphlet-thruster leaped into my path: “Are you ready to fight for the revolution?”
Other aspects had changed. Students lugged gallon-sized bottles around as if entering Death Valley, though water fountains were stationed every 20 steps. Lecturers emitted flares of anxiety, tense about students’ mental health, about tricky topics, about course reviews. As for my classmates, they were a bright bunch from around the globe who marched into each lecture hall and flipped open their MacBooks, earnestly staring at the screens as if that was where the course took place.
The professor, pacing as if bungee-corded to the lectern, presumed himself the center of attention. But in the back, but I saw those wide-awake rectangles: restless clicking on Wikipedia for every name mentioned; searches for “bouldering in central London”; ticket bookings to “Oppenheimer”; job applications starting, “Attn: World Bank.”
Now and then, typing intensified, and I glanced up from my paper notepad, wondering if this part of the lecture was more important than I’d clocked. But fast typing, I realized, usually meant messaging on WhatsApp.
Despite all the one-click-away distractions, my peers had insightful queries, if rather too many, interrupting lectures as if pressing every hyperlink. Rarely were they the moralizing young bores depicted by moralizing old bores in the culture wars. Mainly, they worried about finding jobs. By contrast, I reveled in my temporary escape from employment, a year to ponder the battle of science to decipher humans.
I also noticed challenges facing this academic pursuit, which includes sifting through data sets and conducting randomized controlled trials on perhaps a hundred souls, after ethics approval, followed by a protracted publication process, just to land in a respectably unread journal. All that, while Big Tech runs uncontrolled trials on billions, not troubling with ethics approval, merely altering our onscreen defaults in ways that hurl the known world hither and thither.
Those are the behavioral changes that will define and explain our times, delivered by the machines learning humans without ever meeting us.
As for my own deep learning, I found it exhilarating and a welcome relief from my customary newsletter-skimming, podcast-cramming and tweet-frowning. Here were winding sentences more packed than the corridors before class, obliging me to shoulder through complexity, holding my breath, only to pop out the other side at understanding. Life rushed toward me again. It was like being on a vibrant foreign trip where imagination isn’t needed, just attention.
Yet inwardly, I struggled. Certain professors seemed mistrustful of a student my age. Certain classmates clammed up before someone as old as their parents. I’d forget myself, debating and bantering with young faces, only to glimpse a mirror: gray stubble, incipient jowls. What I am doing here?
I’ve always admired those who up and change. In my experience, they tended to be women, switching to something unheralded and brave in midlife, whereas men with graying hair — even when plastered with regret — seemed paralyzed, as if change rhymed with shame.
Technology keeps overhauling our circumstances while pushing us to clutch to our former selves: the online posts that hold people to their words long after they’d have otherwise evolved; the photos on every phone enforcing how your future memories will look; the persona-hardening that social media demands if you’re to gain followers and avoid irrelevance.
Clinging to identity is self-suffocation, but relinquishing what you’ve been is excruciating. Despite my thrill at learning, despite my renewed hope, the past year often felt like a humbling. That reaction offers clues to much tumult among people today.
For paradoxically, technology keeps discarding what we took as permanent, and hard-earned skills are irrelevant in a blink. Most of us cannot just pivot, whether for lack of opportunity, or lack of funds, or because it feels degrading. Change becomes both mandatory and impossible. Political extremism feeds on that anguish, whispering of dark forces hijacking the present, ravaging what was yours, degrading the future.
The lucky — those who retain meaningful roles — must never sneer at others’ failure to adapt. Status is like clothing: superficial, but one’s dignity depends on it.
My student days are now over, for the second time. When I last exchanged classroom for job market, I was 23, an aspiring writer hoping to create something on paper that might outlast me. But print isn’t what it used to be. Nor am I.
These days, I’m a job applicant, devising a new character only in the form of a résumé, writing a life story in bullet points. I approach young techie brainiacs, seeking a role for myself in A.I., to help safeguard future for the humans. Everything is changing. But can we?
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