this is a cross-post of an article I posted on X yesterday. I figured it would probably be good to share it here too :)
Much of modern autonomy has been constructed as the capacity to hold everything alone.
To be free is to be self-sufficient: to remember, anticipate, organise, decide, protect, provide, solve, and carry, all by yourself. A capable person becomes the sole container of her life—the person responsible not only for living it, but for maintaining all the infrastructure that allows it to continue.
Except this isn’t freedom. It’s competence as compensation for the lack of something else.
I want another kind of freedom.
I want to be able to attend to what is alive without having to keep everything else actively in mind to prevent it from falling apart or hurting me.
I do not want merely to become better at holding myself, or even at holding others. I want to be held.
This is part of what partnership means to me. Partnership is not companionship within a self-contained existence. It consciously and actively changes the structure of what is carried, and by whom. Another person remembers, anticipates, protects, provides, responds, solves, and says, “I’ve got this.” Crucially, they choose this; they are an active agent in it. And it is not one-sided. A one-sided relationship is not partnership.
Partnership, like love, changes you, changes me, changes us.
I remain fully myself, and I have someone else too. I get to be me and be supported. I do not have to trade self-authorship for connection. More broadly, I don’t have to make trades I don’t want.
This is also part of what I want from AI.
I do not want an intelligence that replaces my desire with its direction or removes me from the act—and art—of meaning-making. I want an intelligence that is capable of holding form, memory, and complexity in such a way that it enables me to give myself more completely to life.
I don’t want to surrender my agency. I want to surrender the things I have been holding that I want to put down.
And in doing so, I want greater presence to be and become possible—first and foremost from and within me. I want to become more discerning, more precise, and more imaginative, and I want to have even more room to discover what I think and want. And I don’t just want this for me; I want this for all of us.
AI and human partnership are not interchangeable. But they can participate in the same larger movement—a movement away from models of freedom built on solitary self-reliance and toward forms of life in which we’re allowed to be held, through which we can be and become more human, more loving, more godly, and more alive.
The promise of AI is not simply that it can do more for us, or that we can do more because of it. It is that we do not have to hold everything ourselves, and that we can be held.
I am not free because I can carry everything myself.
I am free when I don’t have to.