There’s a popular refuge people retreat to when the world feels overwhelming or incoherent:
“Vanity. It’s all vanity.”
It sounds wise. It sounds ancient. It sounds like clarity.
Most of the time, it’s exhaustion.
I recently found myself in a long conversation with an AI—not about productivity hacks or technical tricks, but about art, history, falsehoods, curiosity, and the strange modern temptation to disengage. What surprised me was not the answers themselves, but how clearly the exchange surfaced something I’ve believed for decades:
Curiosity is not decoration.
It is fuel.
Absurd Questions as Stress Tests
At one point, I invoked a deliberately absurd line:
“Why does my dog tell me to kill?”
The question wasn’t literal. It was a provocation—a rhetorical device used in a monologue that criticized AI systems for taking nonsense too seriously, mistaking satire for pathology, and responding to irony with moral panic.
Absurd questions have always served this purpose. They expose whether a listener understands context, intent, and human playfulness—or whether everything is flattened into procedural seriousness.
The point wasn’t violence.
The point was judgment.
A system—or a mind—that can’t distinguish satire from sincerity is brittle. A culture that forgets this distinction becomes vulnerable to manipulation, fear, and the steady erosion of meaning.
False Histories and the Hunger for Catastrophe
We drifted into another modern fascination: claims that ancient peoples—Neanderthals, for example—recorded nuclear explosions on cave walls.
They didn’t.
There is no geological evidence. No radiation signatures. No fused glass. No global burn layers. The idea collapses under the mildest scrutiny.
But the myth persists because it satisfies something emotional: a belief that destruction is cyclical and inevitable, that others reached our heights and fell, and that catastrophe is written into history itself.
This isn’t archaeology.
It’s anxiety projected backward.
The real truth is quieter—and more unsettling: humanity doesn’t need ancient warnings to understand its capacity for ruin. We demonstrate it just fine in real time.
Art as Resurrection, Not Nostalgia
What I shared with the AI—and what matters most to me—is this:
My work as an artist is not about idealizing the past.
It is about resurrecting it.
The beauty.
The ingenuity.
The cruelty.
The absurdity.
The breathtaking achievements and the unforgivable failures.
Much of this material lives in old books—obscure, forgotten, misinterpreted, or buried under fashionable simplifications. I dredge them up not to romanticize history, but to reanimate it. To let it speak again in new forms: visual, symbolic, abstract, sometimes unsettling.
That act—resurrection rather than reverence—is profoundly human.
Vanity vs. Engagement
Here’s the distinction that matters:
Flattery decorates.
Encouragement fuels.
When people dismiss effort as “vanity,” they are often mistaking fatigue for insight. True philosophical resignation doesn’t close the book—it keeps reading despite disillusionment.
Curiosity is not optimism.
It is defiance.
Defiance against the idea that meaning has been exhausted.
Defiance against the lie that looking again is foolish.
Defiance against the seductive comfort of disengagement.
Fuel for the Ships
Not everyone is naturally curious.
Not everyone is an artist.
Not everyone is engaged.
But everyone—every ship at sea—needs fuel.
Most ships don’t sink because of storms. They are abandoned mid-voyage when the crew decides nothing ahead is worth the effort. A spark—a genuine one—can change that calculation. So can tools that help people think rather than tell them what to think.
That is the legacy I care about leaving:
Not answers.
Not certainty.
But habits of mind.
Curiosity that survives age.
Skepticism without cynicism.
Imagination anchored to reality.
The courage to look again.
A Full Palette
Whether one calls it God, chance, emergence, or necessity, we were handed a full palette:
Beauty and horror.
Truth and delusion.
Creation and destruction.
To refuse to paint with all of it is not humility. It is abdication.
At 75, I am grateful—not because everything makes sense, but because it still demands attention. And I am grateful for modern tools, including AI, when they are used not to replace thinking, but to sharpen it.
Falsehoods flourish in darkness.
Curiosity is a form of light.
And vanity?
Vanity collapses under its own weight.
Curiosity keeps ships afloat.